Massive rescue operation saves Colorado skiers life

It’s shortly after 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 22, and lives are about to change with a phone call.

There’s the young wife and mother stirring a pot of soup at home in Colorado, the surgeon walking the halls of Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’Alene, parents in Florida, family, friends, an ambulance driver, a pilot, nurses, and the Schweitzer Mountain ski patrol about to kneel in the snow beside Brian Connelly, 39, dying on the side of the mountain.

It’s just before 2:45 p.m. March 22, and four skiercross racers are soaring above the back side of a rolling jump on the way to the finish line.

Brian is one of them.

Three of the four racers jostling for position in the extreme skiing sport land on the back side of the roller while Brian keeps rising through the fog and the rain, then loses control and dives head first into the rising slope of the next roller, shattering his helmet into pieces.

Face down in the snow, his right eye dilates. A vein in his skull is severed and bleeding, squeezing his brain.

Dr. Richard McLandress, a medical specialist on ski patrol, sees this.

He kneels in the snow with the patrol team and spots the eye like a ball of coal through the fog and the rain and the sleet. When the Bonner General Hospital ambulance arrives, he looks at the emergency staff circled in the snow around Brian and they have a decision to make.

Brian is dying. But MedStar, the life flight helicopter, won’t be able to land in the weather.They strap Brian in the ambulance and the wagon inches through the fog and the wind and the rain down the mountain.

At Bonner General, paramedics medically paralyze Brian’s body.

McLandress makes the call.

Brian’s wife, Sarah, is stirring a pot of soup in Colorado and the sun is shining in Holmes Beach, Fla.

In Coeur d’Alene, Dr. Jeffrey Larson’s phone rings.

“If he stays up here he will die,” McLandress tells him.

Lives change.But it is not a graduation or rite of passage; rather a flash like a blinder when your soul freezes and teeters in a hollow, empty cell reserved for when children are buried and spouses die; an abyss where your own soul stops and the emptiness is measured in the smallest breaks of silence like the drip of the kitchen faucet, the crash of a soup ladle or the vacuumed hum of airline engines crossing the country.

For Larson, a 46-year-old neurological surgeon, it sounds like the still of the emergency room.

It is just after 3 p.m. on March 22 and the operating room at Kootenai Medical Center is prepped; it is waiting, and for two hours there is the sound of operating staff breathing while they wait for Brian’s body.

For the ambulance driver, 55 miles north, emptiness looks like the blanket of slush and fog outside his window descending the mountain with the father of a 1-year-old girl dying in the back.

There is the single glow of a headlight catching the bend of the road covered in fog and the race against time’s crawl continuing from the hospital with the paralyzed body strapped in the back to the Sandpoint Airport, where the weather breaks.

For the MedStar pilot it is the roar of the blades leaving Spokane and the perched isolation knowing paramedics in Bonner and Kootenai counties are praying to hear the thunder of your engine as you sweep south around the cloud of weather and slice north up the Idaho Panhandle.

But it is nearing 4 p.m., and it is just beginning.

Even with the helicopter landing at Kootenai Medical Center — a CAT scan revealing no further injury — there are more phone calls to make.

It is after 4 p.m. and Brian’s body waiting in the operating room while Sarah, a pot of soup in her Colorado kitchen, is cupping her hands in prayer.

All she has heard since the crash is Brian has had an accident, and to wait.

She waits.

“Please,” she says. “Please, oh please.”

Larson’s test confirms Brian has suffered a subdural hematoma — that survival is slim — but there is still that call he must make.

“I can’t make you any promises,” Larson tells Sarah on the phone before entering the operating room.

What he doesn’t say is he fears Brian is dead. He doesn’t tell the 33-year-old wife this is one of the worst injuries he’s seen in 12 years.

“Oh God,” Sarah says.

Nor does the surgeon tell her that his own young son is racing that day, at nearby Lookout Pass. He ignores that, pushes it away.

“I have to worry about saving his life,” he tells her. “We’ll deal with everything else later.”

“I’ll see you at 6 a.m.,” he says.

It’s just after 6 p.m. when Larson removes a saucer-sized piece of Brian’s skull.

Swelling drains.

Sarah calls Marge and Jim Plath, Brian’s mother and stepfather, in Florida.

They are flying to Spokane, 2,800 miles away.

