Rachel Lance

One of the really interesting mysteries about decompression sickness is that we don't actually know where the bubbles originate from.

Bubbles in the bloodstream are not related to the actual symptoms of the disease itself.

So you can have a person in extreme pain with very low levels of bubbles in their bloodstream, and you can have people with lots of bubbles in their bloodstream who have no pain and no other signs of issues.

So one of the things that I research at Duke and in hyperbarics in general is trying to figure out where these bubbles are coming from in the first place.

Sometimes it feels like magic.

Anytime you're looking at the human body, how do you find out is the key problem?

You have to be creative with instrumentation, with imaging, with testing, with looking at indirect metrics so that you can try and trace these mysteries and these sources of injury back to their origin without doing further damage to the person you're studying.

A lot of what I do at Duke involves the creation and the development of new products and new methods that work under pressure and work at depth.

Because when we're in that extreme isolated scenario in this incredibly thick metal container, we don't have access to most of the tools of the rest of the hospital.

We try to flirt with the line of danger but never cross it.

That's a big rule that complicates the study of injury biomechanics in general.

And that's something that I encounter a lot with blast trauma.

There is a gentleman in this book in Chamber Divers named Horace Cameron Wright, and he encountered that same issue.

He wanted to look at underwater explosives.

Well, he didn't feel ethically comfortable putting other people down and risking them get injured.

So he decided to go himself.

when we're looking at these problems, we have that same ethical conundrum.

We can't intentionally injure someone.

We can only take advantage of cases where people have injured themselves.

And so those cases are very valuable.