A Memorable Day
How About a Helicopter Evacuation Off a Mountain and a Defibrillation?
That makes for an everlasting memory; fortunately, it happened to my friend, not me
A few days back, B. A. Cumberlidge. offered us up a writing prompt asking to recount a day that is an everlasting memory. One popped right to mind because it involved a great day of skiing, then a helicopter, and a bear sighting.
Unfortunately for my friend, he didn’t get to appreciate his helicopter ride because he was strapped flat on his back. I suspect he didn’t get to enjoy the view at all.
It all started when a buddy and I headed up to Whistler BC for a few days of skiing. I remember it was just before the third weekend in May because of what we discovered later on our adventure. Canadians celebrate Victoria Day on the last Monday preceding Queen Victoria’s birthday on May 25.
But we didn’t know that going into it. Being firefighters that worked 24-hour shifts, we got several days off at a time, so we headed up to ski for a few days leaving Wednesday and returning on Saturday.
My friend was going through a tough separation with a (now) ex-wife. She had moved out and he was fairly depressed. We planned this trip to go do something fun and get him out of the house for a bit.
He is an on and off again bodybuilder (think Lou Ferrigno with a buzz cut) and was just starting training for some future event. Because of that, he brought an entire duffel bag full of dietary supplements. An. Entire. Duffel. Bag. God only knows why he needed that much.
We skied all day Thursday and had a great day. On Friday we were up and out reasonably early, around 9 am. It was a gorgeous sunny 75-degree day (call it 23 for you Celsius folks).
We stopped for lunch around noon and, after lunch, we thought we might take a go at a run called Couloir Extreme.
At one point in history, probably the 1970’s, Couloir Extreme was the steepest run inside a North American ski resort. It was epic before all the amazing skiers pushed the limits of epic to the extremes they are today, and before other ski areas expanded to include more challenging terrain.
In winter, if you ski Couloir Extreme, you can expect a long uncontrolled slide if you fall. It is rated Double Black Diamond, and the ski patrol just happens to keep a sledge at the bottom of it at all times during the winter.
Spring was a different deal as the snow had become much softer and more forgiving for turns. Plus, it wasn’t quite as steep with the way the snow melted. It became closer to a single black diamond, although it is still pretty challenging.
My friend works harder than most people when he skis. It is almost as if he is willing the mountain to move to the side with each of his turns. He truly looks like he is pushing the hill left, and then right.
I have a little more practice under my belt, and I am used to waiting for a few seconds for him to catch up on most runs. This run works best to go ahead and tear it up until it flattens and widens out, quite a ways down. So, that is what I did. It is narrow at the top, and we would just interfere with one another if we tried to go at the same time.
I stopped at a place where a rock outcropping had formed due to the snowmelt. I sat on a rock with my snowboard downhill, meaning that I had to turn around 180 degrees to see my buddy as he advanced down the slope.
Now, he is usually a bit slow, but he was barely crawling along today — a bit out of character. It took quite a while until he finally stopped and sat on the snow just at the edge of shouting distance. I yelled up to see if anything was wrong, and he replied that he couldn’t breathe very well.
It was going to be quite a slog up to him, so I let him slowly make his way down closer. He finally stopped about 10 meters away and he looked a bit grey. I asked him if he could feel his pulse, and he just stared at me with a vacant look in his eyes.
That is when I ditched out of my snowboard and hiked up to him, post-holing the whole way in the very soft snow. By the time I got up to him, he had rested for a bit and felt better. He was taking his pulse, but I could see in his neck arteries that it was going very fast.
It was clear that he was having some sort of heart arrhythmia issue. As we pondered how we were going to get him down the hill or figure out how to get help, I could see a tiny figure in a red coat come over the top of the run.
As he skied closer, I could see the white cross on his coat and started waving frantically. We were pretty lucky that a ski patrol person just happened by while we were sitting there. We told him what was going on, and he assessed my friends’ pulse, coming up with a rate of 180 (which is way too fast).
Apparently in the Whistler Blackcomb algorithm, a pulse of 180 is pretty high up the emergency scale, as he started calling right away for a doctor, an Advanced Life Support responder, a sledge, a defibrillator and… a helicopter, to get my friend off the mountain and down to the clinic.
When the heart monitor showed up, I hooked him up and he appeared to be in a rhythm called Ventricular Tachycardia, a rhythm that can be potentially life-threatening.
Now the doctors that work on a ski mountain may not be emergency room doctors. The ski areas just often give doctors passes if they agree to help ski patrol when needed in return. I will give this guy props because he started an IV (something that nurses mostly do in the U.S.) but beyond that, I could see that all he wanted to do was get him in the helicopter.
For all I know, he was a podiatrist or something.
That turned out to be an “all-hands-on-deck” event as my buddy is pretty large and could only help a little. I got to be honorary ski patrol labour and help out with strapping in him in the sledge for the short trip down to where the helicopter had landed on a flat area below us.
Then after we loaded him up, I got to crouch like a badass next to the helicopter as it took off and flew to the clinic. At one time I had a great photo of the helicopter where it landed, but that was before cloud storage, so it is probably on an old hard drive somewhere or in my old flip phone in a landfill. I couldn’t find it for this story, unfortunately.
I knew I would never make it to the clinic before they shocked him out of the bad heart rhythm, so I took my time heading down the mountain — it is a big hill and takes quite a while. We were staying in a place where I could ski up to the condo and figured I would grab the car to pick him up at the clinic.
On the way down, just by where the runs ended, I went right by a little black bear going about his or her business. Likewise, the photo is similarly absent. That made for a nice cap on a very interesting day.
That wasn’t the end of my friend’s story, however. When I got to the clinic the emergency doctor and the cardiologist consult on the phone both agreed that the rhythm looked like Ventricular Tachycardia.
Because of that, and even though they had converted him out of it with a single shock, they wanted to have him someplace he could get monitored. That meant an ambulance ride to St. Joseph’s hospital in Vancouver.
I remained behind that evening because I didn’t have a place to stay in Vancouver, then got up early, packed up our stuff and all 14,000 dietary supplements, and met up with him at the hospital the next day. That is where Victoria Day raised its ugly head.
Turns out none of the imaging specialists that could do diagnostic tests would be back to work until Tuesday (a little different than U.S. healthcare, but it is free, so…) That meant my friend would have to sit in the hospital until then. The doctors refused to release him to go anywhere unless he could be on a cardiac monitor the whole time.
British Columbia ambulances weren’t going to be able to transfer him back to Everett, nor would an American ambulance service. So, it turns out that the fire chief allowed one of our fire department ambulances to travel, with two paramedics that volunteered for the trip, to go pick up my buddy and transfer him to the Everett hospital so he could get further tests promptly.
It has been a long story, but the last little piece was that it turned out that the rhythm wasn’t Ventricular Tachycardia, but a more benign Atrial Flutter — it was just going at a super-fast rate, to the point where the cardiologists couldn’t see the indicators in the EKG that allowed that diagnosis.
My friend had an ablation procedure, and now is completely free of any arrhythmia issues and doing great.
Speculation has it that perhaps the supplements, plus the gallons of Red Bull he drank, and the little adrenalin spike you get when you look over the edge on a steep ski run all conspired to work against him that day.
It certainly made for a very exciting trip and a memorable story. How about you P.G. Barnett, Holly Jahangiri, Sherry McGuinn, Charles Roast, Arthur G. Hernandez, Tree Langdon ♾️, Chris Hedges, Joe Luca, and Ann Venkataraman. Do you have any memorable days?
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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a contagious passion. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.
