Story time!
Back when I was in the Navy I did a lot of scuba training – for obvious reasons… That whole submarine, underwater, living near the ocean thing.
Anyway, once I got out I didn’t have much call for all of that dive training. Not a lot of ocean front property in Colorado after all. But once I moved to Virginia seven years later there was a bit more opportunity, and once the Yacht was acquired and things like props and hull fittings needed to be inspected, it was once again a valuable skill.
My roommates at the time got into it a lot more seriously than I did, eventually spending thousands on drysuits, fancy full-face masks, and high-tech air systems. I suggested they get their nitrox certification if they were going to go all-in – and so they did. So there were three of us with mixed-gas training and the ability to stay under the boat for as long as we had air.
In the late 90’s I lived on a 40-acre farm, and on the farm we had a six-stall barn for the horses. Above that was a one bedroom apartment that Pegasus lived in… And this meant that to get to Peg’s place one had to go up about twenty feet along about forty feet of steps with no landing.
So one evening Zeze, Peg, and myself are hanging out in Peg’s apartment and Zeze’s ex decides she wants to visit as well. She wasn’t the world’s healthiest person, and getting up to the apartment winded her.
Well, about ten minutes pass and she starts to complain about being light headed, and then passes out in the middle of the living room…
I check, get an erratic elevated heart rate, and judging by her lips her oxygen levels have plummeted.
Thinking quickly I sent Zeze to get blankets, Peg to call an ambulance, and then grabbed his nitrox setup, checked the mix (32% oxygen, which while above the 21% for regular air, wasn’t so high as to burn the lungs), and then manually breathed for Zeze’s ex using the purge valve on Peg’s regulator… For the 15 minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive.
Ultimately they arrived, put her on medical oxygen, and hauled her off to the hospital, where she made a full recovery and is still around to this day.
I’m told that, at a minimum, I prevented brain issues from oxygen starvation and probably saved her life.
And so that was that one time I saved someone’s life.
Listening to "Galaxy Train" by Jordan F