Week 3 - What a Long Week

Day Fourteen : 1030
Mood : YAY! A day to sleep in!
Temperature : Sunny and 75

Sunday...finally a day to sleep in, and boy did it feel good! It was finally nice and all of us were tired of being couped up at school so what did we decide to do? Thats right, we went to the beach!! There is nothing better than spending Lazy Sunday on the beach. Threw a little football, swam in the cold Atlantic water, bake in the sun. All I can think of was "this is the life." :-) Once we started getting hungry we called it a day and headed back to school to catch chow and studied for the following day's Physiology test.

Day Fifteen : 0630
Mood : Monday again!? UGH!
Temperature : Sunny and great

Monday started out with PT as usual, I'm starting to really enjoy it. Get up, work out and feel good the rest of the day and whatnot. After the daily morning routine we had our Physiology test at 0800. I felt nervous going in but somewhat confident. When we found out the test results which wasn't till Thursday, turns out I got the highest score with a 97 which made me feel estatic! Anyways back to Monday's activities. Once we finished our test, we had our dive briefing with Red for the next to dive days. Disassemble a flange project, show topside the removed spool, reassemble the flange, assemble a square piping project, airlift the flange project to reach neutral buoyancy, then go topside to get blacked out to do the flange project all over again. I spent the day Tending (should of moved to Comms or Data Recording at somepoint but "asked nicely" to stay tending to get more practice at it. I'm starting to get quick at getting the divers dressed and more importantly, dressed correctly. Day ends and spent the rest of the evening relaxing.

Day Sixteen : 0800
Mood : Saddened
Temperature : Decent

Today wasn't a good day, I woke up to a text from my friend Nick saying I shouldn't come up to Richmond this upcoming weekend like I had planned due to *name removed for privacy* (the girl I liked) getting a boyfriend. Luckily though I was told I would be diving first in the rotations so that quickly grabbed my full attention. While everybody else was only partially dressed by the time Red (our instructor) gave the on-dive-station briefing I was fully dressed ready to don the hat. Since I was going to be the first dive to splash, Red had me set up the flange projects on the bottom of the tank which had to be lowered down to me. So my 60 minutes of bottom time to work on the project was actually more like 30 cause I spent the first 30 standing around waiting. haha. Soon as I had the go ahead to start working on the projects I wasted no time. I disassembled, and reassembled in 9 minutes. (most of the class was taking around 15 minutes when they could actually see it!) The square project took 4 minutes and the liftbag project took probably about the same. Then it was time for the blackout so off to topside I went, got duct tape across the face and went back down. I realized all of my tower climbing experience paid off for this because there's been times where I couldnt get a look at the bolt alignment due to its position being blocked by the actual radio. So breaking down the flange project went smoothly and only took 12 minutes to breakdown and reassemble. So while everybody else is struggling to finish everything with a full 60 minutes at bottom, I got everything done with a minute to spare! I got dried off and went back up to tending which I was glad to do due since by this time the sun was out and it was pretty warm. Stayed up there till lunch and after lunch the Junior class was short 2 people for their projects in the river so I got sent to help them for the rest of the day till the air-off drills. This was just dumb, why they couldn't just incorporate it into the earlier dive is beyond me. We had to get fully dressed once again just for a 5 minute dive for practicing going on bailout. Once the day was done, spent some time in the computer lab chatting with Kirsti from Richmond about what the deal was with *name removed for privacy*. I won't go into detail about it since it wouldn't be fair towards her. (if you read this, I wish you the best)

Day Seventeen : 0800
Mood : Death by Powerpoint
Temperature : 70 and Sunny again

Death by Powerpoint...and by that I mean learning Dive Medicine. Today we covered the simple / common injuries occured by divers. Various squeezes and barotraumas, etc. All the signs and symptoms are basically the same and the treatments are the same, deliver O2, perform First Aid / Rescue Breathing, and seek medical attention. Thrilling stuff let me tell you....NOT. This was a boring day since we didn't do anything but sit in class and take notes. Lots and lots of notes.

Day Eighteen : 0800
Mood : Blah
Temperature : Thunderous Downpour

Today, they gave us a break and taught us how to perform basic maintance on the hats we have here at school. First half of the day we had Red who taught us how to assemble a JIC fitting to a 3/8's Gate hose and what the industry standard was for proper assembly, then we learned how to splice speaker wire to the WWII telephone cable used in the field and make it watertight. We also learned how to disassemble various parts of the hat. Turns out Red jumped the gun kind of and that Dick was going to show us that in the afternoon, so the afternoon session turned into "Stories told by Dick" haha. Did I mention it was downpouring outside?! Well it was.

Day Nineteen : 0800
Mood : Death by Powerpoint...again
Temperature : Humid but Sunny

Friday was back in the classroom for more Dive Medicine. Today's stuff covered all the POIS (Pulmonary Over Inflation Syndrome) injuries and DCS (Decompression Sickness) injuries such as AGE's (arterial gas embolism), Dysbaric Osteonecrosis (death of the bone due to an air pocket in the bone) and DCS Type I and DCS Type II and several others. Basically in this first month, they've told us all the various ways we can die. *Did you know Commercial Diving is the 5th deadliest job in the world!?! Know you know! * That took up the entire day till 1530 when we got dismissed to clean the campus. Soon as we got dismissed it was off to the airport for a surprise trip home!! I missed my 1800 flight by 5 mins due to car trouble so I had to pay 50 bucks to catch the 1930 flight to ATL then the 2200 flight to CVG (that was still the original flight) soon as I landed I called my best friend Doug and met up with him to hang out for the evening. Within a half hour of landing, he took me to Pirates Den for some drinks to see more people, after spending some time there and not spending a dime, it was back to Greendale to visit even more people which I enjoyed so much. Finally got back to my house at 0430 in the morning haha.

Day Twenty : 1000
Mood : This is prison
Temperature : 45/50ish

Woke up Saturday wanting to go to the bank only to find out my parents said I couldn't take the truck due to the fact they had cancelled my auto insurance >:( GRRRRRR! So basically I go from one "prison" here in FL to another "prison" back in Indiana. Finally shaved my 3 week beard growth and back to the "clean baby face look". Kelly brought over little Camryn which I enjoyed getting to hang out with him for the evening even though he doesn't really know me. I still enjoyed it. Once she left, I got a ride to Perfect's to procur transportation for the evening. (I'm resourceful) I left Perfects and headed down to one Jon Davis's house and spent a couple hours chatting with him and playing Halo. Headed back to Perfects at 0100 to pick up Doug and it was back to Pirates Den to relax some more. Arrival back to the house at 0400.

Day Twenty One : 0730
Mood : Tired
Temperature : Chilly

Woke up and Kelly drove me to the airport to catch my 0910 flight back to Jacksonville. Glad to get back to Florida but I'll miss my friends that I had seen over the weekend. Chilled most of the day till 1800 when I headed next door to Jackies Bar to play some free Texas Hold'em Poker and watch the Championship games (Sucks the Jets lost, Glad the Saints won!!)

Day Twenty Two : 0800
Mood : Yay for PT
Temperature : Amazing

Today, we took our Dive Medicine test and me and a couple others got the highest score with a 88. Mick wasn't lying when he said it would be a hard test. After that, it was the start of charting dives and figuring out Residual Nitrogen. Easy stuff. Once we started getting into charting decompression stops on air it started getting complicated. Straight air dives were cake to figure out, when we got to Air/O2 stops I got entirely confused and fried my brain, then finished off the day charting SurDO2 (Surface Decompression Oxygen) I understood fairly well. Now its time to do the homework and try to understand the Air/O2 charting.