Ruined left shoulder
May 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Mammoth 2005- Day after thanks giving- I find myself laying on the floor next to a downhill box. what happened? it all happened so fast. All I knew was one minute I was at the lip and now I find myself lying on the floor. I try to get up, but wait. I can’t move my arm. this is entirely new. A pain that I have never experienced before. It was kind of interesting, it hurt yeah, but it wasn’t the kind of pain I thought a break would be. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush or maybe I was just trying to ignore it, but I always imagined a break would hurt so much more. So here’s the lowdown on what happened. I was hauling toward this lip, don’t know why but I was. I decided to bail out at the last minute and forget the box, after all it will be there next run. But no, I decide on another last minute decision to go for it. Whats the worst that can happen right? So as I’m hauling up to this lip at a perpendicular angle, I feel that something is wrong…very wrong. I pop and begin the 270 rotation and I guess I catch my nose on the box or there was something sharp sticking out, either way something caught and ruined the rotation throwing me off balance, atleast this is what I’m told. I do remember the next part though, I saw it from a third person perspective. Kind of scary when I think about how close to getting really hurt I was. I fall forward with all of my bodyweight centered on my left side, my shoulder is aimed at the box. This is going to hurt. I fall and keep falling, everything going in slow motion of course and hear it. The loudest crack I have ever heard. I get up slowly and painfully and time instantly speeds up. The pain hit so fast and so hard I didn’t believe it was real. My friends offered to get ski patrole but I refuse, after all. What kind of snowboarder am I if I can’t get up and get down a hill. For those of you that have been to Mammoth, I was at McCoy lodge (A.K.A. mid chalet) and had to snowboard to the bottom of Main lodge. Since this was the begining of the season there were only a few select runs open and I chose to ride down the one with the most moguls and the most people. Anyways thats boring, so I finally make it to Main lodge and refuse first aid, I thought it was going to cost me money and I had no money on me. I run to the bathroom, tear off my jacket and look. I see a huge lump on my left shoulder, incredibly painful to touch and immobile. awesome. My friends decided to get ski patrole for me and in hind sight I appreciate it, but at the time I wasn’t very happy with that. Mostly because I didn’t want to be a b****. Lovely. Anyways they talk me into going into the patrole and tell me it’s free. Now I’m sold. So they bandage me up, and sling me and say “we can’t tell you what it is for sure, go to Mammoth hospital.” Ok. I go and I sit there for about 3 minutes and they try and cut my shirts off. Now I happen to actually like these shirts so I refuse and we struggle to get a broken shoulder out of 2 layers of shirts. Woo Hoo it was like a party in my arm and every nerve was invited. Shirt comes off, and I am marched into the X-ray room where the technitian cracks a joke that isn’t funny, something about how he’s seen alot of me and blah blah blah. They come back to me and tell me my clavicle is broken in half and sort of splintered but nothing crazy, sling it up, bag it, ice it and it will be good as new in as little as 6 weeks. Okay… So I stay up in Mammoth with my friends to let them have a good time. I return to LA to go to a doctor, This is december 1. I think. Anyways I go and he tells me I have a mal form and the bones wont join back together. awesome. December 5th at 7:30am is my surgery date. Once again. Awesome. So I wake up and man I feel rough, I must have asked the lady the time atleast 12 times and my favorite line of the day I guess “MORE MORPHINE THIS HURTS LIKE F***!” So heres what I won in the surgery: A brand new titanium plate, five or six screws and a scar that is atleast seven inches long and a constant dullness in my shoulder. Lesson learned right? No.
Fast forward to February 17, 2007. I am once again in Mammoth, once again hauling down unbound. And I see my favorite kink rail. Nice lip, poppy with about a 2 foot gap and a 1 or so foot gap up. My favorite is to gap the flat and land on the downhill. Anyways, hauling down and gap. Land way too fast and too hard and my board slips from under my feet. Another loud POP and shooting pain. I immedietly yell and scream, get up and run to the lift line after unstrapping. I’m thinking “god damn I broke my shoulder again.” same pain sort of. Anyways I go to the ski patrole and they say go to the hospital. I go and they say it looks like a seperation and minor clavicle fractures. Awesome. So I go back to LA to a real doctor and he says its a seperation and that I can’t ride for 3 months. Anyways now I owe like $1,100.00 and need major help! I just turned 18 and the parents aren’t helping.
A True story by Gabe Taylor
May 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A True story by Gabe Taylor
This story is not embellished. This is how it happened. If you feel weird after a crash, go get checked out. If you hit your head, go get checked out. Shit happens.
