Torpedoed!

My jet lag has now entirely disappeared but has been replaced by the lesser know tent lag. I had thought that my internal body clock had successfully set itself to Brisbane Mean Time, but it now seems to be inextricably linked to the sunset and sunrise. It gets dark, and I more or less fall asleep where I stand. It gets light, and the sun's rays blast straight through the blue flysheet and then through my eyelids and I'm awake at 5:19 am or whatever godforsaken hour sunrise occurs at today. On the upside, this sleeping pattern makes it nigh impossible to get a hangover and was fixin' to be just the job for the early starts required for the week's forthcoming diving course.

In a spectacularly cruel twist of fate, then, my diving course has been both metaphorically and literally blown out of the water. Chris dropped me off in nearby Stafford Heights today for my dive medical, where a nurse used a spirometer to measure my lung function, and then passed me onto a doctor for more traditional reflex, visual acuity and physical checks. Looking at the printout from the spirometer, he re-tested me with it and printed out the second, slightly better test.

Apparently my lung capacity is 115% of the expected size for my height and weight, but the FEF_25-75% (trips off the tongue, don't it?), measuring sustained flow of air over the middle few seconds of each exhalation, is only 73% of the predicted value. He apologetically told me that it should be at least 75% to be completely safe, and he had to put me down as temporarily unfit to dive.

As I was leaving, he suggested that I could organise some further tests to bear out whether or not I'm beyond hope. Unfortunately these particular tests are A) expensive and B) have a lead time slightly longer than the 16 hours left before the course is due to start. Oh well: bagpiping as a kid has clearly given me disproportionately big lungs, and on/off asthma around the same time has partially screwed them. Bugger.

Had it not been an unseemly hour to do so, I'd've gone straight to the pub to drown (oh, the irony) my sorrows.