TORONTO – Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke’s death has prompted questions about the nature of her injury as well as the safety of the sport.
“Freestyle has been built very, very safely almost from the ground up,” Canadian Freestyle Ski Association chief executive Peter Judge told TSN when details first emerged of Burke’s injury. “In almost 35 years of world cup aerial history we have had absolutely no serious injuries and yet there are other sports that are measured in deaths a year.”
Judge went on to call Burke’s experience a “freak accident.”
Neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator of Toronto Western Hospital has a problem with this characterization.
“I don’t like the word accident,” Dr. Tator told Global News. “Is it like lightning striking? No. It’s preventable. And I think we can’t brush it off by calling it an accident. It’s a preventable injury.”
Dr. Tator is the founder of Think First, a national non-profit brain and spinal cord injury prevention agency. For the last 20 years, Think First has been researching and developing programs to prevent catastrophic injuries such as Burke’s.
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“The number of mishaps that we hear about is not large, because there aren’t that many participants relatively speaking,” says Dr. Tator, referring to freestyle skiing. “But we know that deaths have occurred before in this sport.”
When it comes to Burke’s injuries, Dr. Tator was able to clarify some of the medical details. The statement issued by the Utah hospital’s Clinical Neurosciences Center read: “While early reports in the media stated that Sarah’s injury was a traumatic brain injury, it is important to note that Sarah’s condition was the result of a lack of oxygen to the brain during cardiac arrest.”
Dr. Tator suggests the direct blow to her head or neck caused injury to one of the important arteries that carries blood to the brain. This would have led to a hemorrhage from that artery, and because it’s such an important blood vessel, one can stop breathing because of that event.
“Her brain then not only suffered from the hemorrhage, but also suffered from stopping breathing,” says Dr. Tator. “And usually it’s that type of a double whammie that can make it impossible to recover.”
Of course, the medical team in Utah couldn’t be sure it would be impossible to repair the damage at first examination.
“Because she had some brain stem function initially, they deemed that it was reversible,” suggests Dr. Tator. “So they treated her aggressively, even to the point of doing the operation…But as subsequent events revealed, it was too massive an insult to the brain to be recoverable.”
Sarah Burke passed away at 9:22am January 19, 2012 at the University of Utah Hospital, and per her wishes, her organs and tissues were donated to save the lives of others.
“The likelihood is that her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys would have survived in decent condition and would be great for helping other people,” adds Dr. Tator.
“I think that generosity on the part of Sarah and her family is highly commendable…it could potentially help ten people.”
Dr. Tator also co-wrote a paper titled An International Review of Head and Spinal Cord Injuries in Alpine Skiing and Snowboarding and urges people to assess risks before getting involved in sports such as freestyle skiing.
“My view is that freestyle skiing is a high risk activity. It’s higher risk than ordinary downhill skiing,” emphasizes Dr. Tator. “Whenever there’s aerial activity, you run the risk of major brain damage, because you can fall on your head.”
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