HOW TO SAVE A LIFE
Published in the February 1, 2025 edition.
A healthy mother of two, a woman named Guzel was enjoying a mid-December, Mammoth Mountain ski vacation with her family to celebrate her anniversary with her husband. But in one sudden and terrifying moment, everything changed.
Guzel collapsed in line for Chair 17, Schoolyard Express, on the morning of December 16. In a matter of minutes, Mammoth Mountain Ski Patrol rushed to assess the situation, determined she was in cardiac arrest, and immediately began medical care that would save her life.
Just over a month later, those professionals met up to talk about what happened, and filled Guzel in on the hour she spent “hanging out with dead people.” The presentation, held the night of January 22 at Burgers Restaurant, was the first in this year’s Eastside Trauma Series, a Mammoth Hospital-sponsored sequence of events for local medical professionals.
Guzel, who joined the meeting via Zoom, was the first to share her side of the story, wiping tears from her eyes.
That fateful Monday morning, she’d run back to the condo, just a five minute walk from the lifts, to grab her daughter an extra layer, she said. She returned to see her kids “having a blast” playing with snowballs. She buckled their boots and asked them to head to the line.
And then everything went dark. “As I was told, I made it to the line,” she said.
She woke up in Mammoth Hospital with faint memories of what had happened; a bumpy ride on the ambulance, seeing her family, the “angelic” faces of the nurses.
Neil Satterfield, Mammoth Mountain Ski Patroller, explained to the crowd what happened between those gaps in her memory.
It started as a normal day on the patrol, Satterfield said. He was just “carrying a bunch of bamboo around,” when he was dispatched to the scene around 10:00 a.m. Another ski patroller, Connor Pearson, went to get emergency medical supplies from Canyon Lodge Patrol room, and other patrollers started making their way to the area on skis.
He arrived to see approximately 150 people in line at the bottom of the lift, filling up the mazes on both sides. And in the midst of it, a person in a green jacket – who Satterfield would discover was actually ski patroller Kyle Williams – performing CPR.
She still had no pulse, so the team of patrollers administered the first defibrillator shock to Guzel’s heart at 10:02 a.m., and continued to perform CPR. The first shock did not restore a normal heart rhythm.
All the while, patrol staff tried to wrangle the crowd, remove nearby ski equipment, and, most importantly, talk to Guzel’s husband and children, who were all nearby. Jenny Weaver, Health and Safety at Mammoth Mountain Manager, and Lily Emerson, Mammoth Mountain Ski Patroller, were the primary contacts for the family.
“I would much rather be doing CPR than what they did that day, which is communicating with the family, giving them a sense of calm connection, explaining what’s going on and letting them know that they’re safe,” said Dan Flynn, a paramedic and Mammoth Mountain Ski Patrol Manager.
The patrollers shocked Guzel’s heart three more times before she was packaged for transport. After the second shock, her erratic heart rhythm temporarily stopped, but she quickly reverted back. The third shock showed “torsades de pointes,” a type of abnormal heart rhythm, followed by a return to the initial irregular rhythms with some periods of normal heart activity, suggesting some signs of recovery.
By the fourth shock, she remained in cardiac arrest but her erratic heart rhythms stopped for a full minute. Occasionally she showed signs of life; at one point even reaching out to grab a patroller’s hand.
Medics arrived at the mountain and Satterfield made the decision to put Guzel into a toboggan to transfer her to the ER, which meant disconnecting the defibrillator and maintaining CPR, all while being tugged by a snowmobile – not an easy task.
“It’s difficult to provide high quality chest compressions in a moving ambulance,” Flynn said. “It’s therefore very difficult to provide them in a toboggan, spinning and bouncing.”
A Mammoth Mountain Ski Patroller named Nicole was selected for the job because of her small stature, Satterfield said. While doing compressions in the toboggan, she saw Guzel open her eyes and she forcibly remove her hands from her chest – an important sign of life.
The EMS team arrived and quickly prepared the ambulance, continuing CPR and providing ventilation. They shocked her heart again, and her heart showed signs of beating again effectively … but only for so long.
In the time it took to put an IV in and monitor her vitals, her heart rate began to speed up again. They delivered her sixth shock of the day, which further improved her breathing.
By 10:28 a.m., she arrived at the Mammoth Hospital Emergency Department, about a half an hour after the initial dispatch. She was talking, though she wasn’t making any sense – she kept asking the same questions over and over again.
Because of the severity of her event, Guzel needed to be life-flighted out of Mammoth, but the winds were too strong to fly directly. She ultimately had to fly out of Bishop to get to the Hospital in Loma Linda, and it was a turbulent flight.
Even in her semi-conscious state, Guzel remembered the bumpy ride, she said.
Fortunately, after lift-off, the flight crew lowered the cabin altitude to around 1000 feet, which improved her condition. She started recalling the incident and asking about her kids – breaking the cycle of questions she’d been asking repetitively before.
“It was pretty amazing to see,” Flight Nurse Crista Hollenberg said. “I was so happy to see it because I was worried that she was going to be stuck in the loop the rest of her life.”
For context, it’s rare for people in Guzel’s position to survive, let alone maintain cognitive function. Nationally, only 10.2% of patients who have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survive, and 8.1% survive with good neurologic function.
Guzel was diagnosed with Metro Annular Disjunction, an issue with the heart where part of her valve, called a leaflet, wasn’t attached properly. Because of this, the left ventricle of her heart started to get bigger than it should.
A few years earlier, Guzel had passed out while on a rowing machine, but they didn’t catch the severity of the problem, she said. Guzel has a surgery scheduled to fix the underlying problem in her heart later this year.
