Extreme Altitude Medicine
By Susan Purvis www.susanpurvis.com
“Any sickness at altitude is altitude sickness until proven otherwise.”
-Thomas E. Dietz
I finally made it to our snow covered tea house high in the Mount Everest region despite a 20 hour flight across the ocean, a baggage delay in Kathmandu, a terrifying commuter flight to the Lukla airstrip, and a four day trek to 13,000 feet. But I made it and it only took 7 days.
It’s winter in the Himalayas and I am glad to be here.
I am here to teach my 3rd annual Extreme Altitude Medical Training (EaMT) course.
Twenty four of the brightest Sherpa Guides have congregated in PaNuru Sherpa’s lodge in Phortse, Nepal, a small subsistence farming village of 40 stone and mud homes and its 100 residents, to learn about wilderness medicine. They are all here because they want to learn how altitude affects the human body. They have seen it, felt it, and suffered from it. Some have even carried the sick and dead off the mountain.
My goal is to teach these yak herders, subsistence potato farmers and tea house operators and now trekking and climbing guides how to prevent, recognize and treat Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS). AMS kills, it’s preventable, and that is why the EaMT program exists.
The minute anyone steps foot off the airplane in Luka, Nepal, the drop off point for thousands of visitors to the Mt. Everest region, one is thrust into a potentially life threatening medical situation. AMS could be avoided if the local Sherpa people knew what to look for.
It is a monumental task to travel half way around the world and teach a high altitude course to a group of Sherpa’s whose native language is Sherpa and national language-- Nepali. Over the past five years, after teaching a similar course for the African guides on Mt. Kilimanjaro and here, I have designed an altitude medicine course to meet and accommodate the Sherpa guides special language needs. I use the WMA approach to teaching. If a student learns how and why the body works then they can recognize when something goes wrong with it.
I took a risk with the EaMT project. Funding and monetary support is sparse (much thanks to Dr. Johnson and WMA for their support of the program!). As an educator, I can barely afford to pay my own bills, yet I still find a way to support this project. I was the only instructor for three of the five courses. This year a powerhouse team of female educators; Everest ER Doc Luanne Freer, instructor extraordinaire Kristen Peterson, and Bozeman Nurse, Birgen Knoff all came to the rescue. We all teamed up with the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation Khumbu Ice Climbing School (ALCF) to teach this course. The ALCF sent us their top 24 students who excelled in leadership, climbing and English skills from last year’s ice climbing school.
Five woman Sherpa’s participate in this course, up three from last year. This course provides another career opportunity for the Sherpa women. Perhaps they will use this knowledge to evaluate clients in their lodges or give them confidence to work at a local clinic. We asked two of the woman to come back next year and fill the role of EaMT assistant instructors.
I hear from the Sherpa grapevine that our teaching methods over the past three years are paying off. My former Sherpa students are recognizing and treating AMS in both their clients and porters. They are saving lives.
I am passionate about this EaMT course and I hope the program will continue. If you would like to support the project, log onto www.susanpurvis.com.
Oh, and by the way…..by the time I leave class, wait out travel delays in Lukla, and drop dead on my own pillow in Montana, another 7 days has gone by. But it was worth it.
