follow-up article on recent near-drowning incident on Callaghan Creek (BC) -- from The Medical Post
Dusan Soudek
December 05, 2006 | Lynn Martel
Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mark Heard, an experienced kayaker, dropped over a three-metre waterfall and wasn’t seen again for more than five minutes. After his near-death experience and a four-month recovery, he returned to the OR with a new appreciation for work and life
It was at least five minutes. Maybe eight long, tense minutes.
Now, seven months after being trapped in an underwater cave while kayaking, Dr. Mark Heard, an orthopedic surgeon from Canmore, Alta., has returned to his practice a very grateful man.
After paddling the Soo River near Pemberton, B.C., in May, Dr. Heard, his son Jamie and six other buddies decided to traverse Callaghan Creek near Whistler, rated class IV with some “innocuous” class V drops.
River classes run from I: easy, to VI: extremely difficult, unpredictable and dangerous. With powerful yet predictable rapids, class IV kayaking requires advanced paddling and navigating skills. Class V rivers are the domain of expert kayakers capable of negotiating long, violent rapids littered with unavoidable large obstacles, where the consequences of a mishap are usually serious.
Kayaking since he was 11, Dr. Heard’s adventures included expeditions to remote rivers in Nepal and India. After countless kayaking days together, at 19 Jamie was old enough to join an adult road trip, and Callaghan Creek was well within both their abilities.
“This was our first father-son road trip,” Dr. Heard, 46, said. “The last thing we expected that week was an accident. We went out to paddle conservative water.”
The kayakers dropped over a three-metre waterfall 30 seconds apart—Dr. Heard third, Jamie behind him. Landing in the pool below the falls, Jamie noticed the boaters ahead of him motioning. Something was amiss; Dr. Heard had disappeared.
What some locals knew, but Dr. Heard didn’t, was that behind the tumbling curtain, water was being continuously circulated into a hydraulic hole just below the surface—a kayaker’s “room of doom.”
Dr. Heard remembers nothing of the accident—or the better part of two weeks afterward.
“I’ve had worse swims, and memories of much worse experiences in my kayak,” he said. “I’m oblivious to what happened. I think that makes it less traumatic.”
His friends surmise that on approach, Dr. Heard’s kayak bounced off a rock, causing him to briefly stall and land at the base of the falls with less momentum than the other paddlers. Sucked backward into the cave, the relentless cascade trapped him.
“At first it was total shock,” Jamie recalled. “I just felt so helpless. After two minutes we saw his empty boat. Just his actions told us he was in big trouble.”
In class V water, Jamie explains, with numerous rapids downstream, swimming is a last resort.
Finally Dr. Heard’s limp body appeared, floating face down, arms above his head. The turbulent creek carried him downstream for about “a football field” before a towline could be attached to his life jacket. His face was blue, he wasn’t breathing, he had no pulse. He’d been underwater for five to eight minutes. Still half in the water, Ian Norn delivered chest compressions, while Dr. Lothar Schaefer, an anesthesiologist, administered rescue breaths. Then they noticed Dr. Heard making a feeble effort to breathe. Continuing with mouth-to-mouth, eventually Dr. Heard began, weakly, to breathe on his own.
“When I pulled him from the water, he
looked dead,” Norn recalled. “Then he started breathing—but he wasn’t
OK.”
Tended to by his friends, including Dr. Mark Gale, Dr. Heard remained
unconscious and combative. Absorbing the situation, Jamie helped build
a fire. Jean Bourdua ran to his vehicle and dialed 911 on his
cellphone. A helicopter was summoned—the canyon was too deep to carry
Dr. Heard out. Guided by the fire, the helicopter arrived two hours
later, with barely enough daylight to lift him to an ambulance that was
waiting on a logging road for the 15-minute drive to Whistler, where
Dr. Mark Mohr treated him. That night, Dr. Heard was evacuated by
helicopter to Vancouver.
“Lots of things helped save my life,” Dr.
Heard reflected.
Comatose for three more days in intensive care, he was intubated and
ventilated, suffering from immersion syndrome. He had kidney, bowel,
pancreas, muscle and central nervous system damage, and a collapsed
right lung—all of which he would eventually recover from without
intervention.
