Rachel Lance

The hyperbaric chamber is essentially a gas pressure vessel.

So you're basically inside a scuba tank.

Now, our scuba tanks at Duke are very fancy.

We have seven of them all connected together.

So it is like being inside of a little hamster tube village.

And ours can go to either high pressure or low pressure.

But in that process, you have tons of air and gases moving through the piping.

So that's my biggest impression is you're in this enclosed space.

They're always either circular, spherical, or cylindrical because that's a stronger shape.

And then you constantly have noises.

You constantly have gas flow as you're pressurizing.

It gets really hot really quickly.

As you ascend the other direction, it gets really cold really quickly.

And then you have people on the outside who are monitoring the gas composition in there when you're in an enclosed space to make sure you're breathing safe levels.

So, yes, the biggest sensory takeaway from a hybrid chamber for me is probably the noise.

Pretty much.

We have one atmosphere that we breathe.

That atmosphere of gas we forget about pretty often, but it does sit on top of us all the time.

Once we go under the water, we have additional atmospheres that essentially get piled on.

So every 33 feet or 10 meters of your metric is equal to another atmosphere of pressure.