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Whistler doctor meets Everest challenges

Dr. Ola Dunin-Bell experienced hardships, heroism and ambitions at base camp
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Dr. Ola Dunin-Bell at Base Camp, with Mount Everest in the background.

By Lynn Martel

On her first night at the Everest Base Camp Medical Clinic, where she had volunteered to treat patients for the two-month spring climbing season, Dr. Ola Dunin-Bell discovered her tent sat next to a major yak route.

Very quickly she realized how challenging life at the clinic — consisting of a small two-man tent as her private sleeping quarters, a large tube-shaped tent housing the clinic and a kitchen/dining building with stacked rock walls and a blue tarp roof — would be.

Though most of April and May, Dr. Dunin-Bell, a part-time Whistler resident since the mid 1990s, who, when not enjoying the Coast Mountains, lives half the year in Oakville, Ontario, was the first Canadian physician to work at the clinic.

The experience, she said, presented an avalanche of challenges.

During their stay, Dr. Dunin-Bell and her colleague, Dr. Suzanne Boyle, an anaesthesiologist from Edinburgh, Scotland, moved their sleeping tents four times, while the kitchen walls repeatedly collapsed.

“We were right on the glacier, the mixed ice and rock flowing stream of the Khumbu Icefall,” Dr. Dunin-Bell said. “At night, we heard avalanches or rockfall every hour. I learned to sleep through it. The ground underneath really crackles and pops, everything is constantly shifting and expanding. In the daytime, if I heard the start of an avalanche, I stopped sticking my head out to look.”

The latrine consisted of blue barrels lined with plastic bags for solid waste only, since the charge for barrel removal is based on weight.

Asthmatic, Dr. Dunin-Bell returned to Canada with bronchitis and pneumonia.

“We were constantly dealing with weather and discomfort,” she said. “The month of April was, in a word, cold. We lived in down jackets practically the whole time. It was so much physically tougher than I would have thought.”

No newcomer to challenges, in 2003, after two decades as a general surgeon at Mississauga’s Credit Valley Hospital, Dr. Dunin-Bell left to teach at McMaster University and to work with Canadian Global Air Ambulance, flying international air evacuations of critically ill.

A Wilderness Medicine Society member, she knew about clinics operated by the non-profit Himalayan Rescue Association in Pheriche, which opened in 1973, and Manang, launched in 1981.

One day’s walk south of Everest Base Camp, Pheriche is the last substantial village before heading up the 11-kilometre long Khumbu Valley.

The village of Manang, situated west of Everest in the Annapurna-Dhaulagiri Region of Nepal, sits on the northern edge of the popular 300-kilometre Annapurna Circuit trek, which circles a collection of mountains anchored by Annapurna 1.

The HRA opened its third clinic, at Everest base camp, in 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest. It is intended to serve trekkers, climbers and locals. Fees collected from treating Westerners finance care for Nepali and Sherpa patients.

In 2004, Dr. Dunin-Bell volunteered at the Manang clinic for over three months, living at 3,500 metres and treating trekkers for HACE (High Altitude Cerebral Oedema), HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Oedema), Acute Mountain Sickness and numerous blisters and foot problems.

This spring, two days after arriving in Kathmandu, Dr. Dunin-Bell began the trek to Everest. The journey took 11 days, one more than usual because the British Caudwell Everest Xtreme research team had hired every yak in Pheriche to ferry their mountain of equipment, forcing the HRA clinic staff to wait to have their own gear transported to base camp. Everest Extreme was studying over 200 climbers and trekkers for physical reactions to altitude, and ultimately aimed to conduct blood oxygen measurements on Everest’s 8,848-metre summit.

With about 250 climbing permits issued for Everest’s south side (plus more on the north), base camp this spring swelled to 1,000 people, including Sherpas, cooks, support staff, climbers and trekkers. Over the following six weeks, the clinic treated more than 200 Nepali and Western patients for altitude related illnesses, including frostbite, HACE, Khumbu cough, and snow blindness.

