But doctors and medical professionals are out there in the general population, and are random events that can coincide with your emergency. It has happened to me on more than one occasion - the timely appearance of a doctor or nurse on the scene of an emergency. On at least one of those occasions, the physician just turned to our team and said, "go ahead, your treatment looks fine, you know more about this than I do."

The most outstanding example I can recall was treatment of a victim of high altitude cerebral edema on Denali. The victim was able to descend to 14,000, Advanced Base Camp, was in much better shape, and was examined by our team. Also in camp was Dr. James Wilkerson, who wrote several books on the subject (Medicine for Mountaineering). He came over, as word spread about the incident through camp, and monitored our performance. Afterwards, we had a very insightful and educational critique and evaluation, which is one of the highlights of my climbing career. The event messed up our attempt of the summit, but is was easily a fair trade.