“A closed head injury is a very difficult medical problem. I lost a son to a closed head injury. He was under excellent intensive care for many days following the accident and still died.”
I am so sorry for your loss. My wife is a Respritory Therapist at a level 4 trauma center here in California and sees too many of these “minor” head-trauma cases that end up with someone in a coma or dying. You are so right, these are very tricky cases. Everything can go right and people still don’t make it. I think this actress was one of those cases, but her problem was compounded by her initial refusal to see a doctor (that’s her right) and Quebec’s lack of a modern medical system, which, by absolute necessity, MUST include an air-evacuation component.
When my wife used to unload these helicopters (she hated running out under the spinning rotors), she got patients from Nevada and far Northern California, as well as local car accidents and shootings. People still died.
Helicopters increase the ODDS of survival, but don’t guarentee an outcome as many on this thread seem to think.
I am very fortunate to live in a big city in with one of the very best hospitals in the world – Johns Hopkins and one of the very best trauma centers in the country – University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center.
MD Shock Trauma for years set the standard for emergency trauma care that all centers around the country if not around the world, aspired to and modeled them selves after.
With a fleet of state of the art medivac helicopters staffed with highly trained para-medics, nurses and doctors who can be dispatched within minutes any where across the state, certainly many lives have been saved. But even with all the state of the art transportation and medical care, not every one lives. Sometimes the trauma is just too severe or sometimes treatment comes just a few minutes too late, and some times it’s because the patient delays treatment thinking it isn’t any big deal.
I’ve been skiing in the Poconos, in Vermont and New Hampshire. I can tell you that these resort areas are very good at treating the normal skiing injuries; torn tendons, broken bones, contusions, concussions, but they are not equipped to deal with major traumas as they are very rare. If I had such an injury as Natasha Richardson while skiing in Sugar Bush VT for example, I would have to be transported to the nearest hospital equipped to deal with that and that would probably be in Boston – hours away and I don’t think that there was a medivac unit close by either.
I had a friend who suffered a severe knee injury while skiing in VT. While the local hospital was able to diagnose the problem and immobilize and stabilize her injury, they were not equipped to perform surgery on her. She had to fly back home to Baltimore for that.
And if you are skiing in some areas like in Utah or Idaho or Montana, how close do you think you are to a major trauma center equipped to perform emergency brain surgery?
Bottom line is that this was a very freak and unfortunate accident. Miss Richardson could not have died if she had received immediate state of the art trauma care but it had nothing to do with her being in Canada at the time as this unfortunate outcome could have occurred any where including the US.