Now that’s an expensive snowboarding trip. In January, Australian Ross Pointer, who was on a year-long odyssey with his girlfriend, Kalindra McColl, was snowboarding at Whitewater Resort near Nelson, British Columbia, shredding the trees when he ate it and took it in the ass, no joke. “I literally tore my butt open,” he told the CBC. “I looked around and I just saw all my blood and flesh all over a jagged stump and I kind of got a bit freaked out.”
Ski patrollers raced to get to Pointer, who’d hit a sharp tree stump after his fall. He had shards of wood in his backside and was going in and out of consciousness after loosing blood. The patrol rushed him out in a sled, transferred him to a snowmobile sled that got him to an ambulance. Pointer was lucky, to say the least: the stump missed his colon by millimeters and shattered his sacrum while nearly severing his sciatic nerve.
Needless to say, the rescue sequence and subsequent surgeries cost a lot of money and because of a mis-communication in travel insurance, Pointer now owes $60,000 in medical bills. And that seriously blows.
Photo: Kalindra McColl
The couple says they went with, Travel Insuranz, because it offered snow sports coverage and thought that they were covered. But the company says the two didn’t pay for the extra insurance, offering paperwork and a statement to the CBC supporting those claims. Regardless, terrible luck for the Australian. But he’s keeping a positive outlook. “As bad as monetary things may be, I’m very lucky to be able to walk,” he said.
A crowd funding program is having fun with the accident as a movie spoof, pushing the money raising as Project Dead Stump, superimposing Pointer’s face onto a superhero (horribly, we might add) with the subhead: “Bad Ass. Smart Ass. Torn ass. Dead Stump. January 2016.”
You can help Pointer out here.
