Overcoming Trauma: A Rock Climber's Journey to Resilience and Growth

Let’s talk trauma, both physical and mental (check out my friend Katie’s recent blog about her trauma here: Kate's Blog Post). I know, a nice, happy subject that isn’t at all painful, controversial, or potentially dangerous to one’s health to bring up (sarcasm is hard to perform on paper). Attempts to open with a joke aside, trauma is a part of life and should be talked about even though it can cause pain and has the potential to be dangerous to one’s current health, in this case, mine. The higher the risk, the sweeter the reward… as the bumper sticker says. As odd as this might sound, maybe if we consider trauma a learning opportunity it will help me to heal myself to this moment instead of where I was before the trauma struck. To put it another way, let’s see if I can become a better person today by sharing about my trauma experience from the past.

For those of you who might be new to my blog, in June of 2003, I fell off a cliff while rock-climbing. Whether it was luck or good karma from my clean living (another attempt at a lame joke), I only fell about 15 feet that fateful night. On paper, that might not sound too dramatic, but hours after I fell, the hospital inserted 10 screws and a plate into my left arm to put it back together along with 6 staples in my head to close the cut I had received. Maybe this is just my humility talking, but a double-digit worth of hardware to put Humpty Dumpty back together again sounds kind of dramatic.

Now, if you are like most people I’ve encountered since my fall, you are wondering what happened to cause me to fall. Did I make a mistake? Was there an equipment failure? Did something happen to the cliff I was climbing? Take a moment here to refill your coffee, then get comfortable because here comes the answer as to what happened that fateful night in June 2003.

I was leading a route I had previously climbed but on what is called top rope. If you are not familiar with rock climbing, lead climbing is a technique in rock climbing where the lead climber clips their rope into quickdraws which are first attached to permanent bolts that are drilled into the rock as the climber ascends the climbing route while their second (or belayer) remains at the base of the route belaying the rope to protect the lead climber in the event that they fall. The fun and risk of leading is if a climber, in this case me, slips off the rock they fall double the distance between the last two bolts whereas if they fall on top rope, they basically stop at the point they come off the rock. In my case, I was about ready to attach my quickdraw to the second bolt on the route I was on when I fell off the rock. Unfortunately for me, I did not attach my quickdraw to the first bolt correctly so instead of catching me, it came out which is how I hit the ground instead of the equipment stopping me before that happened. Big, big oopsie!

Even today, I can still vividly remember the thoughts in my head as I fell. The first, which happened a second or two after I came off the rock, was that something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t a great climber which is a polite way of stating I’d fallen many times before while climbing. Something just didn’t feel like the previous falls; my experience was trying to figure out what was going on even though the experience was happening faster than my mental capabilities at that moment. The next thought came when I hit the ground. For a moment while I was on the ground, I’m not sure how long it lasted, everything was calm and for a lack of a better word, normal. I was shocked and surprised that I was still alive and what seemed like, unhurt. This changed faster than a New York minute. The next thing I knew, I was rolling down the side of the hill we were on. I’m pretty sure on the second roll I heard the bone in my left arm break more than on the third roll I knew I was in trouble physically and mentally. A second later my belayer had grabbed the rope which stopped me. Once I stopped, I felt the magnitude of what had just happened had hit me both physically and mentally in the gut which felt like getting the wind knocked out of me. To date, that moment has truly been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. My mental capabilities had finally caught up to life after falling off a cliff while rock climbing, not good.

Once I had stopped and regained my a modicum of control over my life, I started to do a damage assessment on myself. Basically, I decided I needed to wiggle every finger and toe to determine if I had any spinal damage. I started by glancing at my left arm, which was severely swollen and rapidly changing color, and decided I couldn’t look at it again without mental trouble. So, I started to consciously wiggle every finger on my right arm. The odd part, meaning I don’t have any good explanation for it, was that I would disappear mentally for a moment or two after moving a finger or toe. By disappear, I mean I was no longer on the side of the cliff broken. I was not in pain nor conscious of my life at that moment. A doctor might suggest I was on the brink of passing out, but it didn’t feel like that; this was something bigger. Regardless, when I reappeared, I would move on to the next finger or toe in line that needed to be checked. Maybe someone smarter than me can leave a comment as to what was probably happening to me.

