Doug From SV Seeker Fakes Head Injury

Ed Lada

Ed Lada

Super Anarchist
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I know some folks here have commented on the videos about SV Seeker, the 74' origami junk rigged sailboat being built in Tulsa Oklahoma.  

Doug, the guy behind the 'Boat that the internet built' sustained a serious head injury in an explosion in the boat.  

While he is pretty well known for his disdain of people that value safety first, apparently he has payed a price for it.  I don't think it's time for value judgments about that issue.

Below is a video from his partner Betsy, and a guy that was there when the accident occurred, who happened to be making a selfie video outside of the boat at the time of the explosion.  It appears the explosion had something to do with an oxy-acetylene torch, but the details are unknown right now.

There is also a short interview with the neurosurgeon describing the serious head injury that Doug sustained.  Doug sustained some non-life threatening 2nd degree burns but the big concern is severe bleeding in the brain, probably caused by the force of the explosion causing him to strike his head on something inside the boat.

Love him or hate him and his dream boat, you have to admire his spirit, attitude and the effort he has made toward achieving his goal of finishing the boat.  He has attracted a lot of attention and a lot of help in the journey of building the Seeker.  

I have mixed feelings about the project, I've been following the build since the beginning and it's been a long and interesting journey. 

I hope that Doug will fully recover, but seeing the CT of the injury to his brain, it's a very serious situation.  They have promised updates when they can post them.  






 
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Fiji Bitter

Fiji Bitter

I love Fiji Bitter
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In the wild.
That's pretty fucking dramatic, and horrible.

I don't follow the build, but surely wish him well, so that he can finish the project.

Been involved in a bad boom (no pun intended) head injury, and the crew recovered well after surgery. 

 
F

Fah Kiew Tu

Curmudgeon, First Rank
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Tasmania, Australia
I've followed The Seeker build for years. I've admired Doug's energy & creativity - he's done things that I wouldn't have even tried because I didn't think it could be done like that. He's amazingly creative WRT problem-solving and his work ethis is phenomenal.

At the same time I've wished he actually knew more engineering but that would have gotten in the way of some of his solutions I guess.

Hope he makes a speedy & full recovery.

FKT

 
Ed Lada

Ed Lada

Super Anarchist
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Poland
I am not a neurologist or radiologist, or any kind of doctor, but I have spent some time in the medical area and I have worked in 2 trauma centers and have seen these sorts of injuries.  

The CT shown when the neurologist is talking in the video is pretty bad.  In any kind of radiological image, black is air and bright white is bone.  Anything in between indicates structures of various density.  The dark areas left of center are the ventricles, they are cavities full of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), so they pass the radiation easily and show up as almost black.  The should appear to be symmetric on either side of the midline of the brain, as seen in a normal brain CT below.  The doctor mentioned a midline shift, which means the brain is pushed away from the center line, to the left side in this case, the left and right ventricles are severely compromised, as it looks like they are pushed together over to the left on the one side.   In the normal CT you can see the bone of the skull clearly and a little black airspace all around, just inside of it.  There are sever layers of protective tissue between the brain and the skull and some of the layers are also full of CSF which helps to cushion the brain.  In the CT in the video, all you see is white.  That means the skull is full of blood, not a good thing.  This creates pressure on the brain which needs to be relieved as soon as possible, because the pressure can damage the brain tissue.  The sulci mentioned in the picture below, are the folds of the brain.  They should appear to be approximately similar on both sides.  As you can see in the video, they aren't.  Because of all the bleeding in the brain, it's not clear if the skull sustained a fracture, but a severe fracture might show as a black line, in spite of the bleeding.  All in all the CT indicates a severe brain injury.  There are many more views of the CT available to the doctors, but that one tells a pretty clear story.  The doctor said that Doug is essentially in a coma, an indication of a serious brain injury as well.

The surgery will relieve the pressure, there isn't much else that can be done.  You can't reconstruct damaged brain tissue.  They will remove a piece of the skull, insert some tubes to drain the blood and monitor the pressure on the brain.  The brain will also swell for a time post injury which is why they will leave the skull open to prevent further damage from the pressure of the swelling.  They will try to ameliorate the swelling with steroids and other drugs.  It really a matter of waiting to see how much swelling will occur, and then to determine the extent of the injury.  The trauma of the initial blow and movement can destroy brain tissue and the bleeding deprives the brain of oxygen which can also destroy the brain tissue.  

At best Doug will face a long recovery, he isn't a young guy.  Like many injuries, a severe brain insult is much worse on an old brain than a young one.

The burns are 2nd degree, red skin and blistering, and are of little concern.   The head injury is the problem.

normal-ct-brain-23-638.jpg


 
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Mark Set

Mark Set

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yikes i didnt watch the dr's part of the video earlier. Sounds very serious. All the best to him and his family, he's a lot of fun to watch.

 
G

Guest

Guest
No good at all, but herein lies a lesson for welding in confined spaces, its really really fucking dangerous... Any unless you know what you are doing and have proven by the manual work practices then you are literally putting your life at risk.

Just watched the explosion on the vid, horrible, horrifying and too real! Must have been an acetylene leak

 
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F

Fah Kiew Tu

Curmudgeon, First Rank
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Tasmania, Australia
toad said:
No good at all, but herein lies a lesson for welding in confined spaces, its really really fucking dangerous... Any unless you know what you are doing and have proven by the manual work practices then you are literally putting your life at risk.

Just watched the explosion on the vid, horrible, horrifying and too real! Must have been an acetylene leak
Click to expand...
Yeah - something they drummed into all our heads when I was doing my welding courses and later in life all over again when I was doing my firefighting at sea training. One of the exercises was to snuff out a burning LPG leak, followed by what you do next to get the valve shut off.

I fitted a gas & CO sniffer to my boat before I fitted the stove.

As Doug has sadly found out, flammable/explosive gases really don't give a fuck if you don't believe in good safety practices. They still go bang.

I hope he makes a good recovery & gets his baby launched.

FKT

 
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