It was a team effort when the RFDS was called to retrieve a woman who broke her leg hiking in one of WA’s most hard-to-reach locations.
It started with a frantic satellite phone call from the bush. A distressed woman contacted the RFDS to say she was part of a group who’d set off from the Mitchell Plateau in the Kimberley, planning to hike to the spectacular Mitchell Falls. Another woman in the group had slipped into a deep crevice between boulders, breaking her lower leg.
Reaching her was not going to be easy. The accident happened about a two-day walk from the closest airstrip, and the location was inaccessible by road or boat.
It was established that the hiker had a “tib-fib” fracture, where both bones in the lower leg are broken; a serious injury that needs prompt medical attention.
These breaks are very painful and need to be splinted quite quickly to ensure good blood supply and that you will be able to save the leg
Dr Michael LeithA crew made up of Dr Michael, Retrieval Nurse Cassie Gaff and pilot Bryn James flew to the Mitchell Plateau, landing on a dirt airstrip. They piled into a tourism helicopter that had room to fit a stretcher and set out to find the injured woman. Spotting the group of hikers in the rugged landscape felt like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
“We were flying around and had to land every half hour to call her on the satellite phone because it was too loud on the helicopter to hear anything,” said Dr Michael. “The hikers tried to give us directions and co-ordinates, but unfortunately what they gave us wasn’t quite right.”
The group put up large yellow tarps to increase their visibility. Other helicopter pilots in the area were told to keep an eye out for them. The hikers were finally spotted perched on the side of a cliff.
The next challenge was finding a safe place to land the helicopter. It needed to be on the same side of the Mitchell River as the patient – the RFDS crew didn’t fancy a river-crossing in croc-infested waters. The closest place to land was about a kilometre from the patient – and the terrain was so treacherous it took an hour to reach her on foot.
When they reached the makeshift tarp tent, the hiker was in a lot of pain. Her pulse was faint and Dr Michael was concerned about a drop in blood supply to the lower part of her leg.
“Cassie and I got to work putting in intravenous lines and giving her pain relief, trying to keep her comfortable while we put her into traction and straightened her leg out,” he said. “In a hospital, patients would usually be sedated for that but it wasn’t possible in this setting and this lady was very stoic.”
Now faced with moving the injured woman to the helicopter, Dr Michael was assisted by his colleague Bryn, the helicopter pilot and others from the hiking group to carry the woman on a stretcher, up and down over boulders and through long, snake-infested grass.
“I could see the patient breathe a sigh of relief once we were in the air,” said Dr Michael. “We even got a nice scenic flight past Mitchell Falls on the way out which she really appreciated because she hadn’t made it to the waterfall on her walk.”
The woman was flown to Broome on the PC-12 aircraft and from there to hospital in Perth on the Rio Tinto PC-24 jet, where she underwent surgery.
The dramatic turn of events hasn’t turned the woman off hiking and she’s apparently eager to complete her Mitchell Falls adventure in the future.