Gradually responding by squeezing people’s fingers, Jamie elicited a significant response by announcing, “Well, Dad, I’m the alpha male in the family now.”
Dr. Heard responded by challenging him to an arm wrestle, which Jamie insists he didn’t throw.
“I arm-wrestled him and I beat him. I still had a tube down my throat,” Dr. Heard said. “That’s when my wife knew I would be OK.”
After 10 days he was transferred to his home in Canmore, still breathing oxygen through nasal prongs. He’d dropped from 180 pounds to 155. As he slowly recovered his physical strength, Dr. Heard underwent neurological testing. Believing he was fine, the tests revealed he could not draw a picture of cube. He was unfit to drive.
“That was stressful, losing that privilege we all take for granted,” Dr. Heard admits.
In September he took an extensive four-hour test of his brain functions. He passed, and on Oct. 2 returned to his practice.
“My first day in the OR was one of the most happy, meaningful days of my life,” he says. “It was a very special moment. I’m as passionate about my work as I am about my paddling. Within my first case, as soon as I started operating it was like I’d been there a week.”
Ironically, it was kayaking that led Dr.
Heard to medicine. Competing on Canada’s national team from 1978 to
1983, one of his coaches, Dr. Bernie Lalonde, was a doctor of sports
medicine.
“I realized there was no money in kayaking, so I
started looking toward the future,” Dr. Heard explains. “My sports
background led me into sports medicine.”
He earned a Bachelor of Physical Education from McMaster University in Hamilton in 1982, followed by a medical degree from the University of Calgary in 1986. He served his orthopedic surgery residency in Ottawa and was chief resident of the department of orthopedics at the University of Ottawa. He then focused his attention on knees, with a fellowship in arthroscopic knee reconstruction and sports medicine at Carleton University.
At the time of his accident, Dr. Heard was orthopedic surgeon at Banff, Canmore and Golden, B.C., hospitals, team physician to the Canadian Alpine Ski Team, and consulting physician to several other mountain and sport-related organizations.
Feeling he’s functioning at “90% to 95%,” Dr. Heard is currently working three shortened days a week. And he’s discovered power-napping. “Before, I’d get home and jump on my mountain bike,” he says.
Beyond a heightened appreciation for simply being alive, he’s gained a broadened appreciation for his patients.
“Being a patient taught me to be much more caring, to treat the patient more as a person not just another knee,” Dr. Heard says. “And I never appreciated how much commitment there is on the part of the family to make those appointments. My wife, Sue, dropped everything to focus on my healing. That’s been a great learning (experience) for me.”
There’s no question he’ll return to his outdoor passions—kayaking and backcountry ski touring—which, he says, bring balance to his personal and professional life. But he insists it will be with a lower risk factor.
“I’m still going to paddle, I’m still going to ski tour,” Dr. Heard says. “By going paddling, by having my adventures, my life is better fulfilled. I think it makes me a better husband, makes me a better father and makes me better at work. But before, I probably accepted a touch too much risk. I feel comfortable eliminating the class V.”
Next summer the family plans to paddle the class III Middle Fork of Idaho’s Salmon River for six days.
“We’re still healing, getting over the accident,” Dr. Heard says.
“The idea is to heal the family in a
whitewater environment.”
Sue and daughter Meagan, 16, will travel in a raft, with Dr. Heard and
Jamie in kayaks.
“I feel so lucky; I could have easily died. I was more than just a whisper away,” Dr. Heard said. “But I’m not searching for too many ‘whys’. This was an accident. It just was.”
Lynn Martel is a freelance writer from Canmore, Alta.
kelsey thompson
It's weird that they call it a three meter waterfall. I've done the creek and have heard lots about this incident from other paddlers in Canmore and area. The drop is more like a 3-4 foot non-vertical drop and apparently what happened to him was a "freak accident". Anyway 3 feet or three meters it's still a pretty traumatic experience.
Kelsey
From: Dusan Soudek <sou...@ns.sympatico.ca>
To: new wwns <paddleno...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: follow-up article on recent near-drowning incident on Callaghan Creek (BC) -- from The Medical Post
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2006 18:30:33 -0400
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