Does anyone have any stories, personal or otherwise about people finishing the trail under less than desirable conditions. I know that blind person and someone on crutches has finished, so my arthritis doesn’t seem that bad. I have plenty of celebrex, so if I don’t die of a heart attack I may make it.
Buckwheat
Good news is that your arthritis may go away completely.
And after you get into trail shape, which will take a minimum of 3 weeks----then you will be very healthy and it will just get better providing you eat right and don’t try to do any big miles.
I’d suggest you get in the absolute best shape you can get into before you go hiking. Seems to me from your comments that you might not be in very good shape to even think about starting a hike-----but nonetheless, you could do it even if in poor shape if you really keep the miles down for say several weeks or more.
Exercise and weight loss has a way of making medical problems such as arthritis, diabeties, some heart problems, and other problems go away.
See your doctor. Make sure he or she says you are okay to hike, then go for it.
Good luck. See you out there.:cheers
Maintain
Hi Buckwheat … I am doing the entire trail for the first time this year, but I have a lot of experience backpacking and treating injuries as I am an Emergebcy Room Physician. In my experience, you hear of a lot of horror stories in the wilderness, but the incidence of injuries is very low. If people used some common sense in the wilderness(i.e. Be prepared for the cold, don’t pick up snakes, don’t climb on rock ledges if you don’t know what you are doing), it would be even lower. Fortunately, most of your fellow AT and thru hikers are brighter than most people.
The most serius injury I have seen was a hip fracture in a lady who was jumping on wood trying to break firewood. She had to be airlifted from our campsite in California.
Your biggest concern is probably about your joints with arthritis. The good news is your arthritis will gradually improve depending on the type and severity of arthritis you have. The most concerning injury for you and all of us is repetitive use injuries from the trail. In other words, we will be walking a heck of a lot. The two biggest types of problems are joint pain and bone pain.
The bone pain is most commonly stress fractures like shin splints. Shin splints are microscopic fractures of the Tibia(shin bone). The other common place is in the mid foot area (2-3 Metatarsal bones). The best treatment for this is prevention. When you start hurting in these areas forget the bunker mentality of a football player (play through the pain) and quit walking on it for the day. The bone gradually will stregthen with time, and the bones tolerance for abuse will increase, but it is gradual. In other words, you will be able to gradually work into walking further distances. If you can work out ahead of time, you will be further along on the trail.
You can a get a number of problems in the joints. Your doctor should be able to give you good literature for this. The most important thing again though is not to over fatigue the joints. When they hurt, quite walking. When you are fatigued (like all of us) you are more prone to injury.
This is especially true in the White Mountain when some rock scrambling and pulling up by roots is required( nothing major) and moss covering make everything slippery. Good support to your ankles will be important too.
Well I have rambled on enough. Talk to your doctor ahead of time and we will all have a great time. See you out there…
Tex doc
I had a compound ankle dislocation 3 years ago(I’m lucky I kept the foot).On the X-ray the gap between my ankle bones is almost nonexistent. I did two 15 mile days with 50lbs and the first day is not a problem. The second I just have less range of motion and minor pain. As I have not done any hikes for extended periods I wonder how much long term damage I am going to do? I think either way I’m going to find out in Mar.
Buckwheat
i want to say a few things about this topic here
first, it amazes me how many hikers hike with just a few bandaids and call it a first aid kit. i know cutting weight is important, but in the event you get injured, having an ace bandage, or enough compresses, etc to make sure you can take care of a decent cut may really make a difference. Make sure you have a few pepto caplets and all that good stuff too. ask your docs for samples of stuff, mine even gave me a scalpel that was sealed in a packet to keep sterile that weighed next to nothing. Of course i used my swiss army knife to save that if it was ever needed but its nice to carry in my kit. Also, since i live in niagara falls, i can cross the border and get OTC tylenol with codeine pills to carry as well. I dont take them for everyday pain, but if someone i know well breaks a leg or toe or arm and wants them until they can get to a doc, then they have that choice.
ok, now for buckwheat, you are gonna have aches and pains. you’re gonna live on tylenol or ibuprofen ( ask your doctor what would be better for you). carry enough with you. if you have extra, you’ll make friends quick by having some to share. I recommend carrying some icy hot or a small tube of bengay or something. you wont believe how good smearing that on your sore legs, popping a few tylenol, and a good nights sleep will make you feel in the morning. plus, smelling like bengay actually is preferable to some people to smelling like an unwashed person!
i also carry a parry of forceps that i use for fishing along the way, and if needed, are great for pulling splinters and thorns and things like that.
the most important thing is to not be alarmed that your gonna hurt alot, more than likely, your first few weeks. no matter how good of shape you are in, unless you trained in the rockies or some other mountain range, the altitude, the exertion, and thinking “ive got to do at least X miles today to keep my schedule” is gonna put unbelieveable stress on your body. the beginning of the trail is not the time to do big miles. get thru the first few weeks, get acclimatized, and then start cranking up the pace.
