Man suffers serious chest injury 8 hours into N.W.T. wilderness canoe trip

An accident and subsequentmedical emergency ended a father and son's canoe trip near Yellowknife last weekend almost as soon as itbegan.

At first, Dan Adam's biggest concern was the ring finger on his right hand it was bleeding a lot.

On the first day ofa canoe trip with his son, hours after being dropped off by float plane in the N.W.T. wilderness, he had fallenhard on his chest while guiding thecanoe along the shoreofan intense set of rapids.

"The rope got tangled around myfinger and it ended up tightening and ripping off the tip of the finger," he said.

Adam's son Mike wrapped his father's finger as best he could, then used their SPOT device tocall for help. A plane picked them up about an hour and a half later.

It turns out Adam's finger was the least of his concerns.

Onedays after being discharged from Stanton Territorial Hospital's emergency room for his injured finger, he was finding he could say only three or four words before needing to stop and take a breath.

"It was around about 11 p.m. when we finally decided, there's got to be something more to this now," he said.

He was right.

New X-rays showed three cracked ribs, which had scraped part of Adam's right lung, causing internal bleeding.

This can be perilous if the bleeding continues and there's no room for the lung to expand, making it nearly impossible tobreathe. Yellowknifedoctors inserted atube in Adam's chest and between last Sunday and Tuesday,drainedmore than a litre of blood fromhis chest cavity.

Well prepared

Adam, who lives in London, Ont., and his son Mike, who lives in Yellowknife, had been preparing for their canoe trip for months; a float plane dropped them off at Fishing Lake, about 80 kilometresnorth of Yellowknife, and they had mapped a four- to five-day route that would bring them out atthe Yellowknife River, where it meets Great Slave Lake.

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They packed a first aid kit, which supplied the gauze to wrap Adam's finger;PFDs,which helped lessen the blow when Adamfell;a SPOT device, which provided the co-ordinates for Air Tindito pick them up during the emergency;as well asplenty of food and a bear barrel.

But Adam andMikearen't sure how they could have prepared for an accident like this.

"I'm cautious enough in most situations," said Adam. "I'm not a risk taker per se; I don't consider this a risk taking thing I had trust in our abilities in what we could do."

Rescues 'pretty regular'

Al Martin, president of Air Tindi, says the companyhandlessearch-and-rescue-typepickups out in the bush "on a pretty regular basis."

He says even if the people don't need medical attention at the time but do need to get back to town, Air Tindi will try to fly out and pick the people up.

"We know where any of our aircrafts are at any one time," Martin said. "So in that case, we didn't have a medic on that aircraftobviously, but we were able to get there and recover [them] very quickly."

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Martin is also co-president of ACCESSAeromedicalCritical Care Emergency Services Specialists a partnership betweenAirTindiandAdvanced Medical Solutionsthatprovides the pilots and paramedics for emergencymedevacs in the N.W.T.

How it works

If someone in the N.W.T. is in the bush and hasa medical emergency, they should getin touch with RCMP or any other emergency official in Yellowknife. That officialwill then call Med-Response, where a nurse atStanton Territorial Hospital triages medical support and air ambulance services and allocates necessary resources, like a plane and paramedics.

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Martin says even if someone called Air Tindidirectly, its dispatchers would forward the call.

"To be honest, in an emergency we would take a call in any direction," Martin said. "We would then contact Med-Response immediately... and it's up to Med-Response to assign the priorities."

If I did it again...

Adam said there are a few things he and his son could have done differently on their trip to potentially mitigate Adam's fall.

He says they would have:

• Taken gear out of the canoe before guiding it down rapids
• Not forgotten sunglasses and hat
• Worngloves, which could have protected Adam's finger
• Bought a different SPOT device with two-way communication

"The SPOT unit was good, it did its job," Adam said. "But we didn't know if[our message] reached anybody or not.

"It would have been nice to have some sort of two-way communication. I wouldn't say I necessarily need a satellite phone, but another way of communicating probably would have been a nice way of having more...security for our sake."