A Canadian man skiing at Sugarloaf with his wife struck a tree. Ski patrol responded and had him off the mountain in 12 minutes, ready to be taken to the hospital. What happened next is the subject of an ongoing investigation. The skier’s wife is a nurse practitioner with 10 years of experience in intensive care units. She says that instead of checking her husband’s blood pressure or looking for internal injuries, the EMTs wrapped a bandage on his arm and began driving him to the hospital. Then when she begged to get out of the passenger seat and hold his hand in the back of the ambulance, she was kicked out of the vehicle and onto the road’s snowy shoulder. Her husband died on the hour-long drive.

There are two sides to every story, of course, and it’s easy to say now that a helicopter ride to the hospital could have had a better chance at saving this man’s life. They report he was conscious and talking at the hill, and the police say they are reviewing the procedures used by the EMTs.

Tags: Skiing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Skiing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.