Two Months After Michael Schumacher’s Ski Accident, Hopes for His Recovery Dim
GRENOBLE,
France — The hubbub of jostling reporters and television crews is a
memory now, nearly two months after the helicopter carrying Michael
Schumacher, the most successful Grand Prix racing driver in history,
landed at University Hospital Center in this old Roman city after
traveling from a rocky snow slope at the Méribel ski resort 45 miles
away by air.
Outside
the nine-story hospital, with a panoramic view toward the snow-covered
Alps, the news media scrum has disappeared. Only a solitary,
weather-stained banner remains to indicate that Schumacher is still a
patient, deeply comatose and in critical condition, in the fifth-floor
neurological intensive care unit.
“Schumi,”
the banner outside the hospital says in bold scarlet letters, using the
driver’s nickname and the color associated with the Ferrari team, with
which he won most of his laurels, with a record seven driver’s
championships and 91 Grand Prix wins. “All our thoughts for you and your
family.”
In
part, the reporters’ disappearance from the hospital’s grounds has been
a response to appeals by Schumacher’s wife, Corinna, to spare the
family further intrusion into their privacy as they maintain their
bedside vigil. But the news media’s absence tells another more
melancholy story, too.
Attention
has moved on, with Schumacher becoming only the latest, if one of the
best-known, additions to the sobering roll call of those who have fallen
into the oblivion — for weeks, months or even years — of long-term
comas after sustaining traumatic head injuries while engaging in
potentially hazardous recreational sports.
Doctors
in Grenoble, the gateway to France’s best-known skiing resorts, say
that hundreds of injured skiers have arrived at the hospital with
concussions and more serious head injuries in recent years. Some of them
occupy beds near Schumacher’s. A further reminder of the hazards of
winter sports comes from the television sets in the wards, which last
week were showing events from the Sochi Olympics, where several athletes
in the skiing, snowboarding and slopestyle competitions sustained head
injuries.
The
outlook for Schumacher, 45, has been obscured by the decision of his
doctors and his family not to give regular updates on his progress. But
what is known seems increasingly dispiriting, at least for his prospects
of achieving a complete mental and physical recovery, or even of
escaping long-term impairment.
His
injuries prompted two operations in his first 36 hours at the hospital
to remove blood clots from his brain, and a statement by his doctors
after the second operation said scans had revealed multiple clots in
deeper areas of the brain that were not accessible to surgery. Those
deep clots, medical experts say, pose the most serious threat to
Schumacher’s recovery, and perhaps to his survival.
Unable
to remove them, the Grenoble doctors moved more than three weeks ago to
a new and critical phase of treatment — an effort to bring Schumacher
out of the medically induced coma in which he has lain since he arrived
on Dec. 29.
Since
that treatment began, the only medical updates have been unofficial and
anonymously sourced reports in German newspapers and magazines.
Those
reports prompted a new statement by Sabine Kehm, Schumacher’s
spokeswoman, who said Monday that the process of lifting the coma
remained “unchanged.” That was not in itself a denial of the German
reports that the attempt to revive him had failed, as experts have said
that temporary suspension of the waking process is common in such cases.
In addition, “repeated partial awakening, reassessment and re-sedation”
are common, given the complexity of the process, according to Headway, a
British brain injury charity.
While
cautious because of the lack of detailed information coming from the
doctors in Grenoble, other experts were generally pessimistic.
“If
they’re not releasing good news because there is none, then that’s very
bad news indeed,” said Gary Hartstein, an American anesthesiologist
based in Liège, Belgium, who worked for eight years until 2012 as head
of Formula One’s medical unit.
“After eight weeks, if there’s no sign of waking, what most people would do is unplug,” he added.
Others were more sanguine.
“A
couple of weeks after you stop sedatives it’s too early to say that
somebody is in a persistent vegetative state,” said David K. Menon, a
Cambridge University specialist who heads the anesthesia division at
Cambridge Neuroscience, a research institute noted for its work on
traumatic brain injuries. “But the more time you take to wake up, the
less the probability that you’ll have the sort of recovery you’d hope
for.”
One
potentially remedial step taken by the family was to invite
Schumacher’s long-term teammate at Ferrari, the Brazilian Felipe Massa,
to sit with Schumacher in his room at the intensive care unit, talking
of common experiences in Formula One and of developments in the cars for
the new season, which begins March 16 in Australia. Massa, who survived
a severe head injury when a heavy spring from another car broke loose
in Hungary in 2009 and struck his helmet at more than 200 miles an hour,
said that he had spent “a long time” with his friend.
“I
told him everything, about my car, my new team,” Massa said, referring
to his shift from Ferrari to the British Williams team. “I told him to
wake up many times.”
At
Méribel, skiers continue to flock to the slope where Schumacher, skiing
with his 14-year-old son, Mick, had his accident, about 7,000 feet up
the Saulire mountain, which overlooks the town. Méribel’s slopes were
used for the women’s skiing events in the 1992 Winter Olympics, and
complaints then, particularly in the downhill, were that the
high-altitude descents were too steep.
But
members of the ski rescue team at the top of the mountain, at a station
known as Dent de Burgin — the unit that responded to the Schumacher
accident, summoning the helicopter that took him to Grenoble — said
there had been barely 400 skiing injuries of all kinds among visitors
who bought more than 1.3 million day passes for the Méribel slopes last
year.
As
for Schumacher, they said, he had avoided the most perilous descent,
which has an 85 percent incline at one point. Instead he took a gentler,
wind-around route to a lower slope where, for reasons that remain
unexplained, he chose to cross between two heavily traveled pistes, or
trails, across an area of ungroomed snowfield strewn with rocks, whose
perimeter is marked with red-painted poles.
Under
regulations set by the Méribel authorities, off-piste areas like the
one Schumacher entered generally carry no warning signs, and there were
none where Schumacher fell. One of the rescue team members, Philippe
Merlin, said an overnight snowfall had left a deep overlay of fresh,
uncompacted snow that covered most of the rocks, but allowed
Schumacher’s skis to sink as much as a foot beneath the surface.
A
French police investigation that was formally closed last week, drawing
in part from videotape retrieved from Schumacher’s helmet-mounted
camera, found that the initial impact had occurred four feet from the
piste and that Schumacher had been catapulted over the tips of his skis
into a headfirst impact with another rock 34 feet farther on that caused
his helmet to split. The police ruled that there had been no negligence
or other error, by Méribel or Schumacher, that required further
criminal investigation.
That
conclusion met with broad support among skiers on the Saulire runs,
many of whom said they were satisfied with Méribel’s safety
arrangements. Merlin, of the rescue team, who has skied the mountain for
more than 40 years, said that Schumacher, who owns a chalet nearby, was
known on the slopes as a good skier and that what he had done in
crossing the rocky area was not unusual.
“It’s quite normal,” he said. “But he was unlucky.”
Still,
the accident has left its mark. On a murky day last week, with
low-hanging clouds enveloping the gondola lift that reaches the Dent de
Burgin summit from Méribel, groups of skiers could be seen through the
mist pausing at the scene of the accident, some pointing their ski poles
at rocks beside the piste. Members of the rescue team said somebody had
used a pole in the aftermath of the accident to inscribe a message in
the snow for Schumacher.
“Our prayers are with you, Michael,” it said. -------------- New York Times
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