Senior Grace Summers and her family have traveled to Bittersweet Ski and Snowboard Resort, a ski lodge located 30 minutes north of Kalamazoo, Michigan since she was just 11 years old. Over the years, skiing has become a hobby for the Summers family, but on February 10, 2018, the fun, family activity would become dreadful.
Ski boots have a safety feature called a binding; this is the part that connects the boot to the actual ski. In case of a fall, the bindings are supposed to release from the boots to prevent injury.
“I’ve skied there several times before,” Summers says. The slopes that she chose that day were not unfamiliar to her, either. “I would go up the chairlift and then alternate between two slopes. I did this every time we went to Bittersweet,” she continues. “These were not black diamond slopes. My accident did not happen while I was trying to do something dangerous and impressive. It was very ordinary.”
Summers was skiing down her usual, average-difficulty slope when she fell. But when she fell, her binding malfunctioned and failed to release, causing her to fall with her left ski still attached to her boot.
“I hit the ground and could not stand up. I didn’t know what was wrong, I just knew something was,” says Summers. She had torn the ACL, or the anterior cruciate ligament, of her left knee.
After a few minutes of being stranded on the ski slope, Bittersweet’s ski patrol came to the rescue and strapped her into a medic toboggans to go to the on-site nurse.
“The slope I liked to ski was the farthest away from the lodge, and I fell at the very top of the slope” she says, “The ride was maybe five minutes, but it felt much longer. I was being stared at.”
After a short visit with Bittersweet’s on-site nurse, Summers’ mother and a family friend drove her to a hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While there, she received basic treatment for a knee injury, but after coming back to Indiana and seeing a few other doctors, she received bad news: she had torn her left ACL, or anterior cruciate ligament, and needed surgery.
The anterior cruciate ligament is responsible for the basic factors of walking, according to the American Academy for Orthopedic Surgeons. “The ACL runs diagonally in the middle of the knee, preventing the tibia from sliding out in front of the femur, as well as providing rotational stability to the knee,” Summers states.
Summers had her surgery on March 21, 2018 and began physical therapy just three weeks after the accident. She still attends physical therapy once a week, but as of September 2018, she is walking on her own and “pretty close to back to normal,” she states.