- Dr. Thomas Higgins, an orthopedic trauma surgeon, fell an estimated 100–300 feet while backcountry skiing on Dec. 30. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, a split face, broken bones, and had roughly a 5% chance of survival.
- Approximately 20 rescuers — ski patrol, Salt Lake County search and rescue, DPS, and Intermountain Life Flight — extracted him from remote terrain between Little and Big Cottonwood canyons. The experience has changed his approach to trauma care.
- He told his story as University of Utah Health celebrated 25 years as Utah's first ACS-verified Level I trauma center, having treated approximately 50,000 patients since 2001.
Dr. Thomas F. Higgins was a trauma surgeon who never gave a patient or family members false hope. Asked — and he always was — how a life-altering injury was going to turn out, he’d lay out the possibilities carefully, including the negative ones. He didn’t want to disappoint patients or overpromise an outcome that couldn’t be achieved.
But after months and months in intensive care and rehabilitation himself, where his own questions were met with what he calls “relentless positivity,” he’s become a fan of a cheerier approach. Complaining about a hand that doesn’t work well, but being redirected to the improvement in his gait certainly gave him the hope he needed to push forward and believe that he would heal.
That’s just one thing Higgins, chief of orthopedic trauma surgery at University of Utah Health, said he’d change about the care he provides, based on the care he received after a catastrophic fall on Dec. 30.
He told his story Wednesday at University of Utah Health’s celebration of its 25 years as a nationally verified Level I trauma center, the first in Utah to earn the designation from the American College of Surgeons and only one of three Level I trauma centers in the state, along with Intermountain Medical Center and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital.
Higgins was skiing with his wife in the backcountry when he fell what he describes as 100 feet and some of his rescuers told Deseret News was closer to 300 feet — so a distance somewhere between the 10th and 30th story of the average office building. Hal Van Meeteren, a flight paramedic with Intermountain Life Flight, and his colleague Sarah Anderson, a flight nurse, were among the approximately 20 rescuers who responded. The staging area in the remote location between Little and Big Cottonwood canyons was crowded with people from the nearby resort’s ski patrol, the Salt Lake County search and rescue, the Department of Public Safety and others, all tasked with figuring out how to pull him up without further breaking him so he could be transported to a hospital.
Van Meeteren thinks the rescue took about an hour before he was hoisted into a helicopter and on his way to the place where Higgins had made his living for more than 20 years.
As Dan Lundergan, the system chief operating officer at U. of U. Health and CEO of University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics, put it, a Level I trauma center sees patients at their “most vulnerable time of life.” And it was certainly true for Higgins. His face was “split in half,” some of his teeth knocked out. He had multiple broken bones.
Somehow, Van Meeteren managed to get past the blood and misplaced tissue and put a tube down Higgins’ throat so he could breathe — “quite a trick,” Higgins noted Wednesday as the two men hugged at their first meeting since the catastrophic fall. Anderson got a hug, as well.
What a Level I trauma center does
Dr. Toby M. Enniss, trauma medical director at U. of U. Health, noted Higgins was one of about 50,000 patients who have come through the center in its quarter-century. The Utah trauma center team “serves the largest geographic catchment area of the contiguous United States,” he said, drawing in patients from not just Utah, but also Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada and Montana, among others. The western area it serves attracts people who love extreme sports and recreation, but also often has fewer resources to handle whatever might go wrong medically, so while in 2001 when it opened the center served 875 patients, it now averages between 2,500 and 2,800 patients in a given year.
And the care at a Level 1 center is along a continuum that goes clear through recovery and rehabilitation, per Enniss. Level I centers meet rigid national standards and beyond the walls offer education, research, prevention outreach and more.
The university’s center has trained and certified more than 4,000 physicians and 900 nurses in advanced trauma care over the years, Enniss said. They’ve also trained 30 surgeons who went on to be trauma intensivists. And they have the ability to fly a trauma surgeon to the scene of the crash or other catastrophe to provide care there, if needed.
“No one plans the day their life is changed forever because of an accident,” Enniss said.
And that was certainly true for Thomas Higgins and his family.
That terrible December day
On Christmas Day last year, it was raining at 11,000 feet. When Higgins and his wife went to the backcountry a few days later, they didn’t realize how much ice they’d find. Higgins was trying to traverse a pass and instead toppled over the side, onto his head far below amid ice and rocks.
His wife found help. He had a terrible headache and a badly bleeding face, among other injuries. The worst was his brain. He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury. At the news conference, he said he walks with a cane not because his legs won’t work, but because they won’t work as they should with his brain.
“My motor centers are not quite right,” Higgins said.
Months later, he said he thanked the staff of the intensive care department where he spent a couple of months and said that he didn’t remember being there. “That means we did our job,” he was told.
As he told the story Wednesday, he started to cry. At 59, he said, he learned to walk. And he feels so much gratitude for all who were part of his healing. “I am so grateful for it,” he said, noting he still has rehab pretty much every day.
Higgins noted that his right hand “knows all the old tricks.” His left hand, “not so much.” The sensation is not normal, he told Deseret News. So he has a lot of hand therapy. And while he hopes to be a trauma surgeon again one day, he isn’t sure if that will be possible. He describes his life as a race in which “I don’t know where the finish line is.” Then he smiles and adds that his head injury improvement has been dramatic.
One of the nurses he’s worked with for years, Janet Cortez, said that his sense of humor has been a big help in his healing.
A doctor with a different view
Every day, before the fall, he did “rounds,” visiting patients. He has “just figured out after 26 years” that he has to care for those gathered around the patient’s bed, as well. He’s seen how important that was to his wife and two children as they, too, coped with the trauma and uncertainty of what happened to him.
Although he has been told he knew and called by name some of the staff with whom he’d worked for years while he was in the ICU, he doesn’t remember the first five weeks. He has to take their word for it. He wasn’t unconscious, but his brain wasn’t working normally.
One of the big changes that future Higgins plans, based on his own case? “I won’t write off anybody going forward,” he said.
His own survival odds were about 5%, according to those who rescued him and the others who treated him.
Survival is now in the bag. But will he be a surgeon again?
He paused for a minute, then noted that “I have to wait and rehab my butt off.”
But he’s got some serious positivity on his side. And he’s anxious to pass it on.