A California teen who is in a medically induced coma described seeing “snowmen and Kermit the Frog” before he walked off a 120-foot slope right in front of his terrified father while hallucinating due to altitude sickness.
Ryan Wach said he and his 14-year-old son Zane were hiking Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada mountain range on June 10 when the unthinkable happened, according to SFGate.
The 14-year-old suffered severe head trauma from the fall and remains in a medically induced coma. Zane also broke an ankle, a finger, and part of his pelvis.
The frightening events unfolded as the pair made their way down the mountain, but the father initially had no doubts about his son’s ability to handle the hike.
“He’s in better shape than I am,” Wach told the outlet, adding his son had prior hiking experience and status as an active teen who competes in distance running, swimming, and triathlons.
“The idea was that this would be kind of like his introduction to mountaineering.”
However, as the father and son were on the journey up the mountain, Zane slowly started exhibiting symptoms of altitude sickness, his father said.
Wach noticed his son was having issues, but they had already finished the toughest parts of the hike. He decided to take an easier trail to ensure a safer seven-mile descent back to their car.
But as they were heading towards the trailhead, Wach said Zane started to “experience some hallucinations.”
“He knew he was hallucinating,” Wach said. “He said he saw things like snowmen and Kermit the Frog.”
Wach said he was keeping a close eye on his son as they made their way down the trail and noticed that he looked “considerably better.”
About an hour later, however, Zane again started acting strangely and began doubting “reality.”
“My best guess is a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, probably some dehydration, and lasting effects from the altitude sickness. But he essentially started to doubt reality.”
As they continued their trip down the trail, Wach said they had to stop after Zane told his father they had “already finished the hike multiple times over.”
“It was completely bizarre,” Wach recalled.
“He told me he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or not, and he would shake his head in disbelief, like, ‘This is not real.’ Like he was in the movie ‘Inception’ or something.”
Zane’s deteriorating state of mind prompted a separate group of hikers nearby to call for a search and rescue team to get him down the mountain.
However, around that same time, things went from bad to worse with Zane’s behavior, his father said.
“He was worse than before,” Wach told the Independent. “He almost seemed like he was sleepwalking. He started dragging his feet and stopped in his tracks,” Ryan said. “He didn’t want to go on.”
Wach said his son started making erratic movements toward a ledge near the trail with a steep, jagged slope, but he grabbed him before he could go over.
The 14-year-old told his father that he was going to the car — despite it being several thousand feet below their current location on the mountain.
Later, he tried again to move toward the slope but was stopped by Wach, with Zane now telling him that he was trying to get “dinner.”
Wach felt overwhelmed trying to keep Zane safe and became emotional, tearing up and briefly letting him go.
“I had to wipe away tears. I was holding my hands to my eyes, and he walked off again,” Wach told SFGate.
“This time, I didn’t hear it until he was about at the edge, and when I went to reach for him, he was 10 feet away from me. I couldn’t get him, and he walked off the edge.”
Zane fell an estimated 120 feet down the slope before hitting the ground.
Wach said he bolted down the slope to get to his son when a nearby hiker, who happened to be an EMT, noticed what happened and started helping with the rescue efforts.
Zane was left on the slope for about six hours as the Inyo County Search & Rescue teams worked to get him off the mountain.
He was then airlifted to Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, and later flown to the nearest pediatric trauma center, Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas.
However, given the extent of the fall, doctors at Sunrise Children’s Hospital said it is “fairly miraculous” that he wasn’t injured further, his father told the outlet.
In a GoFundMe set up to help with Zane’s medical bills, Wach said his son is “improving” and briefly opened his eyes on Wednesday, but “still has a long way to go.”
Hallucinations are a serious sign of altitude sickness, specifically high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), where the brain swells due to a lack of oxygen, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
HACE affects fewer than 1% of people who reach an altitude of 13,000 to 18,000 feet above sea level.
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