By Ron Akeson

To pee or not to pee? The answer would seem obvious to most divers, maybe in a wet suit and no way in a dry suit. But the real answer is just the opposite of what you might expect!

Let's look at the case of wet suit first. As your body cools the blood flow to the extremities is shunted, these include feet, hands, and skin. This is a protective mechanism to help maintain the body's core temperature to avoid damage to the vital organs and is the prelude to hypothermia. Having that warm flow of liquid in your suit may feel exquisite, you are really just tricking your body into thinking it's warm again, and it responds by increasing the blood flow back to the already cold extremities. This is just the opposite of what you want to happen. As the liquid cools (and this applies to pouring hot water down your wet suit just prior to beginning your repetitive dive as well) and cold water replaces it, your heat reserves are driven even lower making for a potentially dangerous situation.

I find that divers routinely avoid drinking any beverages so they don't have to pee when diving in a dry suit, which can also be a dangerous situation for different reasons. Dehydration is considered by many to be the leading cause of DCS. Therefore you should keep well hydrated by drinking lots of water right up until you enter the water, which brings back the dilemma of whether to pee or not to pee.

In a dry suit you have two primary options if you keep well hydrated but can't "hold it" for the entire dive. The first option is Depends for either men or women, and yes-adult diapers. Although we all started off life in diapers, we never imagined they might be necessary again. Peer pressure may come into play here if you don't wear them. As embarrassing as it might seem, especially explaining a trial run or two in the bathtub, you literally have to go in short spurts so the volume of liquid doesn't overwhelm the Depends. Practice makes perfect. The second option is for men only, and can be used in a wet suit as well as a dry suit, a pee valve. This consists of a condom catheter, just like regular condoms but with an adhesive on the inside and a hole in the end (don't mix these up with the others!) and a one-way valve that leads out of the suit. Balanced pee valves just equalize the internal pressure automatically while unbalanced do not. You can't go all at once, so there is no reason to hold it in until it hurts.

Technical divers have their own hand signal for this action, dragging the back of a hand across the forehead, warning our buddies to move up current.

When planning your next long dive, particularly a decompression dive, think twice before withholding your water consumption and remember there are solutions so you don't have to "hold it".