That Time I Climbed Right Out of My Body and Up the Face of Half Dome

Commiserating with one-armed writers in our writing group...

Yesterday evening, members of our weekly critique group popped into our regularly-scheduled Zoom room and I was horrified to see one of our group members was sporting a wicked cut over one eye (5 stitches) and had an arm in a sling. Even though D. was heading into surgery first thing this morning, this did not deter her from making an appearance at our critique group! Talk about dedication!

D. is not the only one who has been a bit banged up in the group. K. took a tumble and shattered her shoulder a couple of months ago and that has cramped her writing style (literally - she says her handwriting has got a lot smaller after the accident, though she is pleased she is once again able to grip a pen and let words spill onto the page.)

These determined one-winged writers reminded me of my own experience a few years back with an arm that got in the way of a nasty fall. In solidarity, I’m reposting this story that first appeared on Medium, but I’ve added some drawings (because, hey, apparently that’s what I do now :)

Writer in the Emergency Room:
What happens when your emerg doc slips you a little too much Ketamine and not enough Propofol

At the end of a long evening of bouldering fun at the local climbing gym with a couple of the women from our friendly climbing group, I decided to go for one, last big move. I’d been struggling to make that last move on the bouldering wall on and off all evening and was getting tired. It was late, a Friday night (that’s what a certain breed of woman of a certain age do for fun on Friday nights — hang out at the climbing gym), and I was determined to beat the puzzle.

Me bouldering not long before the accident. [Photo: Barbara Dickson]

The last move was too big a reach for a short person like me. I considered the merits of doing a dyno. A dyno is a big, dynamic ‘hell — I’m flinging myself into the air and come hell or high water I’m going to grab that last hold’ kind of move and really was about the only way I was going to be successful.

So, I went for it, my pals looking on.

The launch was good — I soared across the gap right up under an archway about a dozen feet (4 meters) above the padded gym floor. Traveling at some velocity (I pushed off the stubby holds under my feet pretty hard) the extended fingers of my left hand were on the rounded hold. I had made it!

Except, I hit the hold with such force that I slipped right off again. There was no time to orient my body mid-air, cat-like. My left hand, attached to a fully extended arm, hit the mat first, my full body weight crashing down on top of it.

Two, quick pops, one after the other had us all wide-eyed and horrified. Someone said, “Did you hear —”

And that’s when the shock wave tsunami of the pain wall swallowed me whole.

Both bones in my forearm shot past their homes in the elbow joint in a spectacular double-dislocation. The nerve attaching my upper arm to everything below the elbow stretched nearly to its snapping point. The stabilizing ligament inside the joint tore away and disintegrated. A flake of bone sheared off.

I knew nothing of that in the moment, of course. All I was aware of was an out-of-this-world kind of pain that stopped me from breathing. I tried to sit up, but the arm was like a wild thing, demanding to be immobilized. The body knows it must protect itself, and everything I did from that point until I was delivered to the local rural hospital emergency room (by car — one of my climbing partners is an ER nurse) came from my animal brain.

My entire body went into a vicious kind of spasm, locking itself around my wounded limb, with full-body contractions so fierce they left me shaking, vibrating as the muscles became so fatigued they could no longer maintain their rigid and contorted shapes.

Image by Darko Stojanovic from Pixabay

Friday night at the small hospital was quiet, thank goodness, so I was fast-tracked in to see a doctor who sent me for an x-ray to see exactly what I had done to my arm.

That’s when we found out how serious the injury was. That’s when he decided to administer a powerful cocktail of Propofol and Ketamine and try to reorganize my discombobulated arm components.

Image by Willfried Wende from Pixabay

Here’s how the drug cocktail is supposed to work. Propofol is a powerful sedative — used to put people under prior to surgery. I heard the ER doc asking for the dose to be drawn up.

“That’s how they killed Michael Jackson,” I said through my pain haze.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “We’re not going to kill you.”

The second drug, Ketamine, is a strong pain-killer that has the added benefit of not typically lowering one’s blood pressure or suppressing the heart rate. It’s a useful tool in the trauma room toolbox.

The combination of the two drugs should, in theory, be pretty good when a doctor needs to, say, manipulate some stray bones back into position inside the exploded drawing version of an elbow joint.

Alas, if given a little too much Ketamine, the patient enters an entirely different realm because Ketamine is also known to be a dissociative anesthetic. I learned firsthand what that means when the nurse pushed the plunger and the potent drugs hit my bloodstream.

