For Sarah (cog-nito), the story of why Ben’s lungs are now horribly damaged and why he is unlikely to ever get to SCUBA on more than air, if even that.
Mkay, so. I keep fishtanks. I’ve done for many years. That is to say, I’m an aquarist. A pretty reasonable one too, if all accounts are believable. But… even the reasonable make mistakes sometimes.
I had a pretty massive tank crash a few years back as the result of some incredibly stupid decisions. I was working 75-80 hours a week at that stage, and trying to totally manually run a heavily stocked SPS (Acropora-dominated) tank. It basically went one error to the next, and I learned a very important lesson.
First mitake I made was the stupid decision to introduce a pair of Pink Skunk Clownfish, (Amphiprion perideraion) which were wild caught into the system without quarantine. As many of you would know, Amphiprioninae are always lousy with disease. In this case, Brooklynella.
Never having had it before I misidentified it as being Cryptocaryon irritans, which was my second mistake.
Third mistake was not thinking rationally about things and setting up a quarantine, so instead I attempted to treat the fish in-situ with some “magical potion” I was sold by a local fish store on good faith. It did little but actually aggravated the problem, for one reason or another.
Fourth mistake was the decision to move my very established coral load (53 corals, amongst that about 25 colonies) from the tank I was treating in to a newly set-up system with much more intense lighting and much reduced filtration (and smaller water capacity). The original setup had roughly 250 μmol/m2/sec PPFD on the sandbed in terms of lighting, the second one I later tested to be closer to about 1650 μmol/m2/sec PPFD - roughly equivalent of a reef top near the equator for much of the year. Established corals don’t much care for it.
Fifth mistake was the assumption that because I’d never killed one of the aforementioned corals (until that point I’d never lost an SPS), I wasn’t going to by something I figured at the time was so small.
Sixth was assessing a bleach-out that happened whilst I was away for the weekend to be a spawning event. Delirium is great, huh? I came home and within an hour of going to sleep, my tank went from not bad to total white-out.
Seventh mistake was letting the mess sit for about a month and a half in 45-50 degree heat. I was using a ridiculous amount of DOC to maintain nutrients at that stage (around 8x that which the average tank uses - a knife-edge and retarded under most [ALL] circumstances), and being the scholar I am, I momentarily bumped up the dose by half again, forgetting that my skimmer wasn’t going to be anywhere near effective.
Eighth mistake was finally getting around to clean it in a confined room with no doors/windows open and no protection.
You know what happens when 53 corals, 5 rather fat fish, a bunch of live rock, and some inverts extinct themselves under the influence of a 12x-the-normal dose of DOC in excessive heat and under extreme PAR conditions? The simplest explanation is that you shouldn’t endeavour to find out.
Long story short, I narced myself with Hydrogen Sulphide (H2S), a byproduct that’s formed as a natural component of anoxic zones in a reef tank’s filtration. It’s what makes rotten eggs and flatulence smell. But, one you go past a relatively safe dose, it actually paralyses your olfactories. Tick that checkbox.
Then once you go to a certain point beyond that, you sustain all sorts of bodily damage. Permanent olfactory damage is one of the nicest as it goes - I still can barely smell, and only intermittently and certain scents. It also leaves some really fun impacts on your ocular nerve (ie. the thing that lets you see), your central nervous system, your brain, your heart, and your lungs. Check all of those boxes too.
Basically, when I did it I am actually very lucky to still be alive. My dose was in the zone of causing permanent damage, but not quite bad enough to kill me (providing it was treated correctly, which it was not - gg, public healthcare). Because of it, I’ve basically got this cross to bear for the rest of my life. The likelihood I’ll ever get to go to any reasonable depth is close to zero - my body won’t take it. My lungs and heart specifically.
So, what’s the moral of the story? Don’t make stupid fucking decisions, because they WILL haunt you for the rest of your life. It screws me up every single day, but I’m starting to live with it a bit. As much as one can. I got incredibly lucky, and for the most part I acknowledge that in everything I do. Somebody else might not have such luck.
Chase your dreams, even if you know that in all likelihood you won’t catch them.
