Three weeks after a helicopter lifted him out of the Grand Canyon, Bob Smith went climbing.

Bob is back on The One Percent Heart. Last time he told us about El Capitan. This time he is halfway down a fourteen day run on the Colorado when a rapid called Horn throws him out of the boat and drives him into a rock wall. He is on warfarin for a mechanical aortic valve, which makes bleeding much harder to stop. The "just a bruise" joke in this episode is doing a lot of work. It was a hematoma that nearly doubled the size of his glute, and it ended his trip on a National Park Service helicopter.

There is an ER doctor who cannot work out why a man on blood thinners would be on that river at all. There is a week alone in a Flagstaff hotel while his friends finish without him. And there is Joe, in California, who found Bob's Instagram before his own heart surgery and wanted to hear it from someone who had already been through it. That last part is a lot of what adult CHD looks like now. Patients calling patients, because nobody wrote the manual.

The accident is part of the story. The life he intends to keep living is the rest of it.

📺 CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open and introduction
00:54 Who Bob is, and what's in his chest
03:02 What sport climbing actually is
05:26 What a fall feels like on blood thinners
08:22 Nosferatus: the cave route in Mexico that made his legs bleed
14:30 The candy store mentality
17:00 Drezden ruptures a tricep
18:52 Fourteen days on the Colorado River
21:02 Horn Rapid
22:52 Thrown from the boat
26:42 "I'm not really sure if I can move"
30:16 One light beer at 115 degrees
32:08 A glute that doubled in size
35:14 Calling for a helicopter
37:23 Warfarin, INR, and bleeding into the muscle
39:14 Twenty five minutes to evac
41:59 The helmet debate
44:58 What an impact would mean for the valve
47:00 Turning down the painkiller
50:59 CT scan and two bags of plasma
55:44 A week alone in Flagstaff
56:46 Back on the wall three weeks later
58:22 The ER doctor who didn't get it
1:01:09 Joe, and the calls before surgery
1:05:34 Why he hates bucket lists
1:07:42 Where to find Bob

▶️ WATCH BOB'S FIRST EPISODE
Rock climbing El Capitan with a mechanical valve: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBLi5I8fq0c

🔗 FIND BOB
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aortic_adventure/
Blog: https://myaorticadventure.blogspot.com/

🚨 CONTENT ADVISORY
This episode discusses medical trauma, serious injury, internal bleeding, and emergency evacuation.

❤️ CONNECT WITH US
Website: https://onepercentheart.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thechdpodcast/
Email: support@onepercentheart.com

⚠️ DISCLAIMER
Nothing in this episode constitutes medical advice. These are personal experiences and stories. Listener discretion is advised.