Injured Glider Faces Mountain Of Medical Bills
Spinning like a rag doll, he dropped 1,500 feet out of the sky, landed on a concrete patio and survived.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Jeff Ames, a world-class paraglider from tiny Valley, Wash., needs your help. Fast.
His broken, uninsured body lies in a Mexico City hospital. The 26-year-old is racking up incredible bills. He may need to be moved to an American medical center for additional care.
Jeff is fast reaching a three-week window to put in a plate to hold his broken bones together. After three weeks, the success for this delicate corrective surgery sharply drops off.
All of the above is costing a fortune, but neither Jeff nor his parents have this kind of money.
“I’ve never seen anything come up at me so fast,” the soft-spoken young man says in describing his dramatic Feb. 12 accident. “Maybe 20 meters a second. I hit. There was this big buzzing as if electricity was throbbing through my legs. “It was beyond pain.”
The impact broke Jeff’s pelvis in half. He suffered major damage to his right leg, internal injuries and a collapsed lung. In and out of intense pain, the lanky adventurer with long straw hair and blue eyes was amazingly articulate during a telephone interview.
Disaster struck in the azure Mexican skies over the aptly named Valley of the Brave. It came on the final day of a sanctioned international paragliding competition.
Paragliding is an extreme sport by anyone’s definition.
Unlike a hang glider - which has a fixed frame that keeps the shape of the wing - the paraglider canopy’s shape is maintained solely by air pressure. Fearless pilots defy gravity by maneuvering these delicate, wind-borne craft that are small and light enough to carry in a backpack.
Jeff got in trouble near the end of his flight. An unexpected crosswind buckled his canopy, tangling it in lines that suspend the pilot.
He burned up precious seconds trying to coolly work through the problem and regain loft. “I’ve been in that kind of situation a couple of times before,” he says, pausing to add, “I should have thrown my reserve chute sooner.”
He pulled the rip cord too late. The parachute unraveled as useless as a party streamer.
If the fall didn’t kill him, the trip to the hospital should have. The ambulance, he says, was more of a station wagon with carpet. It took a two-hour ride over windy, bumpy roads to reach Mexico City.
A fellow glider, Chris Santacroce, saved his life. As the ambulance careened around corners, Chris kept Jeff stabilized by holding him tight.
At ABC Hospital, Jeff refused to be put under. With just a local anesthetic, he endured emergency abdominal surgery to stop the bleeding.
Jeff’s father, Perry Ames, says his son needed 16 units of blood. “I knew he was strong and tough,” he says. “I never realized how tough.”
A dairy farm in Valley seems an unlikely place to produce such a world-beater. But Jeff, says Perry, developed his insatiable wanderlust by devouring every issue of the family’s sizable collection of National Geographic magazines.
As soon as he was old enough, Jeff set off to gobble up the globe on his own. There were elephant treks in Thailand. He spent a year working as a carpenter in Antarctica. He traipsed about New Zealand. Singapore, Burma, Australia … Four years ago he discovered paragliding. Few experiences, says Jeff, match the heady freedom of such unpowered, graceful flight. Last summer, he set a distance and speed record at a national competition in Idaho.
“It’s really as dangerous as you want to be,” he says in defense of his risky and unusual sport.
“It’s like mountain biking. You can ride around Riverfront Park or you can go up on Beacon Hill and bomb down.”
, DataTimes MEMO: A benevolent fund for Jeff Ames has been set up. Donations can be made at any Seafirst Bank.