What's My Name?

What seemed like a moment ago, I was arcing turns in the hunt for windblown stashes of chalky goodness and now I’m trying to comprehend what has just happened.

- Annabel Anderson

A couple of minutes passes by.

“What’s my name?” asks the Patroller in a Canadian accent.

I’m strapped in a blood wagon surrounded by ski patrol. I try to move and am given stern instructions not to.

“Treble Cone Ski Patrol do you copy?”

“Otago Rescue we copy over”. The conversation continues to crackle over the radio.

“Treble Cone Ski Patrol, we are enroute and our ETA is approximately 40minutes over”.

“Otago Rescue; we copy that; patient is stable; landing zone is cleared; over”.

I slowly start to attempt to piece together the situation at hand. A medic arrives from the ski area base and tries to insert a line to intravenously administer pain relief of the opioid variety with little success.

On the fifth mis-attempt to secure the line I suggest that he stops attacking the normally bulbous veins of my lower arms and waits for back up. Yes, when you well and truly toast yourself, the morphine comes to you.

I’ve been in a few ‘situations’ over the years and while I can feel something is drastically wrong with my groin and pelvic region, I’ve endured worse pain and have learned the art of ‘breathing’ through it until back up arrives.

My mind continues to spin as to how I ended up strapped in a blood wagon awaiting an airlift to hospital. At this point all I can remember is making a sweeping left hand turn to make my way back up to the fence line to skip over a ridge...and I got bluffed.

My memory blanks with the first impact resuming approximately 8-10minutes and 400 vertical metres later below where it started and I’m surrounded by ski patrol at the bottom Treble Cone's Motatapu Chutes.

I hear the whirring echo of the chopper in the distance, it’s a common sound in these parts as the throng of the rotor blades reverberate around the hills.