Theme of the Week: Heli-evac

Monday April 11, 2011

7:05PM

The theme as of late has been heli-evacuation. We’ve had at least two per day over the last 3 or 4 days, and I have to say, they have all been legitimate. Not that we would call or approve a helicopter transport for someone who didn’t deserve it, but most of these people have been pretty sick. Even the ones who didn’t look all that bad at first glance turned out to have horrible vital signs.

The streak started with the woman I previously mentioned with the bizarre sudden vision loss and since then there have been two Brazilian men with HAPE, a man from the Czech Republic with HACE and HAPE, a nervous camerman with a heart condition, and, at least, a few others that I can’t currently recall the specifics. There would have been two others, but they chose not to heed our advice and walked down. 

The first of these two was a middle-aged man from the US who while working hard to get up a steep hill began to feel heart palpitations and subsequently passed out. In the medical world, red flags go up over a situation such as this, but despite our warnings he decided to walk down. The second of the two refusals was even more dramatic. A young woman, again American, happened to notice her very rapid heart rate while resting in her room. As it turned out, she has likely had a thyroid condition for years, which is being treated back in NY by her “Oriental Healer” with ginger and some other herbal supplement. Judging by the goiter in her neck, the twigs and berries haven’t been working. We don’t have the ability here to prove the thyroid as the cause and there were several other more serious diagnoses in consideration so we recommended that she fly down to Kathmandu for a more formal evaluation. The trouble came when she refused to go and insisted that she continue up to base camp with her group. After multiple meetings with her and her guides she was ultimately escorted down to Lukkla and onto a plane by one the group’s guides who missed out on his first opportunity to guide a Himalayan ascent on Lobuche.

Tonight we have an Aussie woman with some mild AMS who really just needs someone to hold her hand for a little while. Too bad we’re all going next door to the Panorama Lodge for a night on the town. Five minutes after she arrived her companions asked whether the “heli” would arrive tonight or tomorrow morning. Fortunately, Alun was feeling kind hearted and provided both the TLC as well as the well thought explanation of why she would likely be heading down-valley under her own power tomorrow after spending the night in her own lodge tonight. One of the benefits of eating out is siting around the lodge’s wood stove, so it’s going to take a really sick patient to keep us away from that.


I'm now off for another backpacking trip, and I'm really looking forward to some time away. The plan is to head up to Zhungla today and over the Cho La Pass from the east to Gokyo tomorrow. From there we'll head up to Cho Oyu base camp before crossing another high pass, the Rhenjo La, to Thame. Then it's a long two days of walking down to Namche and back to Pheriche. I should be sufficiently tired by the time I get back. Hopefully, I'll have some new adventures to report in a week or so. Pictures, as I'm sure you can tell, haven't been loading into the blog well on the slow connection, so I'll try to put something new on Facebook when I get back.