Hitting Rock Bottom - My Story

With this month marking five years since I sustained my life-changing injury. I wanted to take the opportunity to revisit the events of that fateful day. One of the key mechanisms through which I managed to positively control my emotional resilience as events unfolded around me was by putting pen to paper and sharing my story. 'Hitting Rock Bottom' was my attempt at beginning to capture and process the trauma of the 6th August 2016. A day which I'll never forget...

Saturday 6th August 2016

Please let this be a dream. Please let me shut my eyes, and when I open them none of this will have happened. I’m desperate. I’m scared. I want this not to be true, but at the same time I can’t kid myself that something hasn’t gone seriously wrong. As I lay their covered in dirt, tangled in the debris from my fall down the rockface, I had an overwhelming sense that life would never be the same again. Please God, just let this be a dream…

The sounds of ‘MmmBop’ by Hanson blared out through Matt’s car speakers as we made the familiar drive towards North Wales from our homes in Shropshire. As we sang along, albeit out of key, I looked forward to a day out in the mountains with my climbing partner, doing what we loved most. Today’s haunt would be the renowned ‘World’s End’ quarry near Llangollen. I felt a sense of calm, an emotion that I’d enjoyed all too rarely of late. I’d taken the decision to leave a well-paid and secure job role, and to embark upon an unpaid year of teacher training with a local Secondary School. Was I making the right decision? I didn’t know. Getting out in the mountains always had a sense of innate therapy about it, which I yearned for more of late with everything going on. Unbeknown to me, the events of August 6th?would play a pivotal role in defining my immediate future.

Arriving at the intimidating limestone rockface, we scrambled our way across a section of loose scree to the base of the cliff. With a cursory flick through our guidebook, complete with a patchwork of routes of varying degrees of difficulty, we set about readying our harnesses, safety devices and other gear in preparation to start climbing. Towering above us stood a challenging afternoon’s work. Three or four hours later, and after having warmed up on a series of moderately graded climbs, we set about looking for a new route at the pinnacle of my respective climbing ability. There we found an enticing but equally challenging crack running vertically up the middle section of the cliff, perhaps 10 metres (30 ft.) in length and no more than a couple of inches wide. The first section would undoubtedly be the most challenging, at least until I could reach a small, precarious ledge perhaps four metres (10 ft.) from the belay point at the top. As with all traditional ‘lead’ climbing, I would need to strategically place safety gear as I moved up, clipping the rope through each device before moving higher. After a quick check and rejig of the kit on my harness, I set off.

It took maybe two or three attempts to get my positioning correct at first, to know in which sequence to first place my feet and hands against the rock. The crack itself was sharp, with jagged edges that had been baked by the sun all afternoon. I was off to a difficult start. Relatively quickly the muscles in my forearms began to feel the strain as I worked my way, slowly, up the initial vertical section – taking extra time and caution in placing my protective gear into various crevices and nuances of the rockface itself. Glancing briefly down at Matt stood belaying from below, I couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder down to the abyss below. Regardless of the hostile environment surrounding us, we exchanged a wry smile as if to say, “this is what it’s all about”. Now, with the vertical crack I was using as my bearing starting to widen, I was able to jam both feet into it, driving upwards with my legs inch by inch. By the time I reached the small precarious ledge three-quarters of the way to the top, my hands had been battered by the coarse limestone rock. Looking up, all that was now left ahead of me was the final section before the finish. It wasn’t pretty, and certainly not flattering, but within a few minutes I’d completed the climb. Standing at the top, looking down at all I surveyed below, I felt like I had conquered the world – albeit a small 30ft section of it.

For the next few minutes, I scurried about setting up a position from which I could belay Matt from above. Looking down, I indicated that the belay was ready before shouting some words of friendly encouragement, not about the challenge ahead of him, but about a Tinder date he had lined up that evening. As he began to climb, Matt found the angle of the crack hard to work with. After a couple of abortive attempts, and with time not in our favour, we agreed to call it a day as I set about rigging an anchor point from which I could abseil back down to the middle tier of the World’ End cliff. Final checks complete, I got myself into position and slowly leant back to test the anchor. Everything was okay, everything worked as it should. A few seconds later, I committed myself to the abseil and put my full weight on the rope.

DROP!!! Something felt wrong. Horribly wrong. It felt as if the ground beneath my feet had broken away from me. Without warning, my bodyweight descended backwards rapidly as my feet slipped hopelessly from the security of the ledge. It must have taken less then a fraction of a second for the situation to escalate beyond my control. In that instant, I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I knew something horrible was about to happen. Now, descending uncontrollably down the jagged vertical rockface, all I could hear was the harrowing ‘zippp’ of my climbing rope running through my belay device with incredible speed. There was nothing I could do at this stage to re-grab, and I wasn’t quite sure how it’d slipped through my grasp once I’d initially plummeted. Within seconds I’d dropped violently back down to the precarious ledge four metres below. Somehow, I’d landed on my feet…I thought I was okay! Yet, as I allowed myself to dream, I could feel momentum slow and uncontrollably pulling me backwards and away from the ledge. My feet had slipped from underneath me. With each millisecond which passed, my outstretched grasp fell further and further away from any potential handhold in the rock. Realising the enormity of what was about to happen, as if in slow motion, I screamed out Matt’s name three times…” MATT MATT MATT!”, I just had to warn him that I was hurtling back down towards him. For as long as the fall lasted, I felt genuinely terrified, petrified that this was it, that I’d never see the people I loved again; my girlfriend, my family, my friends. Gone. Visually, my eyes struggled to comprehend the rapid speed at which I seemed to tumble through the air. They failed to focus as the world flew by at breakneck speed. In the last moment of the fall, and in a rare moment of serenity amongst chaos, I looked directly up at a tranquil blue sky. THUD!

