A Happy Ending (or rather beginning)

[mneagle]

For those who remember Sam's accident back in 2005...

 

LINK

 

I have some happy news to report. Sam has managed to make a virtual complete recovery. Given the MRI, the fact that he even survived is quite astonishing...

 

[img:center]http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/upload/552977-saggital.jpg[/img]

 

He's not climbing anymore (understandably) but has resumed his academic medicine position at the Harborview ER and recently tied the knot with a really awesome woman:

 

[img:center]http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/514/wedding.jpg[/img]

 

Cheers to Pax (Alpinfox), Dave (Alpinedave), Dr. Michael Copass and the neurosurgery team at Harborview for saving his ass. (Pax and Dave are off picture to the right in the wedding party.)

Edited June 5, 2009 by mneagle

[ivan]

badass!

[Dechristo]

bene

[pindude]

Wow. I missed this when it happened. What an incredible read. I personally don't know any of the principals, but hats off to Pax, Dave, others who helped, and most of all blessings to Sam and his bride!

 

[Dechristo]

I'm gonna take a stab at the common denominator in the two events portrayed by the photos and guess: "priapism".

[DPS]

That's a good looking couple.

[mneagle]

I'm gonna take a stab at the common denominator in the two events portrayed by the photos and guess: "priapism".

 

I believe it only lasted for about 10 to 20 minutes, if I remember what Sam told me about the event. Nothing like being an ER doc while experiencing spinal shock.

[billcoe]

Live long and prosper Sam, may your life continue on this path of luck and as full of life as it has been.

 

What a story.....

[cbcbd]

Excellent!

[sweatinoutliquor]

:tup: That's awesome!

[sobo]

I remember reading about this here when it happened. So good to here of a near-perfect recovery. Good on ya, Sam!

 

And to Pax and Dave, and the park wardens rescue team.

[Dane]

Good to hear on both counts!! Congrads to the Bride and Groom!!!!!

 

Live long and prosper

[mneagle]

For people not familiar and too lazy to read the whole accident thread, this is Sam's account of the event:

 

3/6/06 Post by "Iceclaws" AKA Sam

 

"Hi

 

I post this to provide, for those of you interested, an update of my injury, and to thank you for your well-wishes posted above.

 

As mentioned, my fall was December 2nd 2005, around 5 pm, at the end of a week of ice climbing in Canadian Rockies, with Dave and Pax.

 

It was, if you will, a hiker’s injury: a misstep along an unroped traverse of low angle terrain amid our descent off Guinness Gully on the Northeastern slope of Mt. Dennis outside the small township of Field, British Columbia.

 

A front-point of my right crampon stubbed upon something, pitching me forward. My left crampon skated across a rock and gravity finished me off. I fell approximately 15 feet, head first, laden with too much climbing hardware to complete the summersault.

 

When I awoke the air was dim, the scene was blurry, and I thought I was in some city park I couldn’t name. A lightning bolt had struck my upper back and neck. I stood up and took twenty steps, which were twenty too many and I essentially collapsed into my partners’ arms.

 

My confusion was short lived. My pain was not.

 

“You know the drill,” Dave said to Pax.

 

Dave is a member of Seattle Mountain Rescue. He rappelled down the remaining two pitches of the waterfall to summon the Canadian Parks’ rescue wardens. On his way down he fixed our two ropes with high strength tie-offs he knew would need to support the ascent of multiple rescuers and rescue gear.

 

Meanwhile Pax, whom I had met some 4 years earlier while providing a lecture to his EMT class in North Seattle, stayed on the hill with me. He kept me warm, immobilized and hydrated, and he continuously checked in with my psyche. He strapped his headlight to the prong of a nearby tree branch, in strobe mode.

 

It was a cold scene, the temperature dropped to minus 15 degrees Celsius according to the Banff newspaper’s coverage of these events. I rubbed my cold feet together in attempt to avoid frostbite.

 

Which explains, I think, the guilty pleasure I had when a sudden wave of intense tingly heat washed over my hands and feet and I, um, maintained an erection I neither asked for nor deserved. My feet stopped rubbing together, because they lost all power. Nor could I move my upper extremities. Pax and I assessed limb by limb, muscle group by muscle group, all of which had zero strength. My limbs were floppy. I was tetraplegic.

 

I thought of my family and the faith my parents place in my ability to make sound decisions. I recalled the wheelchair of a ventilator-dependent tetraplegic teenager whom I cared for as an intern here at Harborview. A strong puff made it go forward, a strong sip put it in reverse, soft puff for right, soft sip for left. Daily, he would ask me to disconnect his ventilator.

 

Ten minutes after it started, my spinal shock resolved. The intense stocking-and-glove heat, the erection, the flaccid limbs, gone, but never will be forgotten.

