Day 6:
As soon as I saw him, I knew.
“Can you come in here please?? He’s making this really weird, scary noise that I’ve never heard before.”
Before I heard it, I already knew.
In critical care, it’s called, “the death rattle“.
The all-too-familiar sound pierced my heart. So many times before I had heard this sound and not let it permeate me. This time though- this time I felt it.
Deep. In my very being.
This man was going to die.
I woke up that morning after a hellish night. The enemy left me absolutely and utterly defeated. I woke up anticipating to have to announce to my teammates that I could no longer go on and to go ahead without me- preparing myself to spend 3-4 freezing nights alone here in this small, abandoned tea lodge at 4400 meters.
Today was another acclimation day- a shorter hike than our first, but grueling nonetheless, or so I heard, I stayed back to rest. I layed in my bed most of the morning- just staring at the wall. Trying to use my human comprehension to decipher just exactly what God’s plan was in having me come on this trip, just to fail halfway through. Perhaps I had made the wrong choice coming in the first place. Maybe my expectations for this adventure with God were too high. I was lost. Lost in a sea of confusion and condemnation, drifting farther and farther away from God.
I was still lost in my head when my teammates came back and we all sat down together in the lodge for lunch that afternoon. I was trying to gather my words to tell them I would not be able to continue with them, when one of the trekkers we had met on the trail came into the small, sunlit dining room and interrupted us.
“Hey Rachel, you’re a nurse right?”
Oh gosh, I’ve heard this question before. Usually it is preceded by a ‘could you look at this weird spot on my (insert awkward body part here)?’ or ‘So I’ve had this weird rash…’. Reluctantly I said,
“Yes..?”
“Well there’s this guy downstairs in the next lodge who isn’t doing so well. Thought you might be able to take a look at him? He’s not really responsive.”
Any form of the word “unresponsive” is an immediate red flag to a critical care nurse. I left my half drank cup of hot chocolate and moved quickly towards the door, leaving my jacket. As I followed him down the stairs, out the front door and towards the next lodge, I immediately started praying.
“Lord, I can’t do this by myself.”
February is the very beginning of the season here on Everest. Even though it is “technically” in season, the villages are still ghost towns, the weather is cold and unpredictable, and any form of medical treatment is non existent.
Working in the ICU in Oregon, I have never dealt with altitude sickness or been exposed to it. The little research I did about it before I left, I knew that, at its very worst and end stages, it evolved into cerebral and/or pulmonary edema. Both of which I am very familiar with in the ICU.
I walked towards his open room door. There were several people gathered outside. He was laying flat on his bed, in his many layers.
I smiled and met his gaze through his half opened eye lids. I immediately snapped back into my nurse mode that had been sitting dusty on the shelf for the past 7 months. I sat next to him and grabbed his hands. They were cold. As I asked him,
“How are you feeling?”
I reached for his pulse. It was fast and irregular. He responded with a few simple words in English but it was clear that he didn’t speak much English. A woman we had been trekking with actually spoke English and knew Chinese as well, which just so happened to be what this man spoke.
Through translation and looking through this man’s bag and wallet, we discovered that he was Chinese, travelling all by himself, without a guide, porter, or insurance. He had arrived in Lukla a day after us and had arrived here in Dingboche three days ago. A trek of 1760 meters or almost 6,000 vertical feet that had taken us five days- he had done in two.
The only medicinal treatment for altitude sickness is diamox, which I was actually able to get him to swallow before he became extremely lethargic. But the only real treatment for mountain sickness is to descend in altitude and fast.
I walked outside his room to talk with the people who had gathered, including the owner of the lodge. They were discussing what to do. Most were under the impression that because he didn’t have any insurance or money, that there was nothing that could be done. That’s when the woman came out of the room and said,
“Can you come in here please?? He’s making this really weird, scary noise that I’ve never heard before.”