It wasn’t that bad of a crash. I did have a bad premonition about it, and I didn’t like the jump much at all. But it was one of those, worst case scenarios. I was in Big Bear for the TWS team challenge and filming with Torey Piro for the upcoming movie Voice. I was doing a front cork or something and it went wrong, I re-corked onto the landing and my arm jammed all up into my mid-section. The wind was knocked from me but I thought that was it. After hitting the jump again and then talking with some friends I decided to bounce back to Mammoth. On my way down the hill I stopped at the Ski Patrol hut and was complaining about my shoulder hurting and feeling a little off. I didn’t hit my shoulder during the crash and I tried explaining this to the patrolman but he said I was fine. (Note for file, when your shoulder hurts and you have had trauma to your mid-section, it is a sign of internal bleeding, either to your spleen or liver.) This would have been nice to have known earlier, but as it was, I got in my car and was on my way down the back of Big Bear headed to Mammoth.
After about an hour of winding down the hill I started to feel weird. Real weird. Light headed, spacey, dizzy and an all-together feeling of serious wrongness. I pulled over and got out of my car. This is when things start getting a little hazy. I remember my eyes started to flick into the back of my head and I thought I was going to pass out. My arm was wrapped around my side view mirror keeping me from falling on the ground. The furious attempts being made to flag someone down and get some help were proving futile. The lack of cell phone coverage didn’t help either. I’m not quite sure how long I was on the side of the road, dangling from my Montero. I do remember concentrating on the clouds so I wouldn’t pass out. Not passing out seemed really important to me. I also remember looking into the eyes of an older woman as she drove by with a look of disgust. I was screaming, “Help Me! Help Me!” and she just kept on driving, but I’ll never forget those eyes. Maybe she thought I was overdosing or something. The Apple Valley on the backside of Big Bear is known as one of the biggest Meth producing spots in California, so I can’t totally blame all those people who drove right on past me.
I decided to get my shit together and try to leave that place. Back behind the wheel I continued down the hill and into Apple Valley. I started feeling a bit better and thought maybe I should just head up to Mammoth. “What is the worst that could be wrong with me?” I was thinking. Without knowing I had taken a few wrong turns and was headed North instead of the Westerly direction I was supposed to be traveling. Everyone has things happen to them for a reason, those times in a life where a decision can drastically change the outcome of the rest of that life. As I sat at a red light, with no traffic anywhere, without knowing, I was smack dab in the middle of one of these life-altering moments. After what felt like five minutes but was probably one, I was about to gas it and burn the light when a red cross caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. A Hospital. I bounced back and forth but decided on getting a quick check up before getting back on the road. I parked in front of the hospital and after getting out of my car new immediately I had made the right decision. My footsteps were erratic at best and walking the 100 ft. to the entrance was proving extremely difficult.
I burst into the front entrance yelling, “I’m fucked up, I’m fucked up! I don’t know what’s wrong but I’m so FUCKED UP!” Probably not the best way to enter a hospital, especially considering the amount of Meth overdoses that place sees, but what was I going to do? The nurse looked at me with little compassion and asked what I had taken. “C’mon son, what are you on?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about and after she realized this got me into a room where my shirt was removed only to reveal a stomach resembling that of a woman with child. My whole abdomen was huge and after a quick x-ray my doctor had a choice for me.
“So, Gabriel, I have two choices for you. I can remove your severely ruptured spleen right now, or not, and you’ll probably die within the hour.”
I shit you not this is what the guy said to me! It was so fucked up. He didn’t even flinch. I told him to do what he had to do and he then started explaining how difficult the surgery was going to be.
“This is a very serious operation and it doesn’t have a 100% success rate. Blah, Blah, Blah.”
I was fairly terrified, and after signing my life away, literally, I was prepped and ready for surgery. People have asked me what I was thinking about as I laid on that stretcher, waiting for the drugs to knock me out, and I can’t really explain. In hind site I was super calm, I didn’t think I was going to die but in actuality it was a possibility.
It felt like someone had ripped my stomach in half, which they had. Awakening to the most intense pain I have ever experienced was a rude awakening at it’s absolute worst. Once the morphine touched my veins I regained my breath and made friends with the itchy calmness that the drug provided in this time of utter discomfort. Two weeks were spent in that hospital and I was a mess. My stomach had 20 staples that resembled a zipper stitched up the middle. The hose extending out the end of my dick was how I would be peeing for my stay and it was very uncomfortable when the nurses would walk by and bump it. In fact, there were tubes all over the place and when I’d go for a walk around the hospital wing, I had to have two people to carry all my shit.
I was back snowboarding in two months and the whole experience really made me re-evaluate what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to snowboard. I had always liked snowboarding, but that experience made me realize how much I loved it. I was not giving snowboarding what it deserved and since then I have progressed more and loved every minute I’ve spent strapped in.
My mom got all the paperwork from the hospital to review and read. Through all the scientific operation talk the doctor wrote that the “Patient should have expired on the way to the hospital.” Reading that was insane, it put a lot of things in perspective. We all here how short life is but fuck, it really is. In the weeks after my injury two people in mammoth died from a ruptured spleen and the blood loss that is associated with it. They didn’t know what was wrong and went to sleep only to never wake up.
