Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance Read Online Free Page A

necessary. Conscious now, though still only dimly aware of his surroundings, Pasang began protesting when his arms were tied to the stretcher. It was a good sign—although the words, I was told, were a Tibetan curse.
    Every time I returned to Everest, I recalled the power of that event. The research with which I was involved expanded to include global positioning satellite beacons as well as lasers, and took five seasons to complete. With every new expedition, I became more familiar with Everest but never lost my respect for it. Though scientific instruments were placed on the summit, none of us ever felt as if the mountain had been conquered, or that it could be conquered. There were too many reminders of how dangerous a place it is, and how frail in comparison are those who dare to climb it.
    In 1995, as I was ascending a steep, overhanging pitch, a Sherpa team member slipped on the slick ice directly above. I watched in horror as he fell past me, plummeting 3,000 feet—more than half a mile—to his death. The following year I was again trying for the summit when a vicious two-day storm took the lives of eight of my climbing friends. I was the only doctor on the mountain and did what I could to help the survivors, but my team was powerless to save those who were lost and freezing in the snow. They were as much beyond help as if they had been lost in space—an analogy that stimulated NASA to try to apply some of their space-age technology to the problem of saving people lost in the wilderness.
    In the year following that storm, I got a call from a NASA Commercial Space Center that was funding a program to field-test medical monitoring equipment under the most extreme conditions possible. If their equipment could be made to work on Everest, it would work anywhere on earth—or beyond. They had been looking around for an experienced doctor to serve as their “chief high-altitude physician,” and my name kept coming up. Here again was an offer I could not refuse. Climbing Mount Everest is the ultimate test for a mountain climber, and bringing the world’s most sophisticated medical care to the world’s most remote environment would be the ultimate test for an extreme medicine doctor. I accepted the challenge for myself and for the friends I’ve lost in the mountains.
    I returned to Everest, not despite the tragedy of 1996 and the others I’ve experienced, but because of them. I worked with scientists and engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, and the Defense Department to develop computer models and treatment protocols that we tested on Mount Everest. The same wireless body sensors NASA is developing for astronauts on a space station or on Mars were adapted to be worn by mountain climbers, or any other wilderness travelers. Sensors continuously transmitted heart rate, respiration, body temperature, and other vital signs, as well as exact location, to us at base camp. We knew at all times whether and where someone needed rescue.
    Once a sick or injured climber was brought to our medical tent, we supplemented the data with heart sounds, breath sounds, EKGs, sonograms, microscope slides, and video images of the patient. The digitized information was sent via satellite through a live-TV hookup to Yale and Walter Reed Hospitals so medical experts there could radio back real-time treatment advice.
    We had foreign climbers come to us at base camp asking to be treated for chronic conditions, the level of care we provided on the mountain was so much higher than anything they could receive at home. Had such a telemedicine system been in place during that fateful storm in 1996, we might have been able to save some of the people high up on the mountain who are still lying there.
    I’m mindful of how far I’ve come since the days when I kept those little treatment papers in my front pocket. I’ve been to some of the most remote regions on earth, and I’ve had the rare privilege to practice