I Haven’t Always Been a Climber

When I was a kid, I liked to scramble around on rocks. Growing up in Banff in the Bow Valley in the Rocky Mountains meant there was never a shortage of rocks, boulders, and mountains to try to summit. But none of that involved ropes or harnesses (though, no doubt, some of my misadventures back in the day would have benefited from some basic safety equipment). We were kids who lived in the mountains, so we hung out in forests inhabited by grizzly bears, forded streams and rivers so cold they could shock your heart into stopping, and, yes we scrambled around climbing up and down things we probably didn’t have any right to be climbing. But, I wouldn’t say that made me a climber.

A number of years later, in my 20s, I did actually try to be a climber. I thought climbing would be a terrific activity to do with my sports-obsessed daughter (then about 6). Bad luck for me, she soon discovered a pretty healthy fear of heights. I played around a little at the local climbing gym for a year or two back in my twenties, but didn’t really find myself with the time to indulge in what I found to be a super-fun, really challenging, body-mind-spirit kind of activity until I had passed the half-century mark and decided to reinvent myself.

Which is how I discovered the cool group of women at the local climbing gym and really got excited about the sport.

No Half Measures for Me

When I go all in, I go all in. It wasn’t long before I was searching for opportunities to climb outdoors — real rock, big mountains. And, what the heck, I fell in love with a climber. Called Fabio.

By the time I had my accident, we had already spent many long, happy hours poring over guidebooks and making plans for future climbing trips — and one of the top destinations was Yosemite, home of Half Dome. Yep, if you saw the crazy Alex Honnold movie, Free Solo you’ll know the type of terrain we were looking at. Mind you, we’d be tackling an easier route and not forgetting our ropes, but the point is, I had big plans.

Not me. But, where I dreamed of someday sleeping… [Image credit]

I’d started visualizing the long climb, imagined sleeping suspended from the side of that massive wall on a portaledge, one of those suspended tent thingies that crazy people sleep in on their way to the top of a mountainside too long to summit in a single day. I was training hard at the gym, knowing I’d need to be in good shape to make it to the top. And, yes, I might have spent a few too many hours watching climbing videos on YouTube.

I was obsessed with the idea of climbing Half Dome. And, I was in no way ready to be dead.

So it All Kind of Makes Sense — in a Psychadelic Drug Kind of Way

When the nurse in the emergency room pushed the plunger and injected that cocktail of chemicals into my iv, I lost all sense of time. I did not, however, totally lose consciousness. I was vaguely aware of the doctor and nurses moving around the room. Someone was in the vicinity of my elbow. Somewhere down a very long, distant hallway I heard someone screaming.

I later learned that someone was me and that everyone in the emergency waiting room got very quiet and likely had second thoughts about the wisdom of proceeding into the treatment area behind the closed double doors.

But I was oblivious to all that. Because I was busy exiting my body — by climbing. I was moving like Honnold, smooth, powerful, and sinewy — fearless and light. I climbed right up out of my body toward a brilliant light — heavenly and intense and I headed straight for it by way of a sheer wall of granite that had inserted itself into the local hospital.

Instead of floating around above the treatment table watching what the doctor in action, I started climbing Half Dome.

I was amazing. The climbing was spectacular — I pulled my entire body weight upwards using only my fingertips, but there was no resistance. It was as though I was floating upwards, climbing out of my body which had become as massive as the mountain herself. I easily reached every hold, no matter how tiny. There was no stopping me!

I knew I was dead — that was kind of too bad and I was a little irritated the doctor had lied — but I was achieving my dream, a flawless climb up that glorious sheet of rock.

Somewhere waaaaay down in the valley, that person was screaming again and I had the vague thought that if I let go I would, indeed, fall to my death. But in that moment, I was invincible — powerful, strong, confident and fearless. And dead.

Then, of course, I woke up and puked. I was trussed up in a sling and helped into a wheelchair. My memories of getting home and being delivered to my family are fuzzy. Apparently, I threw up again, but I don’t remember any of that.

What I do remember thinking was that I completely understood why people might choose to experiment with mind-altering drugs. When I’m ancient and can’t move any more, I might just volunteer for some hallucinogenic drug trials to distract myself from the realities of decrepitude and imminent death.

Meanwhile, though, I find my thrills through climbing.

Turns out that second arm is not absolutely necessary. [Image: Barbara Dickson]

Nope, I didn’t give up after that wee setback. I was back in the gym and on the wall the following Monday, my arm strapped to my body, learning to improve my footwork.

No, I haven’t made it to Yosemite yet, though we have climbed all sorts of things since the accident. Then again, I’m not dead yet, either — so, who knows? Rest assured that when it really is me snoozing on the portaledge you’ll read about it here!