My heart began to beat faster as I quickly went back into the room and got the man into a sitting position, maintaining his airway.
He had developed flash pulmonary edema.
He was drowning in his own lungs, gurgling with every breath.
My take-charge critical care nurse hat had to be put on and I knew it. I walked out of the room back to the group arguing outside. I interrupted them and as politely as I could, let them know that this man was going to die, and soon, if he didn’t get down in elevation. He didn’t have time to be carried down the mountain- that would take hours to get to the next village and even then, there were still no medical facilities. He needed a helicopter evac and now.
They argued about money. Money. I frustratingly said, “I don’t care about the money, you can put it on my card, just call for the dang helicopter, this man is going to die”, before I went back into the room to monitor the man’s airway.
The man we had been trekking with, who had actually come to get me in the first place, had coincidently graduated with a degree in law. He was able to draft a contract stating that the Chinese man was responsible for all the payments regarding his treatment- including emergency helicopter evacuation.
Thankfully, while I was in the room, another man fought very passionately to get the owner of the lodge to finally call for the helicopter. They were coming from Lukla and would be here in 30 minutes. There was a slight glimmer of hope.
Okay, I thought, thirty minutes, that might be just enough time.
My heart plummeted when five minutes later the lodge owner came in and said there were no helicopters in Lukla and they had to come from Kathmandu- a two hour flight.
There was only one option.
Prayer.
A sense of urgency rushed over me as I showed the woman who had been translating for us, how to keep the Chinese man in an upright position in order to maintain his airway. I hurried out the door and started towards our lodge. I was on a mission.
“The wonder and mystery of prayer is God waits until someone asks.”
Billy Graham
“Prayer moves the arm of God.”
Dorris Johnson
It was time to gather the troops.
As my team all filed into the tiny room, I was anxious about what God might do. Anxious, nervous, excited, scared- all of the emotions I felt simultaneously. But as we layed our hands on his limp body and began to pray, a feeling of peace superseded them all.
I didn’t know this until later that evening when our team was debriefing all the events of that day, that while we were praying, my teammate noticed something. She said that while we were praying (about 10-15 minutes), during intense parts of the prayer, the man, who at this point was almost completely unconscious and only barely flickered his eyes when someone spoke to him in his native Chinese tongue, would open his eyes wide and just stare at the person who was praying for several seconds before his eyes would roll back and he would go unconscious again. She said she watched this happen multiple times as we prayed in English.
“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them… When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken… Utterly amazed, they asked, ‘How is it that each of us hears them in our native language? We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!'”
Acts 2:4-11
The next two hours were the longest of my life.
Between counting the minutes, giving oxygen via a spray can looking device that someone had found buried away in a room, trying to keep this man conscious and breathing, constantly having two fingers on his pulse, waiting. Just waiting for it to stop.
As a nurse in general you must be a multitasker, but as a critical care nurse, those skills must be even more fine tuned. My nurse brain was on overload. There was nothing left that I could do to help this man. All I could do was keep him upright to keep him from drowning in his own lungs. I thought of the horror it would be if his heart stopped and I had to perform CPR on this man. Here. In the mountains. With a crowd of onlookers. Knowing that CPR would have no effect if I couldn’t get an airway- which was impossible to do since his lungs were filled with fluid.
After what felt like an eternity, finally the lodge owner walked in and announced that the helicopter would be here within minutes. Before I even knew what was happening, an old, tiny Sherpa had picked up the man and put him on his back and began carrying him to the “landing pad” (a tiny pile of flat rocks on the edge of a cliff).
My anxiety went in to overdrive when I saw that the man was now lying flat and face first on the man’s back. I knew that we had to get this man to the helicopter, but I also knew that now all of the fluid in his lungs was going to be obstructing his airway.
We reached a large boulder next to the landing area and got the man into a seated position again, with the help of several people, as he was now dead weight. I quickly pushed away the blanket that was covering his face and reached for his pulse again. Still fast and irregular. But I could no longer hear his gurgling. This was because he was barely breathing. Yellow fluid from his lungs was leaking from his mouth.