Maine isn’t going anyway. Make sure you prepare yourself well at the beginning to have the body you need to get there at the end. and enjoy every minute!
big boy
One immediate thought that hit me, was, why are you carrying so much weight in your pack?? I am by no means a Ray Jardine fanatic, but 50 lbs, though many do walk with that much, is alot. If you are young and healthy, then yeah, go for it. If you are older (like me), with prior injuries (like me) and maybe not in the best of shape starting out (like me), I would highly highly highly recommend lightening that load on your back. Both in the long and short term, your ankles, knees, and back will thank you for it!!!
I started with 42 lbs at Springer, and 39 lbs after Walisi Yi, but my hike ended after 130 miles from a knee injury that side lined me for almost 2 months, then I only managed section hikes for the remainder of the season. Let your body tell you what is best, and your mind. Don’t let your heart and pride take over, the AT will always be there waiting for you.
BTW, always remember, HYOH
-xtn :boy
airferret
Be careful how much medication you take. The downsides to ibuprofen and naproxen are well known. When I had achilles tendonitis on my aborted hike last summer, the temptation to take one or the other every day was enormous, because it always helped. But you can’t live on the stuff. The damage it does may not show up for a while. I ended up taking Celebrex (which I think is just a stonger version of one of the above) for the tendonitis, but had to give it up after 4 days and go back to buffered aspirin because the Celebrex guaranteed a headache for the rest of the day. Google celebrex+cons and check out the top 2 results.
Disco
Bigboy, please help me out here, what will you use the sterile(only until opened the first time)scalpel for? Oo
Onlyone
I always hurt.
Bone spurs and fragments in my right ankle. and I carried 50+ pounds in 2003…that of course is because I was carrying a camera and charger blah blah blah…and I tell you…the two weeks when it was gone, man…my entire body was so happy that pack was aprox 40…10 pounds on your back is a big difference…A BIG DIFFERENCE!
LionKing
I’d always heard taking Ibuprofen on a very regular basis will can wreck either your stomach or liver. Other hikers I’ve met have used Alleve instead.
Should it be a serious cut or something, instead of bringing compresses, couldn’t a hiker just cut up a shirt and use that? Or would a dirty shirt cause infection too easily?
In my personal experience, cut the weight as much as possible. Going downhill with 50 pounds is going to be killer on your joints, and knee problems are especially easy to get. That weight ended my hike, and it’s a bad feeling knowing that I could have made it farther by just lightening my load.
0101
well, i carry a scalpel i guess cause i was a boy scout for too many years. in 20003, i had planned to go out hiking for about 3 weeks. the day before i was to leave, i ended up in the ER and 4 hours later, they were doing an emergency appendectomy. I know god forbid but if im hiking and i fall, and crack my tracheia, hopefully someone has the guys to try a tracheatomy if they see me there before i suffocate to death. or, what if i need to make an incision to get out a really nasty wood splinter. the scalpel is much sharper than your dirty old swiss army knife.
Like i said, i carry it only for emergencies. I hope i never have to use it. But i remember someone laughing at me because i carry a sewing needle and some thread, and then i told them the story of once when i was 13 i was canoeing in Canada, and i slipped on some slate and sliced my knee down open down to bone. Luckily i had a needle and thread in my boyscout sewing kit my mom bought me for christmas, and that i was carrying. we used the needle and thread, after soaking them in boiling water, to make some really bad stitches but enough to close the wound till i could get to a doctor 3 days later. It still managed to get some infection, but the doctor seemed to think being able to get it shut saved it from getting really infected and could have possibly saved my leg. plus, needles and thread are good for sewing holes shut in old hiking socks
anyway, i guess i’d rather prepare for an impossibility than perish from a bad accident.
big boy
I can see carrying the needle and thread, but the trachea thing is a definite no go, IMHO.
I wouldn’t let someone without at least a paramedic rating go near my neck with a knife in the woods. Period. My EMT course instructor has been a paramedic for 25 years and he gave my class an hour-long reality check on why it’s not a good idea to cut into someone’s neck in the field.
There are highly vascularized tissues there which can bleed into the opening. That cartlidge is extremely tough, so tough, in fact, that you virtually need a hammer to damage it. If your trachea is cracked you’ve likely got bigger problems than making a hole there can fix. If the person doing the cutting slips and gets sloppy, there are four major arteries running through your neck that if even knicked with a blade will kill you in short order.