Relying on basic equipment, the clinic was furnished with two lawn chairs with foam mattresses, and a desk built of rocks. Their camp also accommodated a Sherpa translator/helper, cooks, five climbers, a psychology research student, visiting trekkers and four BBC film crewmembers.

While the large commercial expeditions often get a bad rap, Dr. Dunin-Bell said, they were very well organized and managed their waste well.

“There’s a lot of negative things said about the big commercial teams, but one thing they have is a plan,” Dr. Dunin-Bell said. “They have a back up plan, and a back up plan for their back up plan. They know what they’re doing.”

Some smaller, poorly organized teams were another story. One team from Nepal’s lowlands trekked to Base Camp in five days. Determined to make a political statement, the poorly prepared group included a woman, Usha Bista, who made international headlines after western climbers saved her life. The day before she started climbing, Dr. Boyle treated her for dehydration, nausea and diarrhoea.

“She was too sick to climb,” Dr. Dunin-Bell said. “But she did not return for her follow up.”

A BBC member reported seeing her vomit as she left camp.

While descending from her own successful summit, Canadian Meagan McGrath discovered Bista alone and barely conscious at 8,300 metres. Bista’s oxygen had run out, so McGrath shared hers.

Veteran American Everest guide Dave Hahn, also descending from the summit, executed an 11-hour rescue with two fellow guides. The rescuers packaged Bista in a sleeping bag strapped to a sled, and lowered her down steep, difficult terrain until they reached Camp III, where one of the Everest Xtreme doctors provided advanced care, including an I.V.

The following day, several Westerners helped Bista down the mountain from Camp III to Camp II, where she remained for two nights under the care of another Everest Xtreme physician. Unable to unclip from the fixed ropes due to her frostbitten hands, and with help from her own teammates not forthcoming, Western climbers helped her down to base camp.

“I have nothing but admiration for Dave Hahn,” Dr. Dunin-Bell said. “Somebody like (Bista) puts everybody else on the mountain at risk. I really did not expect people to be so laissez faire and casual that they expected others to pick up after them. I think with so many tents, so many Westerners, it’s easy to forget the fact Everest is extremely dangerous. They think they can just snap their fingers and get rescued.”

At base camp, the doctors dressed Bista’s frostbite and administered medications. Everest Xtreme had arranged for a helicopter to evacuate one of their doctors the next morning, and offered to transport Bista as well — very tricky business.

“You need a clear, cold morning to get enough lift,” Dr, Dunin-Bell explained. “The helicopter drops down the valley before it can gain enough lift to properly fly. That can’t be taken casually. When you hit 5,400 metres, the air is so much thinner it changes everything.”

A recreational climber with experience in the Coast Mountains and the Canadian Rockies, Dr. Dunin-Bell said the array of people aiming to climb Everest amazed her, including some who had never worn crampons and couldn’t tie a basic figure eight knot.

“There’s such a variety of reasons people had,” she said. “One woman said she needed it to pump up her resume as a motivational speaker. Another had dreamed of it since he was a teenager. He was willing to do whatever it took.”

That climber reached the summit in the dark at 3 a.m.

“But for him it was wonderful,” Dr. Dunin-Bell said. “It seemed those who had climbed before had respect for the mountain itself. Those who were just checking off a tick list had not as much soul in their reason for doing it.”

Capitalizing on a nine-day window of virtually windless weather, 514 climbers had summitted Everest by May 28 during the spring 2007 climbing season.

Dr. Dunin-Bell, however, stated no such interest.

“I have no desire to ever summit Everest, particularly after seeing the masses of people going up,” she said.

“But I met the challenge of living there for two months, and the boredom that can ensue if you are not climbing. I learned about physical and physiologic responses at that altitude and enjoyed making a difference in the health of the climbers.

“I met some amazing people. And I think I have a better perspective on commercial climbing — Everest really is the ultimate. But from what I’ve seen, it takes three things to climb Everest: a body that is tolerant of altitude, sufficient motivation to put up with discomfort and trudging, and luck.”