My mind went back to the thought of having to perform CPR on this man. He was barely holding on. I couldn’t believe he had made it this far alive. As I gave the rest of the oxygen that was left in the can, my eyes were glued to his chest- watching it sporadically and faintly rise and fall, waiting for it to stop at any second.
I have never been happier to hear the sound of helicopter propellers in my entire life.
As we watched it fly towards us, my heart could start beating again. It stopped for a brief second as it flew next to us and then continued to fly on past us.
We looked on in disbelief.
Someone quietly uttered the words we were all thinking, “Is that one not for us?…”
In that instant, all my hope vanished. This man’s fate was sealed.
You know that saying that goes something like, “You wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate joy if you didn’t know sorrow”?
I felt the utter despair of sorrow and the overwhelming joy of hope all in the same 10 second time period, as the helicopter began to make a wide right turn, back towards us.
Instant.
Tears.
That’s never happened to me before. I didn’t know where they had come from or how they had gotten there that fast, but I couldn’t stop them.
This man was going to live.
The helicopter was on the ground no longer than two minutes. We picked him up and carried him the last twenty feet to the helicopter. I tried not to trip over the huge, sharp rocks as I cradled his heavy, dead weight leg.
The wind from the mountains combined with the helicopter were overpowering as we approached the door. As soon as it opened, my heart instantly sank.
There was nothing inside.
Nothing but a bench seat.
No medical equipment of any kind.
No IV bags. No AED. No heart monitor.
I doubt there was even a first aid kit on this helicopter.
In under 60 seconds he was up into the helicopter and the doors were closed. The winds became even more fierce and we were forced to turn our heads from the force of it. I turned just in time to see the helicopter disappear from sight as it dove down in elevation as quickly as it could, vanishing behind the cliff it had just precariously landed on.
I hadn’t even taken two steps before the enemy was attacking me again.
You could have done more. He won’t make it another two hours without medical treatment, it was all in vain. Maybe if you had prayed a prayer with more faith, God would have healed him.
I shared my disappointment about the lack of medical equipment on the chopper with the man we had been trekking with. And as matter-of-factly as any medical professional should have known, he said, “Well, now he’s going down in elevation and that’s the most important thing.”
I locked myself in my tiny, cold lodge room.
As I sat there on my single bed, staring at the wall, trying to process all that had just taken place, God stepped in, and I didn’t even have to ask Him to.
A beautiful assurance came over me as God let me know that the man was going to be okay.
He then allowed me to see the situation through His eyes, instead of through the lens of the lies of the enemy.
He saved this man’s life. And just because it wasn’t through an instantaneous miracle, didn’t make it any less miraculous. All the pieces fell into perfect allignment as every single person on that mountain that day played a role. An English speaking Chinese translator, a lawyer, an ICU nurse, and a team of prayer warriors, all together in an almost abandoned village on the doorstep of Mount Everest- God chose to use us to save this man’s life.
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.
Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
~ Teresa of Ávila
What a grand and marvelous mystery that the God of the universe not only allows, but deeply desires to include us in all His ways- in all His adventures.
His love truly is extravagant.
It knows no borders, no limits, no boundaries.
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”
1 John 3:1
“… To grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”
Ephesians 3:18
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
-Paul
I got an even bigger picture of this grace-filled, awe-inspiring, just down right outrageous love of the heavenly Father two days later when I finally stepped foot on-
Everest.
Base.
Camp.
Team Everest from Left to Right: Raju (our guide), T White, Allison Sandrah, Yours Truly, William James, Amber (Bam), Racer Rach, and Omit (our awesome porter/guide)
We also found out on our way down the mountain, that the Chinese man had made it to Kathmandu hospital alive and is expected to make a full recovery.
God.
Is.
Good.
