The Aftermath

Well the climb of Chair Pk was a great and fun climb that started the push into the next level. A price was paid for doing that. In my trip report(TR) I stated that my hand were swollen on route. Well that did not go away in fact it became worse. It looked like a surgical glove blown up, or I had the hands of a 400 pound person. The climb took place on Friday. Saturday the swelling peaked with redness in the palm region. The tops of each finger was numb and blisters developed and eventually popped on both middle fingers. The general bruising I had predicted did not appear but in the right light my hands are a slight shade of green as my mom pointed out. The swelling started to go down and was complete by Tuesday. Well all but both my middle fingers. A redness had developed in my right middle finger and was creeping up into my palm on top of my hand. A bit worried I finally paged the doc. His offices were closed due to snow and ice covering Portland. He urged me to head straight to the ER for treatment. As it turns out I was getting a secondary infection from the blisters that had burst. My thinking the whole time was that I had a bad case of Frostnip. The ER doc agreed. After some research on the internet it turns out that I had second degree Frostbite. I did not get the intense pain indicated from here http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000057.htm . This web site give the degrees http://www.outdoorplaces.com/Features/Mountain/frostbite/ . The doc put me on some potent antibiotics and cut into the knuckle to drain as much fluid as possible.

















My hand are looking much better and can't wait till I have full rage of motion in my middle digits. Needless to say that it had been a learning curve for this trip. Next time I will rotate gloves every pitch and make sure that my gloves have more padding for busting through the ice crust. My ice tools have a good curve to the handle that is suppose to help but given the conditions I was unable to take advantage of that curve. With any luck I will be back in a couple of weeks for some backcountry skiing.