Decompression Sickness aka The Bends

3 min readDec 15, 2023

Happy Friday Everyone!

I recently went to Mexico and went SCUBA diving for the first time. One of the people I went with was telling me her Uncle nearly died from The Bends and was in recovery for 6 months!

While diving, the compressed air used has oxygen and nitrogen. The body uses the oxygen and the nitrogen dissolves into the blood. Decompression sickness is caused by the dissolved nitrogen expanding in the blood stream as the diver ascends and the pressure decreases. When you ascend too quickly the nitrogen gas is unable to clear from your blood and separates creating a bubble in the tissue or blood. If the bubble forms in your spine you could be paralyzed, if its your brain it could cause a stroke, if it’s in your heart it could cause a heart attack. It can also cause excruciating pain in the body.

You prevent decompression sickness by ascending very slowly or making decompression stops. The slow ascent allows the gas to travel through the blood stream and into your lungs to be breathed out. The longer and deeper you dived, the longer you must take to ascend. Deep sea divers will sometimes spend days ascending.

A hyperbaric oxygen chamber is a common treatment for decompression sickness where pure oxygen is provided in a pressurized environment.

“The treatment reverses the pressure changes that allowed gas bubbles to form in the blood stream. The treatment drives nitrogen back into its liquid form so that it can be cleared more gradually from the body over a period of hours.” — Harvard Health

Additional Fun Fact: The Bends is so commonly talked about that I knew about it before we went diving. However, they also told us to be careful to never hold your breath — if you ascend and you hold your breath the air in your lungs will expand and could explode your lungs (not medical terms) 😵

Another Additional Fun Fact: Have you ever seen those free dives where they test to see how deep they can go on one breath? They don’t take decompression stops because they dont breath compressed air! How can they hold their breath? I actually don’t know, they may let a small stream of air out but that seems wasteful when you’re trying to go as deep as possible.

Hope you learned something new!

Here’s some pictures from my dive :)