BLISTER+: Real-World Testimonials — David Golay

In the spring of 2019, Western Washington got a big, late storm cycle that dumped a ton of new snow in the mountains, and I was excited for a late-season pow day. It had been warm the week before, but temps had dropped back to mid-winter levels and the new snowfall had it feeling like February again in early April.

I was inbounds at Crystal Mountain, skiing a line I’d been down many times that starts with a sharp turn through an opening in some trees at the top of a cliff band, and then a double drop down it. But when I made that first turn out into the opening, the snow just gave way underneath me, with the base having melted out over the underlying rocks, and I tomahawked down the cliff band, and for a couple hundred more feet before I finally came to a stop. I was sitting upright and facing downhill, and while I wasn’t yet in much pain, I knew something was very, very wrong with my knee. I wasn’t sure what, exactly was wrong, but no matter what I did, I absolutely could not bring myself to move myself an inch — my body just wouldn’t let any of the muscles fire to even attempt to budge.

Long story short, I called ski patrol, who responded quickly, and after I insisted that no, I definitely could not glissade down from where I was perched, managed to get a toboggan, put my knee in a splint, and gave me a ride out. Their initial diagnosis was that I’d probably torn my ACL, but by the time they got me into the toboggan, the pain was absolutely unbearable — completely unlike anything I’d experienced before.

The good news was that I hadn’t actually torn my ACL. The bad news was that I’d shattered my tibial plateau and broken my fibula along with it. Tibial plateau fractures are rated on severity on a I to VI scale, and I had a Grade VI — the high-score, worst-possible version of one.

I had a high-deductible insurance plan at the time, with a yearly out-of-pocket maximum of $8,000. After an ambulance ride off the mountain; an initial ER visit and X-rays; a massive surgery that installed four plates, 40-plus screws, and that took 80-plus staples to close back up; several follow-ups with the surgeon; and 50-plus physical therapy appointments, the total sticker price for my care was over $250,000.

Now, thankfully, I was only (“only”) on the hook for $8,000 of that. But that’s still a lot of money, and on top of that, I was literally bedridden for nearly a month before the pain was manageable enough for me to be able to move much at all, even with my knee immobilized in a brace. So I missed a lot of work (this was before I worked for Blister) on top of the bill that I was stuck with. While the BLISTER+ Membership’s injury insurance through Spot wouldn’t have covered the massive tab that would’ve occurred if I hadn’t had health insurance on top of it, BLISTER+ would have saved me that $8,000. But there would have been another major benefit: I would have been able to continue with my physical therapy for longer.

That’s because, while I’d blown past my out-of-pocket maximum for 2019 more than thirty times over, it reset when 2020 rolled around. But I wasn’t done going to PT yet. My knee was certainly doing a lot better, but it wasn’t anything close to 100%. I was still down a lot of range of motion; I could ski, but only tentatively and gingerly; I could walk, but I’d develop a limp after just a couple of miles; I could ride a mountain bike pretty hard, but it still hurt.

This put me in a tight spot. I wanted to continue with PT — I was still seeing clear gains from it — but each visit was going to start costing a whole lot of money again. And so the compromise that I arrived at was to cut back from going twice a week to once, and then pretty shortly thereafter to every other week. I was doing a ton of work at home on my own time too, but suddenly I had to do a cost-benefit analysis for my own care, and was coming to it having both already spent a ton of money on this injury, and having missed a lot of work in the earlier stages of it. And so I scaled back my PT visits, not because I wanted to, but because it’s what made the most sense financially. With BLISTER+, I wouldn’t have had to do that, either.

My knee’s a whole lot better these days. I haven’t thought about it for a moment on the bike in a long time. I can ski hard as long as I don’t jump off anything big, since my still-limited range of motion makes deeper, heavier compressions a dicey proposition. Running’s still tough, but I was never much of a runner anyway. And while I’m back to doing the things that I love in the mountains, I do wonder sometimes where I might be if I’d kept up my PT for longer. And so in a lot of ways, that’s the thing that I’m most excited about with BLISTER+ going forward — I doubt I’ll ever again need to weigh the cost of just getting medical care after an accident like this.

Fortunately, I haven’t had anything even remotely as serious as my knee injury in the years since, but I’ve had some relatively minor bike crashes where I tweaked something — a hyper-extended elbow here, a sprained wrist there — that I decided not to bother seeing a doctor for, because I figured they probably wouldn’t be able to do much for me other than tell me to rest up and let it heal. Was I right about those? Who knows. With BLISTER+, I’d definitely have gone in to be safe, and now that I have it, I’ve got a lot more peace of mind for those sorts of little lingering injuries, too.