Diver Airlifted to San Diego, Treated for Bends

A South Laguna man was being treated for the bends Monday night after being airlifted from Baja California following a diving accident, authorities said.

Jorg Meyer, 45, a former professional diver who now works as a glass blower at UC Irvine, was undergoing decompression at UC San Diego Medical Center, officials there said Monday night.

The bends, also known as decompression sickness, are caused by rapid reduction of air pressure--usually as divers ascend too rapidly to the surface--and can result in pains in the joints and respiratory and neurological ailments.

Meyer’s wife, Allison, said she and the couple’s 3-year-old daughter were in an open boat in the Sea of Cortez, 13 miles off the Mexican port of La Paz, Sunday afternoon when the accident happened.

“He was scuba diving in deep water,” Allison Meyer said in an interview from the hospital. “I’m not sure how deep, maybe 180 feet. He just speared a pinto bass. He had about 15 minutes of bottom time, and he came up in five minutes.”

At first, she said, Jorg “seemed to be OK. Then he had sort of a seizure. He didn’t know who I was.”

Allison Meyer, an English teacher at Laguna High School, said she tried for 40 minutes to start the boat’s outboard motor. By then, her husband seemed to “snap out of it,” so they returned to a private diving club in Las Cruces where they were staying. That evening, she said, Meyer began to stagger and lose control of his legs.

Friends drove him over rough roads to a hospital in La Paz, where he was given oxygen. Early Monday, a specially equipped jet flew in to take him to UC San Diego, which has the nearest hyperbaric chamber for treatment of decompression sickness. His wife, who was not permitted to fly on the medical plane, followed on a commercial flight.

“He’s got a very bad case” of the bends, she said, “but he’s tough.”

Hospital officials, who declined to be identified, said Meyer would remain in the chamber until early Tuesday morning, then be transferred to intensive care for observation.

Meyer, a third generation glass blower, left his native Berlin at the age of 17 and went to Australia, where he became a professional diver.