I Met a Hero

On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending a speaker. Her name is Meagan McGrath and was all over the national news last month after climbing to Everest's Summit. She's young; only a year younger than I am, making her the youngest Canadian on record to climb the highest mountain on every continent. She's also the first member of the Canadian Armed Forces, an aerospace engineer, to do so. In itself, that is remarkable, but it doesn't end there.

After making it to the top and then making her way back down, she explained how she became a hero. She came across someone who was just standing there motionless. After a few moments, she knew that something was wrong with this person. After a communication barrier (She was a Nepalese), and she managed to break through and find out that this person wanted her to get her goggles out to continue up, and to Meagan, it was obvious to her that she wouldn't make her window of opportunity because it was too late in the day at the rate she was going, she she tried to convince the Nepalese woman that she needed to go back down to seek help.

To give some perspective on this, the woman was suffering from a lack of oxygen, and her brain was swelling up and wasn't "all there" because of that lack of oxygen. They have medicine that they can inject to keep the swelling down, but Meagan only had pills. She couldn't really tell where she was, so she managed to flag down a Sherpa who helped her take the woman down to a point where they encountered a seasoned climber who happened to be famous and was familiar with rescue, so he took over from there after injecting her with some medicine. If this encounter wouldn't have happened, this Nepalese woman would have died. Meagan simply couldn't live with the thought of leaving someone die, although apparently it happens quite often, so she had to do something to save this woman. Nobody else had been paying attention and just went past her as if nothing had been wrong; even her own Sherpa.

If that alone wasn't enough excitement, Meagan eventually started to experience a breathing problem and she wanted to get back down to base camp as soon as possible and she didn't have anymore oxygen tanks as she had given her last one to the Nepalese. It was later determined that she had a lung infection.

It's really quite amazing to hear it all come from her. I mean, all of it, from the preparations involved, to the acclimatization, to the climb itself, and finally, to the rescue. You really don't get a sense of how big Everest really is, not even on the IMAX movie, until you see it from someone's very own eyes. She showed us some of the massive crevasses she had to walk over using ladders, which would rightfully scare anyone, possibly even trained tightrope walkers. Some people look at these once and say, "Ok, that's enough! I want to go home!" When you realize that nature takes its course and things melt, such as ladders falling, it's even scarier. One such thing happened. She had crossed a crevasse, and then the next day, the ladder they had walked across had fallen in-between, and only hanging by a rope, and that was due to melting and the crevasse enlarging. Just a night is all it takes. Just amazing. When you think of what it takes to climb Everest, I think these people could easily join the circus, but then again, sometimes you just don't want to do it all over again. Sometimes it's just that one-in-a-lifetime experience that you're searching for.

When the talk was finished, a crowd was surrounding her, and it wasn't until the crowd dispersed enough for me to get to talk to her. I asked her, "What was your favourite part of the whole experience?" This was probably the only question that had given her a serious pause as she thought of what to say. She said, it was the company. Being at the base camp for 2 months, eating food and creating new friends that share a common interest, and then climbing with those friends. It hadn't even occurred to her she was a hero until she arrived at basecamp; and then she was honoured by Nepal for saving the Nepalese woman who was severely ill. A hero indeed.


Here's an article about her: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/0...st-rescue.html