1st Emergency

Last winter was out 13th year having the trapline. Naturally something interesting had to happen. We’d been lucky so far and never had to leave for the entire winter or call out for help. Our luck changed last winter and we had our first incident.

On November 3rd I started the day with a mild tooth ache. That same afternoon I went for a jog. It was -20 and I didn’t wear a face shield. I really needed to escape from my toddlers for a few minutes and Tyler was around to watch them. It felt refreshing to gulp down the fresh cold air as I jogged around my 1/4 mile track I’ve developed in the last few years. The cold air burned a little bit but I didn’t mind. Later that night one side of my throat hurt and I figured it was from sucking in all of that cold air.

The next morning my tooth was still feeling uncomfortable and my throat was worse. By the 6th the infection had spread to both tonsils I had swollen glands in my neck and armpit and my whole body was so stiff it was very painful to pick baby Blaze up. My head was pounding and I knew I needed to try to do something about my problem before it got worse.

I took out all of our first aide supplies which includes various prescriptions we’ve thought to ask our doctor for over the years. The only antibiotics we had in the kit that seemed somewhat appropriate for a throat infection was Bactrim and cipro which are both pretty heavy duty antibiotics and neither are particularly compatible with nursing for Blaze. Blaze still nurses some now and at the time he was still nursing quite a bit. That’s how it is when you live this lifestyle. Your around your baby 24/7 and they love to nurse. I wasn’t ready to wean him and so I didn’t want to take either of those antibiotics if I didn’t have to. Tyler told me he was pretty sure he saw some amoxicillin in an old first aide kit over in the old cabin. I remembered we had gotten some from a veterinarian years ago. Tyler went and got the amoxicillin out of the old cabin and it was prescribed to our dogs 11 years ago. The label read 1 500mg tab per 50lb of dog. Most adults can take 1 500mg tab every 8 hours so I decided to go ahead and try out the old amoxicillin. I took my first dose and Tyler took off to go check some of our trapline.

I don’t think Tyler understood how miserable I was. I made out fine that day but I didn’t like being left alone to take care of things at the house. The next day, the 7th, my mouth and gums started to swell up so bad it felt like my teeth could just pop right out of my gums. The next day, the 8th, the swelling went down and revealed a bunch of lesions and sores around the tooth that had been bothering me. I regretfully came to the conclusion that my whole illness could be stemming from the molar that was bothering me. It was pretty undeniable that I was going to have to go to town to take care of the tooth. We called 3 dentists to get opinions and everyone of them told us that I better get to town before anything got worse.

That sounds easy right? Just go to town and have it taken care of? In town they had just had a storm that dumped 2 feet of snow. Out on our trapline the storm had missed and we had just a dusting of snow. It was still wheel landing up at our place and most of the pilots had switched to skis for the winter. The river wasn’t froze across yet. There was about 20 ft of shore ice on either side with an open lead down the center. Our decent landing strip is across the river from our cabin now, this changes from year to year but that’s how things are right now. There was no safe way to get across the river.

Our friend and closest neighbor to the North, Dan still had his super cub on wheels and was willing to come in and rescue me if we could find a place to land on our side of the river. Tyler spent an entire day with a chainsaw and a maul removing 2 driftwood snags to make room for Dan to land safely.

We are about to drop a bunch of money on a flight and tooth extraction but the kids are having a jolly good time getting ready for an adventure!

Dan finally got good weather and flew up to get me on the 12th, 9 days into my illness. I didn’t want to leave Blaze and wean him cold turkey with his father in the wilderness. That would have been traumatic for both father and child, haha. Sydney begged to come along because she loves airplanes and didn’t want to be left out of an adventure. I just couldn’t deny her.  There was an advantage to me bringing the kids as well. The trapping season had started and that’s how we make money living in the woods. Tyler could get a lot of work done if he wasn’t babysitting. That’s how I ended up cramming into the back of a super cub with two children on my lap.

Super cubs are extremely small aircraft with a 300lb load carrying capacity… 300lb plus the pilot. There isn’t much space for anything that would weigh 300 lbs either. On the 2 hour flight to town they both fell asleep on my lap, all 75 lbs. of my children. When we got to town I had to call and arrange rides everywhere. There was no point in getting one of our vehicles plowed out of our driveway for just a few days use. We like to keep our driveway unplowed all winter while we are gone. It makes it easy for all of our very wonderful longtime neighbors to keep an eye on the place and check it for tracks. We don’t want anyone to be able to drive in.

We stayed with friends that have 3 little girls that Sydney loves to play with. I don’t think she even thought of me the whole time we were in town. She had  such a good time catching up with her friends she hadn’t seen in nearly 3 months. I got my tooth pulled the day after we got to town and I finally began to heal and feel some relief. It was a rear top molar.  Funny how getting a tooth pulled feels better than the pain it can put you in beforehand. I didn’t even use painkillers afterward I felt so much relief. We had one more day in town after I had the tooth pulled, mostly to make sure everything was going to go all right.

On my last day in town I picked up our mail from our friend collecting it and quickly went through 3 months worth of mail that had piled up. I skimmed through the backlog of emails as quickly as I could and got lucky when I caught a problem. When we leave for the bush I run through all of the inventory of our online store for this website and make all of the inventory numbers  0. That’s my way of closing down shop for the season. It turns out that I missed something, one thing, and somebody had purchased it only a few days before I got to town! It was very lucky I had a chance to go to my house, get the item and I left my friend to mail it for me the next day. I’m so glad I got to correct my mistake before it was too late and someone was left thinking I had shady business practices. This September I will be triple checking my inventory before we head out to the wilderness.

We flew back to the trapline Sunday the 15th in good weather with a tail wind. The flight was extremely cramped with both kids on my lap and they were pretty whiny. They were overtired from all of the town action and both cried and wiggled on my lap for over an hour before passing out from exhaustion. My knee was pinned to the cold wall of the plane for over 2 hours and it bruised me pretty bad and had me limping. It was -20 when we landed on the river. Tyler and I were so happy to be done with the whole ordeal and hopefully have it behind us. We bundled the kids up in blankets and put them in the sled to haul them home to the cabin. Blaze really likes routine and he sang a song in baby talk the whole sled ride home, happy as a lark to be back on the river. Sydney was so tired she hardly woke up.

We got the kids undressed in the cabin and offered them a drink and a snack. Sydney threw another wrench in our spokes. “I don’t feel good Mommy!” she had gotten sick during our short stay in town and now had a fever! I felt like such a fool for bringing her along!. It took a week for her to get better and finally after 3 weeks everyone was healthy again and we were ready to move forward again.

The following are pictures of us to enjoy!