An expensive trip to Salt Lake City

On December 30, 2024, our local Firefighter ambulance company came to my home as I wasn’t feeling good, misdiagnosed me as having a heart attack and took me to the cardiac center of one of the main hospitals in Salt Lake, 33 miles down valley. 

Fifteen minutes into the ride, I was back to being myself and feeling good, but it was too late, the two paramedics on board and the driver were committed to take me there. 

I had just fell on my butt and hit a muscle that triggered a painful reaction from my sciatica nerve, but no one, from the medical guys in the ambulance to the specialists that told me I didn’t have a heart problem weren’t able to tell me that my sciatica nerve was the problem. 

I investigated the cause and found it myself. At the Fire Brigade’s request, I was asked for my insurance information in early January, gave it to them and my insurance paid them on February 12. Well, a few days ago, I received a bill asking me for $3,886.74! A pretty expensive trip to the hospital! 

Fortunately my insurance paid $979.65 of that and I only had to fork another $290 to satisfy our Fire Department. This said, the negotiated cost was only one quarter of what someone without insurance would have to pay. 

Once more, talk about highway robbery!

Skiing my age… finally!

If there’s something I’ve taken for granted in recent years, it’s my ability to “ski my age”, that is to make as many ski outings as I racked up years. So, it’s with some trepidation that around the middle of March time in the season when I’ve historically “skied my age”, I realized that I only had skied 48 times! 

Sure, I fell on my posterior while blowing my snow, back in December, followed by a full-blown sciatica, and this put a serious damper on my ability to ski and, even after healing completely, I never recovered my pace again. 

In spite of my advancing age and aside from being much stiffer all over, I felt good on my skis as my cognitive skills, technical ability and comfort at all speed and in all terrains had not changed a bit. At that point in time, I knew that Park City Mountain was scheduled to shut down on April 13, so I started to panic, since I only had 29 more times to go out while there were only 26 days available… 

Thank God, nearby Deer Valley Resorts decided to extend its ski season to Sunday, April 20, so that pushed Park City Mountain to reciprocate, even going one day better, as it extended its season to April 21. I was technically saved and on April 19 I hit 77 times matching my number of years.

I ended up above that, but in the process, I learned a valuable lesson to pay more attention in the upcoming years, when meeting that milestone isn’t as likely to be so easy!

A long delayed diagnostic!

Going back to my end-of-year fall on the butt and my landing urgently at the ICU, my hurting posterior still has to be addressed and repaired, which in fact is both funny and concerning because it still hurts like hell, I can still barely put on my underpants, pants, socks and shoes on my own, and no skiing to boot, excuse the play on words, because it’s been impossible for me to get into my super stiff ski-boots, even if a third party tried to help. 

That means skiing must wait, even though the Ski Patrol strike might eventually be over and the tourists are mostly all gone! So the brilliant doctors attending to me all focused on the cardiac problem I didn’t have and instead didn’t investigate my intensely hurting buttock. 

With the Holidays, it’s also been tricky to schedule any physical therapy, so I did the next best thing I could, which is to educate myself by putting on my white smock, pretending I was a young intern and going on the Web to come up with a good diagnostic. 

Clearly, I had to fall on my “piriformis muscle” and injured it badly in the process. I’m pretty sure you’d never heard of that muscle, but we all have a pair and now you do. 

That muscle is where the center of bruise is located. It got inflamed after I fell, probably grew enough in volume to apply undue pressure on the nearby sciatic nerve, leading to acute pain and irritation alongside the leg, in other words causing a form of sciatica. 

The schematic tells the story better than I could ever do, but even better than the medical folks who handled me and forgot to look at that, which is quite astounding and shows that medical acumen if it ever existed isn’t always put to good use!

My next ski boots?

My old friend Philippe Mollard, a hard core skier who is going to turn 85 this year was telling me the other day that he had to make a switch from his conventional front-entry, overlap ski boots, to something much easier to get in and out of. 

He was telling me about one of his brothers, about the same age as he, having to ask passers-by to help him pull the boot out of his foot and leg! Not the most convenient way to do that job. 

As for me, the boots I currently have are tight and comfy but very stiff, very hard to get in and when the weather is very cold, nearly impossible to get out of. My recent sciatica was also a warning shot for me. 

I think that next year, I’ll be due for a new pair and while alternative designs like Dahu and Apex might be worth looking at, the Nordica HF mid-entry that Philippe now uses could very well be the winning ticket for me!