I wasn’t the patient, it was my dad.

We were on a ski trip in another country and my dad was snow boarding on his own as I had split up with him earlier in the day. None of us really know what actually happened, the theory was he caught an edge dropping into a run but he was then found by ski patrol who suspected a spinal injury. They took him down off the mountain into the urgent care clinic at the bottom of the hill. Now knowing they thought he had a spinal injury, nobody ever bothered to actually x-ray or even check his back. I have no idea why. They told him “go see a chiropractor in 3 days” and sent him away. He walked back to our accommodation, by chance I’d gotten back just before he came in. He was in shock and a ton of pain, but he essentially lay down and then couldn’t get back up. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do besides turning the heating on and giving him a drink. I didn’t get the full story at the time, just gathered he had a back injury from snowboarding but I do remember him saying to me “it’ll be fine in a few days when the swelling goes down.” We later got the full story about what he’d been told by the doctor and even though I was only 15 I remember thinking ‘they knew it was his back, potentially a spinal injury, why didn’t they at least x-ray it?’ It just seemed odd to me that he’d been sent back home in his condition, especially when I found out he’d been told to see a chiropractor.

3 Days later he still couldn’t get up and swelling hadn’t gone down. He was just lucky my mum used to work in home care so knew how to help him able to help him. However, he was still in lots of pain and unable to even turn over. My mum and I made the decision to call an ambulance so that he could get checked out. Back at the same urgent care unit, there was a competent doctor who agreed that his back needed an x-ray. He had broken the L4 vertebrae, he was just lucky that it had perfectly broken in half and hadn’t become displaced. Had the wrong move been made or the fracture worse than it was it could have easily become a spinal case. He ended up in the main hospital about 2 hours out for about 5 days, was on the verge of needing surgery and faced a long recovery period.

To this day I still don’t understand why they didn’t check his back at all when they thought he had a spinal injury. But yeah “just go see a chiropractor” it’ll be fine.