what's my name?
What seemed like a moment ago, I was arcing turns in the hunt for windblown stashes of chalky goodness and now I’m trying to comprehend what has just happened.
A couple of minutes passes by.
“What’s my name?” asks the Patroller in a Canadian accent.
I’m strapped in a blood wagon surrounded by ski patrol. I try to move and am given stern instructions not to.
“Treble Cone Ski Patrol do you copy?”
“Otago Rescue we copy over”. The conversation continues to crackle over the radio.
“Treble Cone Ski Patrol, we are enroute and our ETA is approximately 40minutes over”.
“Otago Rescue; we copy that; patient is stable; landing zone is cleared; over”.
"My mind continues to spin as to how I ended up strapped in a blood wagon awaiting an airlift to hospital. At this point all I can remember is making a sweeping left hand turn to make my way back up to the fence line to skip over a ridge...and I got bluffed."
"As I run down my body I make a mental note of the collateral damage sustained. Starting at the top, not much escaped. From a serious concussion, severe whiplash, damage to my left shoulder, minor fractures to several vertebrae, a severe haematoma and swelling to my tailbone, a dislocated left hip with a femoral head fracture wiping the articular cartilage dislodging a 1.67cm sliver of bone as well as tearing my psoas and labrum on the way through, a grade 3 meniscal tear to my left knee and a tibial plateau fracture. I’d learn weeks later that there were more fractures to be discovered. "
I slowly start to attempt to piece together the situation at hand.
A medic arrives from the ski area base and tries to insert a line to intravenously administer pain relief of the opioid variety with little success.
On the fifth mis-attempt to secure the line I suggest that he stops attacking the normally bulbous veins of my lower arms and waits for back up. Yes, when you well and truly toast yourself, the morphine comes to you.
I’ve been in a few ‘situations’ over the years and while I can feel something is drastically wrong with my groin and pelvic region, I’ve endured worse pain and have learned the art of ‘breathing’ through it until back up arrives.
My mind continues to spin as to how I ended up strapped in a blood wagon awaiting an airlift to hospital. At this point all I can remember is making a sweeping left hand turn to make my way back up to the fence line to skip over a ridge...and I got bluffed.
My memory blanks with the first impact resuming approximately 8-10minutes and 400 vertical metres later below where it started and I’m surrounded by ski patrol at the bottom Treble Cone's Motatapu Chutes.
I hear the whirring echo of the chopper in the distance, it’s a common sound in these parts as the throng of the rotor blades reverberate around the hills.
“We’ll get a line in when we’re airborne”, I overhear the air rescue medic as they bundle me into the back of the BK, a twin engine helicopter with double rear facing doors which make it a common choice for emergency air services.
The pilot hands me a head set and I hear the familiar voice of a local pilot who is in the area searching for some lost ski tourers in the cloud that has shrouded the mid layer of the hills all morning. The joker in me wants to say gidday, but I quell the urge to crack a joke over the radio given the situation.
In an attempt to keep my mind off the pain before the medic got a line in - it was too good an opportunity not to make light of the situation for memory's sake (and the entertainment of those watching the ' Gram).
We take off and the rescue medic gets to work on finding a vein to tap. There’s something about that first hit of morphine. It hits your system and while you still feel the pain, it takes the ‘edge’ off bringing a sense of calm.
“We’ll keep loading you up all the way to Dunedin” comforts the medic and he stays true to his word.
Fast forward fourteen weeks and while I know that I’ve well and truly dodged a bullet and gotten the get of out jail card, it has not without some major consequences.
As I run down my body I make a mental note of the collateral damage sustained. Starting at the top, not much escaped. From a serious concussion, severe whiplash, damage to my left shoulder, minor fractures to several vertebrae, a severe haematoma and swelling to my tailbone, a dislocated left hip with a femoral head fracture wiping the articular cartilage dislodging a 1.67cm sliver of bone as well as tearing my psoas and labrum on the way through, a grade 3 meniscal tear to my left knee and a tibial plateau fracture. I’d learn weeks later that there were more fractures to be discovered.
To say the first three months were a mega lesson in patience, acceptance and relentless optimism would be a mild understatement and the reality is that that recoveries like these are far from fast and while you may look ok from the outside, there’s still one hell of a mountain to be climbed on the return-tonormal function front.
The curve balls and lack of information are likely the hardest to deal with.
If you give me an objective or a desired outcome, I’m innately programmed to work backwards and figure out exactly how I'm going to make something happen. I’m comfortable with curve balls, in fact I’ve come to expect them and embrace them.
Unfortunately in this chapter of the game of life this rule book just got thrown out the window.