Like a crash test vehicle hitting a concrete reservation, my body slammed mercilessly into the ground. My rapid acceleration cut to zero in a split second. Pain shot through my body as I landed flat on my back. But, as soon as I hit the dirt, my body started to ragdoll uncontrollably downhill, in the direction of the cliff edge and yet another 10 metre (30ft.) drop off the mountainside. I had completely lost control of my body. I continued to tumble, numb to the pain as everything happened at a million miles an hour until, perhaps only seconds later, I came to a crashing halt as Matt threw himself on top of me only a matter of feet away from my ultimate demise. A searing pain started to radiate from my back. Even in my discombobulated state, I knew that I was in a bad way.

For the first few seconds, I just laid in the dirt where Matt arrested my fall. I couldn’t move. My arm was in absolute agony, a long laceration ran the length of my arm. Crimson red blood dripped from the open wound as it stained the dark earth beneath it. To make matters worse, I had somehow managed to land in an ants’ nest, who were somewhat enraged by my destruction of their home and were now attacking my already beleaguered arm. Gathering my thoughts, I tried to stand up. However, as I attempted to drag myself to my feet, it felt as if my whole body pivoted around the middle of my back. In my desperate attempt to get up, my legs laid lifeless below me. I couldn’t move my legs, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t move them. God, I couldn’t move any part of my body below the chest. I felt sick. My mind started to race. I thought of my girlfriend Ellie. I felt an immediate sense of guilt for knowing what I was about to put her through. I was so scared that this meant the end of our adventures together, that I would lose her. Matt did his best to reassure me that I was just in shock, and that I shouldn’t move until help arrived. As he shouted up to the climbers above and signalled for help, I told Matt that I had a searing pain in my back. I could feel something digging in. Carefully, Matt slid his hand under my back, before gently pulling out several metal climbing nuts. I had fallen directly onto them.

Locked in my own psychological battle to comprehend what had just happened, Matt took control of the situation as he did he best to stabilise the situation as much as possible, although it would be another 30 minutes until the deep thump of the HM Coastguard helicopter would arrive over the horizon. In truth, it had been the slowest 30 minutes of my life. It was at this stage that I made a commitment to myself. I would not let this beat me. Whatever it took, whatever it meant, I would not let this beat me! I had to prove to myself that I could overcome this hurdle. A few moments later, with the Sea King helicopter hovering above, the coastguard winchman rappelled to our position. I remember trying my best to mask the severity of the situation by talking to him as if I had everything under control. But, as the adrenaline began to subside, I was in an increasing amount of pain. Mercifully, the first contingent of the Mountain Rescue team arrived. The team Doctor asked what my pain score was out of 10, to which I replied “7”. He paused, laughed, and told me that they had just rescued someone with a broken finger who had said 9. To which I replied, “okay 10”. Within moments the Doctor administered the first dose of morphine, which instantly took an edge off the pain, but left me in a semi-hazed state. As I lay there immobile, the team busied themselves above me, moving me onto a spinal board, and debating which hospital I needed to be flown to. Above us, I saw the Merlin helicopter fly off into the distance. What? Why? It had left me behind! I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was told that it needed to refuel if it was to make the journey to the regional trauma centre at Stoke Hospital. My hopes for a quick extraction from this nightmare had been scuppered.

Position on the spinal board, waiting for extraction, it felt like an eternity before I could hear the faint drone of the returning helicopter. The torturous wait for evacuation was coming to an end. With the helicopter now hovering perilously close to the cliff above, the team on the ground moved me onto a cocooned air bed that inflated around my body, rendering me motionless. Matt came over and protected me from the downwash of the helicopter as I was prepared to be winched up. Matt and I said our goodbyes, and seconds later I was airborne, heading towards the open loading bay of the Sea King. Passing in and out of consciousness, the flight to Stoke seemed to take only a matter of minutes. Before I knew it, I was being loaded into the back of an ambulance, and driven the short distance to A&E. Staring up at the bright fluorescent lights as I entered A&E, I was immediately referred for a number of scans including x-rays and an MRI. It wasn’t until I was lying in the doughnut shaped MRI scanner, engulfed by the sounds of whirring and beeping, that the seriousness of my situation began to dawn on me. My fears were confirmed when the medical team stressed that I had sustained a “significant” injury to my spine, and to the spinal cord itself. The word “significant” played over and again in my head. I remember asking whether I would ever walk again, the answer, “this is a significant injury”. By this point I was fighting to remain strong, to persevere in the face of overwhelming odds. As the minutes and hours rolled by in a morphine induced blur, I remember seeing my Mum. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to be her little boy again, I wanted her to take care of me. She held my hand and told me that everything would be okay. As I faded in and out of consciousness, the next thing I can remember seeing was Ellie walking across the bay to me. As I lay there holding her hand, I struggled to see her so emotional, particularly as there was nothing I was able to do to make the situation better, or to make up for what had happened.

That night passed in a blur. I was made aware that I was to undergo a major operation to stabilise my spine first thing in the morning. Slowly but surely, that time came. As I looked up into the bright lights of the surgery staging room, I remember talking to the anaesthetist about the operation. A few moments later, he had me counting down as I was put under anaesthetic. “3”, “2”, …