Weillcornellmedicine - Weill Medical College - Cornell University

TODD MINER
By Beth Saulnier
Though it’s based
in the big city,
Weill Cornell is
becoming a leader
in wilderness
medicine
The hikers, a group of medical students and
professors visiting the Adirondacks on a
gorgeous week in mid-October, are resting
on the shore of Lake Champlain after a
morning ramble when they hear the
shouts. Tim Greene, a fourth-year student at Mount
Sinai School of Medicine, comes running out of the
woods, cradling his hand and looking stricken. His
hiking companion, med student Kelly Grabbe, has
been bitten in the lower back by a snake. He’d tried to
capture it—and had been bitten himself.
The questions come fast and furious. “What did the snake look like?” “Did
you get a look at its head?” “Can we find it?”
A brief search reveals that the serpent—suspected to be an Eastern diamondback
rattler—is long gone. Justin Pitman, a fourth-year student from
UVM, inspects Greene’s wound. “I’m fine,” Greene tells him. “My hand just
hurts like hell.”
As Weill Cornell emergency medicine professors Jay Lemery, MD, and
Flavio Gaudio, MD, look on, Pitman directs his fellow students in examining
Grabbe, a fourth-year at the University of North Texas. She’s nauseated and
cold, with a tingling sensation in her feet. They pull a mattress pad from a
backpack and lay her on top of it, covering her in fleece jackets to stop her
shivering.
“How’s the pain, Kelly?” Pitman asks.
“Horrible,” says Grabbe, grimacing and barely able to speak.
Pitman turns to the rest of the team. “We’ll clean the wound a little bit,” he
says. “But we have to get these guys out of here—that’s the main thing.”
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