On a rainy Sunday night in November 2006, Franci Sterzer, 33, and her daughter, Sierra, 14, arrived home to Canal Flats, tired but happy after a hockey tournament in Missoula, Mont. Their town, in the Kootenay Rockies, about 75 kilometres north of Cranbrook, B.C., has its share of bad weather, and when Franci got up on Monday morning, she noticed that the slick roads had frozen over.
“I didn’t feel like taking the kids to the school bus,” she says, “but we were going to Mexico in December and I didn’t want them to miss any more school.” So at 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 20, Franci and her kids – daughter Sierra and sons Aspen, 12, and Mapston, 9 – hopped into the family’s Chevy Avalanche sport utility truck, buckled their seatbelts and headed south along Highway 93/95 to catch the school bus in Skookumchuck.
Black ice
The 20-minute drive was uneventful until Franci came to a bend in the road and hit black ice. “It was such a huge patch that it seemed to never end. I kept sliding and hit the ditch. Things got blurry from there,” she says.
The Avalanche flipped over and landed upside down. Franci was trapped inside, unable to move, with the back of her head pinned against the roof. Aspen was injured, too, with a concussion and cuts to his forehead. Sierra kicked out the window, scrambled out with Mapston and flagged down the first car. The driver had a CB radio but didn’t know how to use it, so Mapston picked up the radio and called for help.
When the paramedics arrived, they extricated Franci from the vehicle on a spinal board, then took her and Aspen to the nearest hospital in Cranbrook.
Severe spinal injury
Because Franci had suffered a severe spinal injury she needed specialized trauma care and was airlifted to Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre, arriving at about 4:30 p.m. Her husband, Karl, and the kids had to stay behind with Aspen. “It was extremely tough. We wanted to be with my wife,” he says.
Franci had fractured and dislocated one of the lower vertebrae in her neck, C7 (the seventh cervical vertebra), and it was compressing her spinal cord. Several hours later she underwent decompression surgery to lift the bony fragment off her spinal cord, as well as a bone graft and plating to realign and stabilize her spine.
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