Pennsylvania Game News - September 2018 - 24

Mike fractured 11 of the 13 bones
where his hand and wrist come together.
Four of the seven vertebrae in his neck
essentially disintegrated, two of them
breaking away, pieces shooting forward to
his windpipe. And he sustained compression fractures to three vertebrae between
his shoulder blades, which jammed
together like stacked-up bottle caps hit
with a hammer.
His hand dangling from his arm like
it was held there by a rag, Mike - amazingly - got to his feet and made it home.
Collapsing in the yard, he was discovered
first by his red doberman Ninja, then by
his oldest daughter Ashley, who was 6 at
the time.
A medic unit rushed him from Holtwood to Lancaster General Hospital,
where he remembers being wheeled into
the emergency room and taken for a CAT
scan, then - eight days later - waking
from a coma and learning he'd undergone
14 hours of major surgery a couple days
earlier.
It took nine hours just to clean out all
the fragments, any one of which could
have caused future problems if left behind.
And doctors needed to cut two slivers of
bone from Mike's hip and wire them on
either side of the damaged vertebrae in
his neck.
Mike's recovery would include spending his first three months at home in a
23-pound vest that isolated his head and
neck with a metallic halo that was screwed
directly into his skull and was held in
place by four rods extending upward
from the vest. Even though it required
twisting at the waist to turn and face the
person next to him, Mike said it beat the
other option - spending 18 months in a
body cast.
Even today, with two pins in his left
hand and wrist, and a neck and back full
24

of arthritis that make things like overhead
work difficult, Mike said - every day - he
considers himself lucky to have lived.
And there are even some benefits to the
lingering effects he still feels, he joked.
"I can predict the weather pretty good,"
he said.

FALLS RISE

Since there's no requirement for
Pennsylvania hunters to report falls from
tree stands, and even if there were, some
falls inevitably would go unreported, it's
impossible to know how often falls occur.
But by delving into records available
on the Pennsylvania Trauma Systems
Foundation injury database, Dr. Joseph
Smith and his colleagues have compiled
what's believed to be the only report on
tree-stand falls endured by Pennsylvania
hunters.
It's the most-extensive research out
there, using the best data available.
But it's far from complete.
For all the falls that have been documented, and for all that's been learned
of the reasons that most often lead to
falls, and the role safety harnesses play
in reducing injury, there's an enormous
amount of missing information that just
can't be uncovered by searching the
database.
The accounts of most incidents are
summed up in a simple, sentence-long
narrative that might read, "Fell out of tree
stand while deer hunting." Sometimes a
few more clues appear, like a ladder rung
broke or the fall occurred while the stand
was being set up, or the hunter fell asleep.
And there are columns to collect information on whether the hunter wore a harness, or note the results of drug or alcohol
tests the hospital might have performed.
Sometimes this information is provided;

Pennsylvania Game News - September 2018

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