Losing a leg hasn’t stopped her triathlon training
14. March 2008 by Tridad.
By JOE MILLER McClatchy-Tribune
RALEIGH, N.C. — Like a lot of triathletes, Deanna Babcock is starting to train for the 2008 season. She’s swimming a
couple of days a week at the YMCA, and she’s gradually upping the miles on the bike. Soon, she plans to start running. Her goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C., which will involve swimming 1.2 miles, biking 56 miles and running 13.1 miles.
First, though, she needs to break in a new piece of equipment.
Her left leg.
“There’s a lot to learn,” says Babcock, a 23-year-old grad student at N.C. State whose plan to do Ironman Florida this past November got derailed the afternoon of July 20 when a routine workout cost her her left leg and nearly her life. “That’s OK. There’s a lot of people out there willing to help you. It’s not like Sarah Reinertsen is out to keep her trade secrets.”
Sarah Reinertsen, for those of you outside the triathlon community, is the reason you shouldn’t scoff at Babcock’s plan to do a half Ironman. In 2005, Reinertsen became the first female with an above-the-knee amputation to finish the Hawaii Ironman, generally regarded as the toughest Ironman going.
Run an Ironman on just one leg? In Babcock’s opinion, it’s just a matter of figuring out the new hardware. The rest — the open water swims at Jordan Lake, the hours of pedaling the back roads of North Carolina’s Wake and Chatham counties, the long training runs through town — that’s a matter of doing what every other triathlete has to do: getting yourself physically and mentally prepped for the challenge ahead.
“It’s pretty sweet to put your body to the limits of what it can do,” Babcock says. “I kinda inadvertently did that this summer.”
When everything changed
By “this summer,” Babcock means July 20.
Her recollection of the day is fuzzy. She remembers rising early and heading to her 10-foot by 30-foot research plot along Davis Drive. For her graduate thesis in soil sciences, she’s testing various materials that may help minimize erosion. She spent the day working in the sun — the temperature peaked that day at 88 degrees — before knocking off about 3 to get in a swim at N.C. State.
The swim was important. Nine months earlier, Babcock, who had run cross-country as an undergrad at Albion College in Michigan, was watching the Ironman world championships in Kona, Hawaii. That looks like fun, she thought. She’d done a couple of sprint triathlons over the summer and performed well, winning her age category in both; an Ironman would just be more — a lot more — of the same. She joined the N.C. State Triathlon Club, picked an Ironman a year out — Ironman Florida, on Nov. 4, 2007 — and started training. That training had included the Myrtle Beach Marathon in February (time: 4 hours, 1 minute), the collegiate nationals triathlon in mid-April and the White Lake Triathlon, an Olympic distance race (just under a mile in the water, 24.8 miles on the bike, a 6.2-mile run) in May. Her next big test was the Duke Half Marathon in September. She needed to swim.
Babcock has to rely on the recollections of others for an account of what happened after she rode her bike to the pool. At some point in her swim her heart stopped. N.C. State lifeguards pulled her from the water and began CPR. Wake County EMS arrived and had to use a defibrillator three times to revive her. No one can say for sure how long her heart was stopped. One estimate puts it as long as seven minutes. “It certainly was at least a few minutes,” says Dr. Marc Silver, her cardiologist.
Certainly, he adds, long enough to do some serious damage.
Bad to worse quickly
When she arrived at WakeMed, it was feared that Babcock had an enlarged heart, a thickening of the heart muscle. Silver says the condition is more common than generally thought; it only becomes apparent when the heart undergoes an intense workout. When that happens, the heart practically explodes and the situation is almost always fatal. About 125 athletes younger than 35 die each year from an enlarged heart; among the more prominent recently was 28-year-old marathoner Ryan Shay, who died five miles into an Olympics qualifying event last fall in New York.
An echocardiogram ruled out an enlarged heart in Babcock’s case. A diagnosis would have to wait until other life-threatening problems could be addressed.
When the heart stops pumping and cells stop getting blood, bad things happen quickly. The immediate concern is brain damage. Brain cells start dying after three to four minutes without oxygen. After the brain, the heart and kidneys start to go. With Babcock’s heart down for perhaps as long as seven minutes, there was plenty of cause for concern.
That concern immediately focused on her kidneys. The blood-deprived muscle tissue in her legs began leaking an enzyme damaging to the kidneys. Both failed. She went on dialysis.
Then there were her legs. The muscles in her left leg were especially bad, the lack of coursing blood causing the veins to collapse. Doctors cut the muscle fascia — the thin layer of tissue encasing all muscle — to re-stimulate circulation. Her right leg stabilized; her left worsened. The next day it was amputated about mid-thigh.
She developed pneumonia and was in an induced coma — to keep her still for healing purposes — for four weeks.
During that time, though, surprisingly positive signs began to emerge. Her kidneys regained full function, there was no evidence of brain damage, and her right leg began to improve.
“She is incredibly lucky to be alive,” Silver says. “She’s a miracle child.”
An aggressive treatment
Babcock is quick to second that “incredibly lucky to be alive” observation. Asked Monday how long it had been since the incident, she replied, “My six-month anniversary of not dying was two days ago. We went out and celebrated with refined sugar.”
She’s quick to second the “miracle” thing as well. The miracle is the technology that saved her life and promises to get it close to where it was before July 20.
Miracle One: The reason Babcock survived as long as she did without a heartbeat is a procedure called induced hypothermia, being used with increased aggressiveness by WakeMed. Induced hypothermia involves dropping body temperature through ice packs and an injection of an icy saline solution via a catheter into balloons placed under the skin.
“The target temperature is 91.4 degrees,” says Eric Reyer, a nurse with WakeMed who’s involved in the hospital’s induced hypothermia program. Cells in a chilled body require significantly less oxygen to survive and thus prevent damage from spreading. The procedure has been in use for several years, but gained widespread attention last fall when Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett suffered a severe blow to his spinal column, the type of injury that often results in paralysis. Doctors credit induced hypothermia with the fact that three months later he exhibits few signs of his injury.
Miracle Two: Silver still isn’t sure what caused Babcock’s heart to stop, but the current thinking is that it was caused by an enlarged right ventricle, something a person is born with. If the ventricle has improved on her next checkup, then Silver will scratch that diagnosis — a genetic condition can’t “improve” — and look elsewhere. Regardless, Babcock will keep the implantable cardiac defibrillator inserted under her left collarbone. It’s a tiny, battery-operated device that, should Babcock’s heart stop again, will deliver an electric jolt to jump-start it.
Miracles One and Two were lifesaving. Miracle Three has more to do with saving Babcock’s spirit.
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Deanna Babcock’s goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C. — we’ll be cheering her on.
if you’d like to help her in her cause, then check out Dollars for Deanna
hear Deanna’s interview with Beginner Triathlete
GPS-enabled helmet calls for help post-accident
11. February 2008 by Tridad.
from Engadget Mobile….
We’ve seen some pretty well equipped helmets in our day, but UMass Amherst student Brycen Spencer seems a touch more interested in safety advancements than integrated speakers. His concoction, dubbed the Wireless Impact Guardian (WIG), looks like your average helmet at first glance, but a quick look inside reveals electronics designed to sense an impact, judge if you’re conscious and dial for help if necessary. Essentially, an alarm is triggered upon impact, and if you’re not cohesive enough to disable it after 60 seconds, it automatically rings up 911 and beams out your location via GPS so that medical personnel can get moving. Currently, the device is quite a ways from going commercial, but considering that Mr. Spencer has already invested in a provisional patent, we’d say it’s well on its way.