Snowmobiles = Hospital

What was supposed to be a fun afternoon with friends riding through the snow, turned into one scarey afternoon that ended with a helicopter ride to Harborview.

Tim and I went snowmobiling with our friends Pam & John on Saturday to celebrate John's birthday the week before. We rented snowmobiles in Easton for 4 hours and headed out into the woods with very little instruction and a printed google map of the trails.

We did great for the first hour and a half, and then a major accident occured. We had been riding up and down hills and John was far ahead of the rest of us. He went up a hill (one that he thought we'd been on) and when he crested the hill, he realized it wasn't a hill, but a cliff that dropped off about about 20 feet to the frozen lake below. Miraculously he wasn't killed. His snowmobile hit the ice, cracked it, but somehow bounced up onto solid ice again. His head slammed into the handlebar area of his snowmobile when he landed. What is amazing is that he wasn't knocked unconcious. He said he knew he was going to drown & die if he stayed there so somehow he managed to get off the ice and scrambled his way back up the side of the cliff. He was about 1/2 way up by the time Tim got to him. He said John's eyes were as big as saucers and blood was running out of his nose. None of us had seen the accident happen. When I got to Tim, I saw John on his knees and seriously bleeding. Pam, his wife, was shortly behind me and started to panic when she saw all the blood. (John takes a blood thinner for a heart condition, so he was bleeding pretty badly and it wasn't going to clot.)

Me, being me, sort of took charge. I called the snowmobile rental place for help (smarty me had my cell phone along with us!). Since we couldn't tell anyone where we were, I had Tim ride John out of the woods on his snowmobile to get some help. Tim got him to a gas station and called the ambulance. Everyone thought John had a broken nose and they told us to drive him to the hospital in North Bend, they didn't need to take him by ambulance. We were at the tiny North Bend hospital for about 3 hours and when the cat-scan finally came back, they found he was bleeding in his brain. They ended up airlifting him to Harborview hospital that night. He spent the night in the ER and then neuro-ICU. It was very frightening for all of us.

Thankfully, things turned very positive with the test results yesterday and he actually got to go home last night.

I will never go snowmobiling again and I've already warned my kids that they don't even need to ask if they can ever go, because the answer is a very loud NO!!