Even if somebody managed to saw a hole in your windpipe, the blood from the wound would probably run into your lungs and drown you. An injury traumatic enough to crack the trachea is likely going to swell up anyway, and if you don’t have devices to hold the airway open in the face of that swelling, like intubation equipment, it’s a losing proposition. And the old TV trick of putting the cylinder from the ink pen in the throat to make an airway simply does not work. Try breathing only through a pen shaft sometime and you’ll understand. There is TV and there is reality.
As for sewing a wound shut, I’d close a wound with gauze pads and tape and buttterfly bandages so that it could be cleaned well once I got back to real medical care, bright lights and cold steel, which would become my number one prioity in that situation.
On the other hand, reality is stranger than fiction and if the scalpel makes someone feel safer, then so be it. Most of the time, though, cutting someone isn’t moving you in the direction of helping them.
48 days to go! Peace!
Tyger
i guess the point i was trying to make was i’d rather have a nice sterile scalpel along in an emergency when it weighed barely nothing then my swiss army knife, which i use to cut rope, food, wood, etc and probably would be not near as sharp. i’d hope i’d only need to use it to get out a bad sliver, but as the new york lotto goes, hey, you never know.
and you are right about the tracheaotomy. not exactly what i am hoping for during my hike, but, certain death not being able to breath and the possibility of living? i’d at least want the chance. and my first aid kit actually came with a chest tube. Or i picked up one from somewhere a while back and put it in there. Dont remember which.
big boy
I bet Aaron Ralston would’ve been overjoyed to find that sterile scalpel in his pack.
Eagle Eye
Aaron had a knife and used it and I bet he wasn’t worried about infections. And a scalpel didn’t help him when he had to break his own bones. He probably could have done a neater job with a scalpel, though. He hiked his own hike, then had to cut himself out of it!:lol
Tyger
maybe thats what that tiny saw on my swiss army knife is for, for sawing thru bones. it sure as heck isnt for cutting firewood
big boy
Hey Big Boy–it’s nice to see that someone else shares my dry sense of humor:happy
Eagle Eye
I am a practicing general surgeon, for the past 20 years. I know about wounds and scalpels. I have hiked 800+mi of the trail. Here is the real deal: There is no physical reason to carry a scalpel on the trail. If I were on the trail and you were injured and had a scalpel, I would offer to help you by taking away the scalpel and then doing all the appropriate first aid measures and get you the heck outta the woods. There is no use for it unless you want to cut your cheese block with it, and then you are risking cutting a finger or two with it.
Another misconception I want to clear up: Wounds are only closed to make the cut look better when healed. The risk in closing a wound is to CAUSE infection beneath the closed skin. We treat many injuries by OPENING the wounds enough to allow the area to be cleansed. Cuts in a non sterile environment are different from ones in the operating room where we have optimized the cleanliness PRIOR to making the cut. That is why we risk closing those wounds, and still, there is a 1% risk of infection. I would not close a wound in the field. I actually fell last year, gashing a 1 inch cut on the knuckle area of my right index finger. Here is how I treated it: 1. Rinsed off the blood and dirt with my water bottle to see how deep it went (down to the tendon). 2. Held pressure on the area to stop the bleeding 3.Applied bandage (actually the best bandage was simply DUCT TAPE) to loosely approximate the skin edges to keep the wound from moving around too much, using the duct tape to provide a compressive effect to prevent further bleeding.
I then resumed my hike, and hiked on for another 7 days. After 2 or 3, I gently removed the tape and replaced it. At the conclusion of my hike, my wound was healed.
Wounds of this sort will most likely not get infected if allowed to drain adequately, but if become infected it would normally be a few DAYS after the injury (like 4 or 5). You would see increasing redness, swelling, and tenderness at that time which would indicate that infection is present. You should seek medical attention for these injuries as soon as possible, but if it is more than six hours beyond the time of the injury, I would normally NOT close the would if I were the MD, but just treat it with cleansing in water and clean bandages. Remember fellow hikers, before 1945 there were no antibiotics, and before the civil war, there was no real surgery done with wound closure. The human race did not fail to survive because these things were not available. Infection was treated by opening the wound, and it worked. So closing wounds isnt necessary, but is cosmetic. Bleeding is controlled not by thread, but by compression or in extreme cases, by ligation or cauterization. Civil war amputations consisted of 1. Chop off the leg with a saw or ax 2.Sear the end shut with an iron heated in a wood fire 3. Let the wound heal itself, no need for sutures.
Hope this helps you all when you hike. Cutman11
Cutman11