This is the ongoing roller coaster that requires a daily commitment to ‘hang on for the ride’ and to be relentlessly optimistic.
At four weeks post accident I was told, “no, you don’t need crutches now” to an MRI revealing that I’d chipped a large piece of bone off the femoral head wiping most of the articular cartilage with it, along with leaving my medical cruciate ligament dangling by a thread and a missed fracture. No wonder that knee was rather angry and swollen. Weeks later I’d find out that I’d also sustained a fracture of the acetabulum which happens when the head of the femur gets driven into the pelvis congruent with a high speed feet first impact.
The patience game has been alive and well. Crutches for the first four weeks resulted in many a passerby enquiring if I would like a lift as I crutched my way to and from appointments along a loosely formed gravel bike trail.
As I started to hobble without crutches, I'd get some interesting looks as I attempted to my daily walk down to the lake, again people stopping to ask if I needed a ride. It would take eleven weeks to feel as though I could walk without hitching my hip although that might be optimistic. Five and a half months on, the unasked for comments about my gait from onlookers was something that resembled a soul crushing affair that quickly brought a flood of tears welling in my eyes. The physical part of the recovery is one bit, the mental part another.
You start to dissect the how and the why of what has happened. In a year when I made a concerted effort to ease off the gas pedal, why was I continuing to be penalised and put into the time out box? It’s the question that continues to play through your head over and over.
How could a mellow blue bird day searching out stashes of snowy goodness go so drastically awry I still ask myself?
You go over the scenarios, the only sense of relief knowing that it really was a freak accident. A freak accident that so easily might not have happened, but one that could have (and should have) been so much worse. The fact that it wasn’t is a daily exercise in gratitude for what it was rather than what it wasn’t.
These are the moments when you find gratitude in the little things that went right. The people I was with, ski patrol who just happened to be right there, the immediate dispatch of the rescue helicopter, that my injuries were not of the life threatening or paralysing variety, that is happened at home rather than overseas and most importantly that the banter has rolled hard and fast from the helicopter to the hospital and for the weeks and months that have followed.
In the months passed, I have spent countless hours in waiting rooms and visiting specialists to confirm the state of the damage done and to ascertain the plan to move forward. I can assure you that this is where the nervous self deprecating jokes stop and the realities kick in. It is also when you face the stark realisation that no-one values your recovery like you do and that you have to be the one driving the action, asking the questions, doing the research and making things happen.
Open hip surgery with a full dislocation and clean up/resurfacing of the femoral head is still a very real possibility, although one I
"How could a mellow blue bird day searching out stashes of snowy goodness go so drastically awry I still ask myself? "
have negotiated with the surgeon to defer while I both explore non-invasive options of regenerative medicine that I had access to in the United States and to give the rest of the injuries I collected a chance to heal. When you’ve blown out the whole left side of your body, there’s only so much one can deal with all at once when there are no guarantees for what you’re signing up for.
As the recovery continues different challenges start to present themselves. While being knocked out on that first impact likely saved me from sustaining worse injuries, it would take until week six to start to fully feel the effects of the head injury well and truly kicking me in the ass just as I started to feel like I was making some progress.
Yep, concussion is a b*tch and concussion 2.0 for the year is nothing to be taken lightly. Tiredness, fatigue and having to remove/ excuse yourself from many a social situation when the noise, talking and conversing can be a little too much too handle and a momentary time out from socialisation became the norm. Not to get ahead of myself, I’d be set back yet again suffering my third major concussion in 12 months while walking head on into an overhanging rock on a trail in the forest thanks to it being the same level as the brim of my cap that I was wearing. Back to the naughty corner of concussion I went promptly saying goodbye to anything that would resemble any kind of fun for the summer months due to the overbearing need to sleep, avoid social situations and the like. Maybe it was life’s way of giving myself a little extra time for all the other broken bits to mend.
It’s no secret that I’ endured my fair share of injuries over the years. Broken legs, blown knees, shoulders, ribs, ankles, lacerations, whiplashes, concussions and plenty of gravel rash, just not all at the same time like I’ve been served up this time around. I've acquired a few tools on how to deal with these adversities, now I actually get to put them into the practice which is likely the silver lining of the whole experience.
Let me tell you this much, when you fully toast yourself the ability to be patient, to persevere and to commit to “turning up” everyday have become my greatest assets. My jacket and merino base layers may have been cut off and left in shreds, but I have painstakingly sewn them back together, just like I’m continuing to put my body back together.
If there is one thing that will define my memory of this little bump in the road, it will be the laughter, the gratitude, the choice to be relentlessly optimistic when the chips are down and to embrace the ride.
"Multiple indentations to my helmet that bear the scars of the impacts I cannot remember."