It’s the beginning of the ski patrol cycle again. Last Saturday was the pre-season refresher training for returning ski patrol instructors. The makeup for ski patrol training is that we cover the whole corpus of patrol training on a three year cycle. The focus this year was environmental and neurological emergencies.
Trauma being ski patrol’s bread and butter, neurologic topics always includes a healthy does of spinal column and spinal cord compromise. Everytime we cover spinal injuries, I always get drawn back to when I was training to be a paramedic, and we were required to do hospital rotations. One particular rotation was to the ICU, where a nurse recounted to me a recent patient who was a below waist paraplegic resulting from diving into a pool and hitting her head on the bottom of the pool, and suffered a complete spinal cord transection. One day, while still in the ICU, she asked, “I’m only fourteen; I haven’t even had sex yet. I guess I’ll never know what that feels like, will I?”