My name is Pam… DAN was there for me?

It is always a source of great joy for the DAN team to hear testimonials from our members. Therefore I want to share another DAN member story with you!

Everyone should have DAN!

My name is Pam and I used to run the Aliwal Dive Centre in Umkomaas. My head instructor, who is also my partner, Mark Shaw, had a diving incident which, if it was not for DAN, I do not know where he would be today.

My story begins Sunday, 22 July 2012, on a much-needed day off. I received a call that “Mark is down”. Needless to say, I was at the office within two minutes and found Mark on the floor still in his wetsuit with one of my instructors and a diver medical technician (DMT) attending to him. They had him on oxygen and my assistant was on the phone to the doctor. Her first instruction is always to call DAN, which she did. Mark was retching continuously, his eyes were shaking from side to side and he was really battling. We got his wetsuit off and had him on the second bottle of oxygen when the ambulance arrived.

We rushed him through to St Augustine’s hospital where the hyperbaric chamber is located. Because DAN had already pre-alerted the medical team, Dr Mike Marshall was already waiting for Mark. He was in the Trauma Unit while I had to do the paperwork, which you can imagine at this time I was not very interested in doing. I knew I wanted to be with Mark but also knew that this needed to be done. Wow! The DAN medic had everything under control. She had spoken to Dr Marshall and I was able to handover all the administration between the hospital and DAN to her to focus my attention on Mark as all the hassles of authorisations were taken off my shoulders

Mark was in the chamber for just under six hours on that Sunday, with me pacing up and down in my slippers. Dr Marshall and the two full-time paramedics (Tarryn and Tristan) were amazing. They even had to clear the chamber to get a bed wheeled in as he could not sit up.

Mark was then taken up to high care. For the next week he was in the chamber every day, went for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, went to an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist, and went for a hearing test. During that week, we were able to get him into a wheelchair and eventually he managed to start walking.

You can imagine this was one of the worst times of our lives. We owe a great debt of gratitude to DAN for coordinating all the necessary resources and staff who took such good care of Mark. His medical bills were all paid for in full, no questions asked.

As to what happened to Mark in the water? He had a cold two weeks before his dive. He did a casual dive the week before his incident to see if he could equalise or not and he was absolutely fine. He was leading a baited shark dive that Sunday morning with a maximum depth of 16.3 m. On looking at his dive profile, there was a lot of surge and he was up and down quickly with a difference of 2-3 m at a time. He sneezed underwater and then had a very bad coughing fit. He came back up from the dive feeling fine and they returned to the beach. The skipper stopped on the back line so that life jackets could be handed out and as Mark turned his head he practically fell over. He had lost all sense of balance and they had to carry him from the boat to the vehicle and then up to the dive centre. He had an inner ear bend (DCS) which they think was from a combination of all of the above.

Mark went for a dive medical on 29 November 2012 with Dr Gary Morris where he was declared fit to dive. Very slowly at first, and as a casual diver with one of my professional staff members as a buddy, and eventually back into full teaching status.

DAN, I cannot thank you enough for what you do for our industry and in particular what you did for Mark.

Alert Diver and the DAN Blog is read almost exclusively by the DAN members. As such, important messages like Pam’s do not reach non-members unless DAN members make the material available to them or talk to them about it. As such, I would really like to ask you, as a loyal DAN member, to tell your diving buddies about DAN and the value of being a DAN member. DAN is so much more than diving medical cover. DAN represents a culture of care, a heart for diving. It goes beyond helping in the occasional emergency towards serving and protecting the very enjoyment of this wonderful sport of diving!

We’d like to ask you a favour! Do you mind posting a Google Review via the DAN Google platform? It will be great if you can add any images you have with a DAN flag, t-shirt, sticker etc. or at your favourite dive shop or dive site. More importantly is the review! You can use this link https://bit.ly/dangooglereview

We look forward to reading your DAN review!