 

But this story is about something more than me. I believe it’s about quality first responders. Or let’s call them what they are: rescuers. Beginning with Dave and Pax. They knew the drill and executed it precisely. I could not ask for more qualified climbing partners. The fire engines from Field and Lake Louise spotlighted the entire length of the waterfall, turning night into day. The foot of the waterfall is a good quarter-mile from the road. Spotlights, to me now, mean hope.

 

Ten Canadian Parks wardens involved themselves in my extrication. Four of them climbed the two pitches of waterfall to my location. They integrated the skills of Dave and Pax. They executed a highly technical litter rescue. Their communication during the rope rigging was deliberate and reassuring. I was immobilized in a cervical collar and full body vacuum splint, which one crampon stab could have rendered soft. Pax, having shared the experience of my tetraplegia, promoted the log roll routine to an act of religious veneration and advertised it to everybody on its every occasion. An ice shield was lowered over my eyes, and Dave helped one ace climbing warden, Brad White, attend the basket as we lowered - more smoothly than I would ever have imagined - down the ice.

 

What I’m trying to say is: my rescue was a perfectly choreographed one.

 

It had to be. My spinal cord had no room to wiggle. None. I had multiple unstable spine fractures from C5 thru T3. C6-7 and T1-2 were fracture-dislocations. What you see in this CT scan reformat:

 

 

is a scary 8mm of anterolisthesis, or forward slip, of the vertebral body T1 upon the vertebral body T2 (the vertically-oriented lucent space between the two bony stacks is the spinal canal and you’re correct, it should be aligned). Vertebral bodies C7,T1,T2,T3 all were fractured with multiple posterior element fractures behind the spinal cord. A bone fragment was afloat in the spinal canal. Cerebral spinal fluid leaked from a tear in the dura, and an epidural hematoma tracted from C2-T2. That my spinal cord was spared permanent damage is almost unbelievable.

 

I was handed over to paramedics by 3 a.m., still able to move my limbs. Plumes of goose feathers littered their rig when they cut off my parka. The medics monitored me, preserved my immobility, treated my pain, and missed every pothole and bump en route to Banff, and again en route to Calgary.

 

So, I didn’t just receive ordinary help. With certainty, I received a standard of help that preserved, against great odds, my neurologic function. Millimeters, or a single millimeter, shy of that standard could have rendered me seated for the rest of my life.

 

So what’s a hero anyway? You may have read David Roberts’ recent book about heroism in mountain climbing where by the end he concludes that it hardly exists. He gives Sebastian Junger credit for the most meaningful distinction between heroism and courage. Apparently Junger was frustrated that Perfect Storm was popularly lumped into the adventure genre with Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. He cited the difference between those so exhilarated by risk that they take, if you will, risky vacations, and those who take risks for a living like the fishermen who sank with the Andrea Gail, or miners, or to the point, rescuers. Heroism, Yunger said, is more than courage. It is, rather and specifically, “courage in the service of others”

 

None of the climbers I climb with mistake climbing for heroism, so I doubt Junger’s distinction is lost on most all of you. I only raise it to consider that by no fluke was my rescue and pre-hospital care executed so professionally. Dave didn’t join Seattle Mountain Rescue for mere high adventure. Pax didn’t seek it in his EMT training. The Parks Canada rescue wardens were much more than ace climbers. All their training and their teamwork with the fire departments of two townships and their paramedics produced for me something far beyond what any group of overeducated thrill seekers could have accomplished.

 

I spent 5 days in traction in a Calgary hospital, and on Dec 8th traveled home from the Rockies in a manner I never would have intended, upon an Airlift Northwest medical Learjet with my boss, Dr. Michael Copass, medical director of the Harborview Medical Center Emergency Services, accompanying as a flight nurse. I was handed over to Medic One at Boeing Field, and driven to Harborview. It’s hard to describe what feeling of homecoming is being wheeled into my work place, halo screwed into my head, traction vest ratcheted to beyond 50 pounds, to be cared for by colleagues. The following day, I was fused from C4 to T4. My operative report reads like a novel.

 

For deeds so heroic as the first-responder care to which I owe my neurologic function, I am forever indebted.

 

“You know the drill” Dave said to Pax.

 

And they all did. They knew it perfectly.

 

Thank you again, for your comments on this site,

 

Sam Warren"

[mneagle]

This is the slide show from Dave's website, complete with rescue and rehab documentation near the end:

Rockies 2005 Slide Show

[pup_on_the_mountain]

Totally awesome!!! :tup:

[sobo]

Very nice documentary.

The slideshow froze up on me at 2:22 left to go. Had to scroll through one by one after that. Is it just my computer, or did I not give it enough time to fully load up?

[pup_on_the_mountain]

The slideshow froze up on me at 2:22 left to go. Had to scroll through one by one after that.

I had the same experience.

[LostCamKenny]