Tikkamike
Well-Known Member
Well yesterday was the day I planned to go up and see if I could shoot a bear. Woke up in a good mood, ready to go to work and leave immediatley after to head up the mountain. I was headed to the shower about 6am when my search and rescue pager goes off "injured hiker with broken hip on the mountain unknown exact location." COOL! love a good search and they are even cooler when medical is needed. (not for them but for me I really enjoy getting to use as much of my training as possible) I go down to the hall load up a rhino and a wheeled liter cart that hooks to the rhino and a couple 4 wheelers. We end up with a 5 man crew and the ambulance responds as far up the dirt road as they can. Get our crap together and pair up and start picking off the trails one by one. I was on my 4wheeler and another member on his so we took the lead and took off. eliminated all the trail on our section and headed up to the top where a deputy was in contact with dispatch as a command center hub. he says dispatch just called and the hikers had called on a sat phone and said they saw someone on an atv of some sort coming toward them. So we took off and followed the other crew. (pair of side x sides) they had got to the bottom of a huge canyon and split up so we took the obvious main trail to catch up to one of them and get an update... well they didnt have one so we helped them continue to search that fork and came up dry. as we turned around I ended up in the back and the dust was too much so i was kinda rolling to a stop and getting dirt out of my eye with one hand (3-4mph) when my left front tire hit a rock and it jerked the handlebar our of my hand at the same time my other tire went into a wash in the road that was too deep for the tire to come out of at that angle so it rolled with me on it luckily I was able to protect myself somehow fairly well but initially I wasnt sure how badly I was hurt so I laid ther hoping one of my counterparts and fellow EMT's would come back and asses me and decide what I should do as far as ride out or have them take me out. My right ankle hurt and my left hip hurt and so did my mid back. after a few minutes I was already tired of waiting so I started going through the assesment in my head trying to decide if I thought I should move or not. good neuros, alert and oriented as far as I could tell didnt look like any deformities from what I could tell and palpation oh hips they didnt appear to be broken, so I was convinced I was probably ok to go ahead and move so I slowly and painfully gathered myself and limped over to my 4wheeler that was running and on all 4 tires with no apparent damage. Started riding out and about a 3/4 of a mile down the road was my partner waiting on me. He said he was about to go back and check on me and that the victim had been found and were just ahead of us on the trail. I was a good 20 miles from the truck deep into the forrest service and knew I had a hard ride ahead of me but figured I could make it. so we headed out and finally a couple miles from the ambulance I caught up to the crew that had the patient and he was sitting up in the trailer. I pulled up next to them and ask what the heck they were doing with no immobilization on the patient and they said he had been walking on it and was comfortable.. as odd as that sounded I went with it. we get to the ambulance (by this point my hip is killing my and my ankle is hurting pretty badly) and the guy jumps out of the trailer and says he os fine just pulled a muscle and if we could just give him a ride to the highway he would be fine... so he signed a refusal for the ambulance crew and they took him down to the highway. Meanwhile I am barely able to walk so I get down to the truck have someone else load my equipment and drive to the hospital. I am lucky and didnt break anything but tore some ligaments in my ankle and just gave myself a charlie horse on my upper hip/butt cheek when i landed on it and my back pain was gone by that point I just felt like I had twisted wrong. so I have an ankle brace and crutches and a supposed to stay off of it for 2 days then try a little weight and so on... 2 weeks left of bear season id say it looks like I will be trying to fill my tag during the fall season this september. for now I am trying to hobble around and do a little work at the shop to make sure I dont get too far behind. It is hard to walk on one leg and even harder when my good leg is more sore than the one I am not supposed to walk on... the good news is they dont anticipate needing to do surgery, it should heal on its own.