I’ve said this many times before. The only way I know how to describe what I felt that night is to refer you to the scene in Return of the Jedi where R2D2 gets shot and all his gadgets popped out. I was essentially experiencing a level of confusion previously thought not possible so my mind, spirit, consciousness was trying to throw any and all personality traits (R2D2 gadgets) at the situation in the hopes one would help. I was making jokes, I was scared, I was confused, I was crying, I was laughing, I was trying to calculate the force I hit the ground with, I was trying to decide what I need to do next; I was giving myself a self-examine to check for possible spine damage; I think you get the idea. As you have probably guessed, nothing was working well enough to provide me with any sense of regaining control or understanding of what was happening. Life was still happening however I wasn’t living it; I was just existing in time that night.

“Just existing in time.” After many years of reflection, I now believe that by not fighting this trauma state I prevented it from becoming worse. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a humble brag regarding some skill I possess that others don’t. This is me accidentally stumbling into a bag of money, no skill involved. See during a trauma I think it's human instinct to try and turn the trauma around during it instead of riding it out to completion. We think that by fighting it we can lessen its effects. No one wants to complete a trauma; our instinct is to fight against it to change or end it. We forget that there is no training for trauma only instinct which gives the advantage to the trauma I believe. By allowing the event or experience to play out to completion we can get a better assessment of the damage, the new normal, which will ultimately help us to move forward. Fighting against the trauma only continues the experience, potentially causing more damage.

Another realization of my trauma is the difference in the definitions of time between the patient and healthcare. Let’s start with healthcare.

Healthcare likes to pretend it can travel back into time using medicine. My doctors and physical therapists wanted to return me to my health as it was the day before my fall in the hopes of returning my quality of life back to “normal” tomorrow. Maybe a better analogy would be restarting a computer or software back to the last time it worked correctly. Now don’t get me wrong, this is by no way a criticism of the treatment I received, it is simply an observation. A plan of treatment was devised which would return my health to a clear and hopefully obtainable goal; this is how healthcare is supposed to work. However, this path doesn’t consider the actual trauma I experienced. It's only focused on the symptoms of the trauma, not the change the trauma brings with it.

Many patients and corresponding literature like to talk about how trauma steals our story. Which on the surface makes sense. Trauma often forces us to make decisions about our lives that we don’t want to. It can also quickly shut the doors of life on us too. But the part we don’t like to admit is that so does life on any random Tuesday for example. Trauma doesn’t steal our story if we are alive our story continues. Trauma changes our story by quickly adding more chapters without our consent.

Life, by definition, does the exact same thing. Maybe it’s finding out someone can’t afford medical school even though becoming a doctor has been their lifelong dream. Maybe it’s finding out you can’t climb Mt. Everest because you can’t walk and talk at the same time without spraining an ankle (that’s me). Maybe it’s finding that one special person you end up spending the rest of your life with but they live in a different zip code. There is an old joke about the only constants in life are death and taxes, I would argue the only constants in life are death and change. My trauma is nothing more than the story of my life changing because of well you know, life.

My life is about living today and preparing for tomorrow based on this new normal from the trauma. I can’t return to the day before my fall because I can’t travel back in time, neither can my chronic pain or illnesses. Continuing to move forward is my story, just like it is for those without a trauma in their life. If this is the case, why does healthcare set a goal of returning to the day before my trauma? The easy answer is it's easier to measure with history than it is if we are talking about the unknown, unknown in patient speak meaning the future. No one can predict the future, but we should be helping patients to work towards it anyway. After all, this better reflects how life and time work plus I must believe it’s a fairer expectation of what healthcare should do for us.

Despite the pain, despite the fear, despite the trauma of the night of my rock-climbing accident, I have only regretted my choice to go climbing that night a handful of times at most. Even more surprising to many would be the fact of couple of those times were basically academic exercises wondering where my life would be today if I hadn’t gone climbing that night. I’m a potato kid (born and raised in Idaho) who went to college at an institution whose biggest claim to fame is its blue smurf turf the football team plays on. Yet I was invited to speak at a medical conference at Stanford University. Yet, I went back to school and earned a second degree in accounting despite having 4 surgeries while in school. Yet, I bought my first house. Yet, yet, yet… My point, yes trauma causes drama. However, it is a workable problem for which can make our stories intriguing and exciting which gives us a better shot at getting the girl like in the movies (in my case the girl being Stanford University, a house, a second degree, and most importantly, this opportunity to share my story with you as a patient advocate).