Story Time!
This happened 3 seasons ago at Park City when I was a Freshman in HS and was just starting to get into park skiing. It was early February and I had really gotten into park skiing by then and was just starting to hit the bigger jumps. My friend convinced me to speed check with him and hit the 35 foot kicker in Jonesy's. I remember the very first time I hit the jump vividly. The feeling of flying through the air was incredible. I was hooked from then on...
I kept hitting the kicker and on about my 7th time, I was going to try a 360 on it. I had never done any tricks except for the super steezy gaper safety grab so I was pretty nervous. But I turned to my buddies and was like, "Hey guys check this out!" I took off down the inrun and as I was about to leave the lip, I carved to start the spin. Little did I know, this took away my speed and as I came around for the 3, I got the OH SHIT feeling.
I cased the jump and when I mean cased I mean l wasn't even close to making it... The landing caused both of my skis to come off and I sort of bounced off of the icy snow back into the air and off of the landing. As I came down the second time I landed on top of my ski which had caught on the ski brake and was stuck sideways in the snow. I slid down it and then rolled down the rest of the landing.
As I got up to get my gear off of the landing, I put my weight on my right leg and as soon as I did I felt the worst jolt of pain I had ever experienced in my life. This pain was accompanied with a spurt of blood that shot out of my pants and all over the snow and down my leg. As I collapsed, I saw a pool of blood forming around my thigh and it was getting bigger fast. I yelled for help and a tall black guy wearing a yellow jacket with dreds came over and yelled to his friends to go get help.
I remember sliding down the icy landing off to the side so I wouldn't get landed on by others. As I crawled over, a thick dark streak of blood followed. When I got to the side of the jump, this stranger looked in the cut in my pants and I heard him whisper, "Oh my fuck, that is..." He almost threw up and couldn't finish his sentence. By this time my heart was pounding and things were starting to get fuzzy. I was going into shock and I honestly thought I was going to die. I remember stuffing my beanie into my pants and just laying there trying to stay awake.
It took 15 minutes for the sled to arrive. During that time the pain had subsided and I couldn't feel my body. I just lay there talking to my friends and strangers who were trying to keep me awake. Finally, they loaded me onto the sled and took me to the medical buildling below 3 kings.
Once inside, I was loaded into a wheelchair and I sat in the waiting room for 25 minutes. (Keep in mind that nobody had taken my pants off yet and had seen the severity of the wound.) Finally they rolled me into a room expecting to throw a couple stitches on me and send me home. My pants were removed and they dripped blood as the nurse threw them on the floor. I turned my head and saw that my thigh had been sliced open and it looked like a roast sliced cleanly with a knife. Blood was still pouring out of the wound and the nurses put a gauze football as they called it on me and within 5 minutes I was on an ambulance heading for the hospital.
I'll make the hospital stay short. I had to wait 8 hours until they could perform surgery because I ate a cookie and they can't administer anastesia on a full stomach... They called in a plastic surgeon to stitch me up and it took a total of 453 stitches and 3 hours of surgery. I had completely severed both of my hamstring muscles, and my abductor muscle and I almost completely severed 2 other muscles. The doctors told me that I was less than a quarter of inch away from severing my femoral artery. IF that would of been nicked at all, I would of died before the sled even got to me.
I was released the next day and had to be on crutches for 5 months and I had to learn how to walk again during the summer during my daily physical therapy sessions. It's completely healed now and there is no loss of strength in my leg. The only thing I lost was the feeling in half of my thigh because of all of the severed nerves.
PICTURES!!!! (sorry for crappy quality, it is a picture of my old cell phone which sucked!)
That white thing in the center of the cut is my femur. It is what stopped the cut and in the x-rays there was a diagonal notch where the edge of the ski hit.
