Six-inch scar for student impaled on ski pole

A Jesus student was hospitalized and left badly scarred after a near-fatal accident on the college ski trip. On the first night of a college trip to Tignes in the French Alps 20 yearold Ed Bloch hit a snow drift, lost a ski, fell and impaled himself on the end of one of his poles. The accident took place in appalling weather conditions with poor visibility and a dangerously bumpy piste. Second-year medical student Bloch said, “It felt like a painful winding at first, so I got up and we skied to the village. I just thought I would sit a couple out to get my breath back. As I got down to the village it got quite hard to breath and pretty painful, so I asked for directions for the medical centre, by which time I was very pale and worse for wear, so we called an ambulance.” Bloch was rushed to a nearby hospital where an ultrasound scan revealed he had ruptured his spleen six times and bled three litres of blood into his abdominal cavity. “I started going into hypovolaemic shock and was short of breath, so they had to operate on me straight away in the very small hospital, “he said. “Doctors told me I was lucky to be alive.” He woke up with a six inch scar across his stomach. Unable to leave hospital until several days after the rest of the college team had gone home, he lost two and a half stone in the course of his nil-by-mouth recovery. He has been warned against contact sports for a further two months and will need to take regular antibiotics for a minimum of three years. Close friend Piers Lemoine visited Bloch several times in hospital at Bourgs Saint-Maurice. “The hospital was a bit rubbish, but Ed had a lot of visitors,” he said. He added, “He was very thin and seemed pretty bored at times, but I thought he kept in remarkably high spirits.”