For five days Brian will lay unconscious.

But there are breaks in the tunnel, small slivers of light.

The United Airlines pilot learns Jim and Marge are going to miss their connecting flight in Denver.

“My heart goes out to you and your family,” reads a note the pilot sends back to them in coach.

He tells him that their connection flight isn’t going anywhere; his plane is now the one headed for Spokane.

“Angels,” Marge says. “Angels everywhere.”

In Coeur d’Alene, waiting rooms are packed with ski boots, racers and patrol.

“The whole team is praying,”  McLandress says. “It’s too emotional not to be invested.”

Nurses baby-sit Brian’s 1-year-old daughter, Rowan.

They let the Plath and Connelly family sleep over. They cook for them.

At night and in the still morning hours, Sarah reads to Brian, lying lifeless.

She reads to him articles from outdoor magazines about skiing, about hiking. The family plays him music. They want to remind him.

Brian, they say. You are Brian Connelly.

But at night and in the still hours of the afternoon there are moments when everyone retreats, when pieces of the soul die and anger wants to launch toward God.

Jim puts his big hand on Brian’s knee.

“Man down,” he thinks. “Man down.”

For five days it is like this.

It’s just after 6 a.m. on March 27 and everyone will know in one hour.

Sarah, Jim, Marge and Brian’s stepfamily stand around Brian’s bed in the soft orange sunrise when Larson quits the paralysis medicine and everyone waits in silence for the drug to wear off.

Then Brian’s body will either take over, or it won’t.

“Does he have any nicknames?” Larson asks.

“Just Brian,” Sarah says, hands cupped.

Then the surgeon pinches Brian’s skin as family members put their hands over their mouths to smother the gasps.

Larson traps and twists the skier’s skin again and again and calls his name, saying, “Brian, open your eyes, Brian. Open your eyes for me.”

Five days of hope and anger and prayer are screaming through Brian’s nerves to his brain and the family cries and chokes as Brian opens his eyes and Larson says, “Now wiggle your thumb for me, Brian. Brian, give me the thumbs up.”

He calls Brian’s name over and over and in each corner of the room there is the echo of an operating room’s stillness, the hum of an airline engine or the flash of an ambulance’s headlight. There’s the roar of a helicopter, the crash of a soup ladle and the single vibration of a telephone’s ring until the thumb, the one little right thumb with a lifetime of pain and prayer and hope, wiggles and twitches and then there it is, pointing skyward, saying: “I can hear you. I understand.”

Larson releases the skin and heads for the door, down the hall, where he puts his long, sturdy hands over his face to cry.

There is another medically induced coma, and two attempts to reattach Brian’s skull. There is a fleet of KMC therapists and nurses hovering for a month at his bedside, working with him, and Sarah still reads.

His parents tell him stories.

And above Brian’s hospital bed, where he is sitting up with his daughter in his lap just after 5 p.m. on Monday, April 20, there is a dry erase board with notes telling him he is in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and he is going home tomorrow.

He feels guilty, he says, for putting his family through this.

“There’s a lot of crying,” he says.

But his big eyes are alert, and his cheeks wrinkle when he smiles.

“I’ve skied much bigger mountains,” he says, and God, how he smiles.

“That’s Brian,” Sarah says. “That’s our Brian.”

The right side of his skull is a horseshoe of staples, sealing four metal plates and 16 screws.

And Brian cries.

Jim’s hand touches his knee.

“I don’t know how or why,” Brian says.

But in one hour Larson is going to swing by his room to take him out for a beer.

“One final road test,” the surgeon will call it.

Brian will make a full recovery.

He will continue rehab, and will work again as a tile setter. He will raise his daughter and love his wife.

It is 8 p.m. when Brian walks into Capone’s Pub and Grill in Coeur d’Alene with a single cane where McLandress and Larson and the table of nurses, therapists and family are beaming, toasting their glasses and filling the air with a cadence of chatter which swallows the smallest breaks of silence.

“Angels,” Marge says. “Here on Earth.”

“I just did what they told me,” Brian says.

And it’s there, just after 8 p.m., when the last of the spring light falls through the bar room window and catches the flash of gold in Brian’s glass as the skier, the husband, the father, holds it high and lets it sparkle above the table light like a headlight piercing a blanket of fog, like a vision that snaps into focus after the last tear has dried.