Widow wonders if husband could have survived ski mishap
Wonders if better response would have saved his life
Early on Feb. 15, David Skinner, a fit, adventurous senior, left his country home to go skiing at Mount Pakenham, just a threeminute drive away.
At roughly 9:30 a.m., despite his sturdy helmet, he fell near the bottom of the hill and injured his head. Who could know that, on a bright, harmless morning, the end was near?
By 9 p.m., he was undergoing brain surgery. Within 72 hours, he was dead.
His widow Sandra now faces the retirement years alone, in a big, lovely house with a dog and cat, and everywhere memories of the man she was married to for 47 years.
Months later, she still wonders whether a better response would have saved him.
“It’s not going to bring him back, but I’d like to see some actual change in protocol, to know this won’t happen to somebody else.”
At the time of the accident, Skinner, a mechanical engineer and technology entrepreneur, was wearing a medical alert bracelet that warned he was “anti-coagulated” — or on blood thinners — after having cardiac surgery in 2004 for an aortic valve replacement.
But Skinner, evidently knocked unconscious for roughly 20 seconds, was in no condition to alert ski patrollers to the bracelet, nor did they ask or look on his wrist.
Sandra has since learned David was so disoriented after the fall, he didn’t know his own name. As the early minutes went on, however, he regained his senses and declined medical attention. The first responders decided he was coherent enough to make his own decisions and, as a precaution, followed him as he drove home.
Here lies, says his widow, the first mistake.
“You might want to examine your definition of coherent,” she said one day this week. “He didn’t know who he was. He was knocked out and didn’t know what happened. That hardly qualifies as coherent.”
When he arrived home, in fact, David did not report any injury at the hill, nor did staff attempt to alert his wife.
Though he seemed “a little disoriented,” he proceeded to snowplow part of the long driveway, said Sandra. In the afternoon, after complaining of a headache and taking a shower, David went to lie down.
She followed him into the bedroom at about 4:45 p.m., only to find him covered in sweat, shaking and slurring his speech. She called an ambulance immediately and, by that evening, he was in the Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus awaiting surgery. The diagnosis: acute subdural hematoma.
An eerily similar thing happened to actress Natasha Richardson, who died after an innocent-sounding fall while skiing at Mont Tremblant in 2009.
She, too, appeared lucid — even jovial — in the early minutes after the fall, only to develop headaches and serious symptoms later.
The medical literature says these “lucid intervals” are common with subdural hematoma, which is characterized by a slow buildup of blood between the brain and the skull. It is an extremely dangerous injury and early intervention is key.
This is what haunts Sandra most. If David had received early medical attention — if she had known straightaway about the knockout fall — could he have been saved?
“Seven hours earlier? I think so.”
Skinner received a reply from Joanne Clifford, the director at Mount Pakenham.
“If the (injured) person is an adult, we cannot force treatment on anyone who refuses treatment and we are unable to hold anyone on the premises against their will,” she wrote.
“Staff who spoke with David following the incident found him to be coherent, offered him treatment on several occasions and David refused treatment each time and insisted that he wanted to drive home.”
As for the medical bracelet, she responded it was not visible and that patrollers are not authorized to “search” a person without permission. The hill followed the same standard firstaid protocol as “every other ski hill in Canada,” Clifford wrote, adding she is unaware of any impending changes in dealing with head-injury cases.
Skinner is not satisfied. She thinks it should be mandatory to look or ask for a medical alert bracelet and argues a next-of-kin alert should be pursued when a skier loses consciousness with a head injury. With a serious concussion, she points out, is it any surprise that the skier would irrationally refuse treatment?
She pushes on in David’s memory.
He had eclectic interests, for sure. He built a trail system through the rolling hills behind the house, erected numerous inukshuks, played piano, motorcycled, skied, loved to entertain. It was fitting that, literally, some of his ashes were shot from a cannon in commemoration of a life avidly pursued.
“Probably his quirkiness,” Sandra said, when asked what she misses most. “He marched to a different drummer. He definitely had a quirky personality and you could always depend on him to do something outrageous.”