Stephane’s thoughts corner…

Stephane Bailliez's thoughts on everything

I’m right now organizing my journey to Honduras. I will get to Miami after 35h of flights and 14h in transit, not counting the 9h bus trip to Cairo and 8h of waiting at the Cairo airport. I will stop in Miami for 2 or 3 nights to get a decent sleep and recover.

As of now, I’m also doing strictly nothing at Dahab, but reading. Most people are gone or on their way, so it starts to be a bit quiet. I have been 2 times to the doctor in Sharm El Sheikh in the last 2 weeks to check for a right ear problem. I’m suffering tinnitus (continuous whisthle) for a month now which was apparently initiated by an inflammation in mid-january. A very soft sinus/ear congestion is on top of it for several weeks and has certainly be aggravated by a possible barotrauma when doing free-diving/scuba-diving even though I haven’t been doing that much.

I have stopped diving as a precaution for now to see if there will be any improvement. Reading through DAN Medical Q&A about tinnitus and diving is not really encouraging nor is the extensive collection of articles available on the internet. I’m not thanking my diving insurance DAN Europe for not having bothered to reply to my concern regarding this.

While visiting the Dahab Recompression Chamber managed by Deco International a few weeks ago, I have also learned that DAN Europe did not pay anything back to the chamber to cover the cost of a DAN Europe insured diver who was treated with a severe decompression illness involving spinal embolism and paralysis of the lower body after shooting up accidentally from 105m to the surface missing a full hour of decompression. The diver received an initial treatement of 11h in the recompression chamber and 5 subsequent days of 2 x 2h15. The whole treatment cost was about 15000EUR and the diver recovered fully. Accident happened on November 2005.