Our expedition set off for Camp IV on the South Col in the early morning hours of May 15th. After a strenuous but relatively smooth climb, we reached the last camp five hours later. A stiff wind was blowing down the Col towards Tibet, visibility was poor, and we received word from Base Camp that we only had a very small window to climb to the summit and return to relative safety at the South Col. “The wind is going to pick up at around 11 AM,” warned Henry Todd, “it’d be good if you could descend to Camp II instead of resting at Camp IV.” The pressure was on. After a few hours rest, we got on our way at precisely 9 PM. The team had decided for the use of supplemental oxygen due to the various problems Anita encountered while acclimatizing over the previous weeks.

The climb towards the so-called Balcony was easy and we managed to pass about twenty-five other climbers. Kenton Cool, always at the front, had to pull the lines out of a thick blanket of snow that had fallen overnight. Clearing the way, he made a herculean effort normally reserved for the Sherpa. After a change of oxygen cylinders at the Balcony, we pressed on hard, stil ahead of the other climbers by about thirty minutes. An hour into the climb, right beneath a near-vertical section of exposed rock, Ang Namgel Sherpa tapped me on my shoulder. “Mike, oxygen leaking!” he yelled. I had heard a faint noise for some time, but because it didn’t grow louder, I wasn’t alarmed. Namgel began the process of changing bottles again. We had plenty of backup between our Sherpa, but it was still a nuisance to be pinned down, the other climbers catching up steadily. After the change, Namgel determined that my regulator -the device that controls the flow of oxygen from a cylinder- was broken and set about changing it for a spare regulator.

By now, this was all taking too long. Right behind us, a ridge dropped a few thousand feet down towards Tibet. In the course of multiple regulator and bottle changes, Rob and Namgel were treading too close for comfort to the ridge line. Then, when the final change was complete and the equipment restowed in our backpacks, Namgel attempted to put on his very heavy, oversized backpack. I was finally able to turn around and face him, my field of vision having been restricted during the change-over because I was facing the rocky area. This is when I noticed that Namgel was unclipped. Just at that moment, he strapped on his backpack and made an attempt to regain his footing, when he slipped and began sliding towards the drop. A panicky, desperate scream came from the young Sherpa who then cried “please, please, I’m not clipped in, please clip me in!” My heart sank as Rob tried unsuccessfully at first to attach his carabiner to the fixed rope. Finally, after pulling strongly on the rope, we managed to clip Namgel back in. Later, Namgel would say that it was the closest he’d come to falling in many years. I was ready to throw in the towel, having just witnessed one of my best friends almost die, but Rob did his utter best to convince me to keep going.

The rest of the climb went smoothly until we reached the rocky ledge just before the Hilary Step. I had just watched Rob hold on to the wrong rope during the crossing of this section and just as he got across, the anchor came out of the wall and the rope flew in his direction. “No way, this is it for me,” I said to Rob and began turning around. “Mike, you’re less than an hour from the summit, what the hell?!” retorted Rob. Anita looked at me with a smile and motioned for me to go on. Even watchmakers have egos, so I decided to do the macho thing and continued on. Fourty-five minutes later, we were on the summit. Had it not been for an hour-long delay during the oxygen bottle change-over, we would have beaten our last summit times by a good hour.

Everything looked magnificent from the summit and we enjoyed an unobstructed view 360 degrees around us. After snapping pictures of us with two Navy SEAL flags, we hurriedly descended back to Camp IV. An hour after arriving there, we continued our journey to Camp II. It was around 6 PM when we reached our camp site and by now we were no longer using supplemental oxygen. It was then that Anita began complaining about shortness of breath. She had been weak all the way from the bottom of the Lhotse Face to Camp II, but this was more serious. “I cannot breathe,” she kept saying, but we all assumed that she was just experiencing difficulties coughing up phlegm. We were all suffering from the effects of the cold, dry air and the high altitude, so we assumed Anita was just being more sensitive than the rest of us. When she began growing panicky, we grew a little more concerned but did not much more than reassuring her that she would be alright.

Then, at around 7 PM, disaster struck. Anita fell down flat on the large, sharp rocks outside our mess tent and passed out. Within a few minutes, she turned blue and stopped moving. I thought “what the heck, how can we have done the same thing last year without incident and now we’ve got this mess on our hands?” I called Rob, our team doctor, and asked him to bring an oxygen bottle. “We’re out of oxygen,” Rob yelled, as he began assessing Anita’s condition. “Shit, we don’t have a pulse, she’s not breathing, what happened?” he asked. After checking her eyes, which stared straight up, Rob determined that there was no reaction to strong light. Rob got on the radio, which was crackling with other activity. “Break break break, this is Camp II, we have an emergency, patient is unresponsive, no pulse, no respiration, suspected case of stroke.” My heart sank, my palms began to sweat, and my mouth was suddenly very dry, despite the gallon of tea I had drunk in less than an hour. Rob looked up at me and said “we might have lost her.” Shock. I yelled for Namgel and Thundu so that we could carry Anita into the mess tent and place her on something soft, but my voice was gone, the result of the cold, dry air that comes out of the oxygen cylinders. Hence, I ran out to their tents, banged on them with all my might, and when their heads appeared, told our trusted Sherpas in a whisper that Anita was dying.

Rob, Thundu, Namgel and I spent six hours getting Anita back to a state where she was lucid and could drink. Down at Base Camp, a team of doctors had assembled in Henry Todd’s tent and were going through every possible scenario with Rob to determine what had happened and how to get Anita back on her feet. A rescue was organized, a helicopter booked, and arrangements made at a Kathmandu clinic specializing in mountain medicine. Miraculously, by eight the next morning, Anita’s condition had improved so much, that after lunch she was back on her feet and able to get down to Base Camp, albeit with assistance. I had almost lost my wife of less than a year but thanks to the remarkable responsiveness and skill set of Dr. Rob Casserley, and the formidable nursing skills of Namgel and Thundu, Anita’s life was saved. A helicopter flight dropped us off in Kathmandu, where we have been able to visit a well-staffed clinic to attend to Anita’s bizarre episode of high-altitude bronchitis. The shock of what happened is now beginning to wear off and we are slowly able to reflect on the success of reaching the summit one more time, albeit with the use of supplemental oxygen.

Expedition doctor Rob Casserley put his skills to the test at Camp II, where he saved the life of Anita Kobold.