Mal's Stories
Accident on Thunder Mountain
I should have died on May 21, 1999. I'd been ice climbing on a remote peak in the Alaska Range when I fell 180 feet, shattering my legs and ankles, lacerating my head, knocking myself out and injuring my partner as I tumbled by him. I should have died that night, stranded on my tiny ledge hacked into the ice, when temperatures plunged to the single digits and it began snowing, then avalanching on me. And I should have died when the pilot of the rescue helicopter decided there wasn't enough clearance between his rotor blades and the cliff, and deemed it too dangerous for my rescuer, dangling from a rope 200' below him, to attempt to pull me off. But I didn't freeze, bleed to death, or get buried, and the helicopter didn't crash, so I have a story to tell.
Heart Attack
in Ouray As I came to I was vaguely aware that I was strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance, the glare of the cabin lights making me squint and want to return to the dark place I'd just visited. The residue of chaos was scattered around me; pieces of torn up bandage packaging, medic supplies strewn around, and strips of tape, ready to apply, still hanging free from the bottom edges of the cabinets. I had tubes coming out of my arms, wires glued to my chest and I could hear the insistent beeps and buzzes of modern medicine going off all around. The EMTs were high-five-ing with the flush of a tough job well done and were saying things to each other like, "Good Job! That was a close one." Recognizing that I had come to, one of them leaned over me and said, "You're a lucky guy." I had just had a major heart attack. It came out of the blue, with no warning, no family history: a wake-up call for me as I was strolling into middle age with the cavalier confidence shared by many ageing athletes.
