R.I.P. Ian's 2011 Ski Season

Ian's ski season ended prematurely with a painful injury on March 4th at The Canyons. It had been a beautiful day of spring skiing- my favorite time of the year to ski. It was warm and sunny and the snow was great. I quit at 2:30 and headed back to the car to relax while Ian finished his ski day. I had barely got all my gear off when my phone rang. It was Ian telling me that he had crashed pretty bad and needed me to come meet him at the base so that I could carry his skis for him. He managed to ski down from where he crashed despite my insistence that he let ski patrol take him down on a snowmobile.

When I met him at the bottom of the Gondola he was unable to move his right arm without pain (why is it always the right arm with this guy?). We went back to Salt Lake and he headed to the Instacare. As usual the instacare doctor had no clue what was wrong but could only guess he had torn his rotator cuff or something in that vicintiy. He was given a sling and told to make an appointment with an Orthopaedic specialist. He finally got in to see someone 6 days later. She suspected a break and sent him for an MRI since the x-ray didn't show anything. The verdict finally came in: a hairline fracture at the top of the humerus where the rotator cuff attaches. It turns out that everytime he had tried to use his arm over the last week and felt pain the bone was actually seperating at the fracture, preventing healing from taking place. He is now in a sling for the next 4-8 weeks with strict instructions for very limited movement in that arm. I'm really hoping for four weeks.

Since Ian and I still have one pass each to the Canyons I guess I'll be skiing by myself one more day at my "favorite" ski resort. Maybe I'll just ski in the morning and spend the afternoon eating Bruges waffles outside Red Pine lodge.