Last time I quit my job and took a year off to travel…. things didn’t go so well.  I ended up with a broken spine, enduring a wilderness evacuation, and having major back surgery in Thailand.  Let’s hope I have better luck this time!

Here’s an article I wrote in 2000 for a climbing magazine about the experience. Whenever I stumble across this and start reading it, I can never get through the first paragraph without crying, it brings back such strong emotions.  Almost 20 years later, it is still the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me.  But, you know the story has a happy ending, so, enjoy it!

March 11th, 2000:

A cry of “F…U…C…K!” was my only sign that something had gone wrong. It was the sound of my belayer realising he had let the rope go through his belay device and was now watching me fall to the ground.  It was over in an instant. One minute I was thinking about what I would eat for dinner that night, and the next I was sitting in the dirt at the base of the climb with an unbelievable shooting pain burning through my back. I screamed from pain and shock when I hit, and through my sobs was repeating “I don’t want to be paralysed!”.

Seth had an image in his head of me falling, hair and arms and legs up in the air, a look of mild surprise and confusion on my face, and then heard the loud gunshot sound of a body crashing to the ground. “Hold my head and stabilise my neck!” I said. Seth looked at me with utmost horror on his face, he seemed frozen with fear. His look was more terrifying than the intense pain I felt in my body – I had no idea what may have happened to me so from Seth’s expression I imagined a bone sticking out at some unnatural angle or a puddle of blood gathering beneath me. He approached and gingerly held my head stable. I was leaning precariously back over a hillside and some bushes had caught my head and prevented it from whiplashing when I fell, but I was by no means in a safe position. The pain in my back was unbearable and I couldn’t hold myself up so, against all First Aid rules, I told him to let go of my head and try to support my upper body weight.

We heard a shout from below and Seth yelled back that we needed people to help move me. A girl burst out from the trees on the trail to our left, looked frantically around, and came running towards us. She saw Seth’s stunned, horrified face, and me crying in pain leaning dangerously back over the hill, and knelt by my left side. She and Seth hesitated for a moment wondering how best to move me. I couldn’t stand it any longer and bluntly demanded they each grab a hip and shoulder, said I would hold my own head, cried “1,2,3, lift”, and like magic I was moved safely to flat ground. I immediately but cautiously started moving my toes, my feet, my hands… My whole body felt numb and tingly but I told myself it was just the shock of the fall. I was having trouble breathing but could do so on my own – the situation seemed to be stable for the moment. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

I had arrived in Thailand about two months earlier to travel in Asia for a year and, of course, climb. There is an incredibly gorgeous, small peninsula in Southern Thailand covered and surrounded by immense limestone cliffs. Add to this the beautiful white sand beaches, the vast green-blue ocean, hundreds of palm trees and the amazingly friendly and optimistic culture of Thai people, and you have a climbing paradise!

I arrived mid-January and, around the beginning of March, after a few side trips to various islands and national parks in the South, had decided that it was time to move on. The 11th March was to be one of my last climbing days there and I climbed some hard routes on Ton Sai wall and Dum’s Kitchen, then several easier routes at Tyrolean Wall and then Fire Wall. On my eighth route of the day I climbed a long route, not in the guidebook, at Fire Wall which is at the North West corner of Ton Sai beach, up a short, very steep trail. There was a slightly tricky short traverse at the top to get to the anchor and I was very relieved to finally clip in as the last sketchy old thread was well below me. Another exhilarating climbing day was safely at an end, I happily thought to myself. I yelled down to my belayer that I was ready to be lowered. The sun was starting to set and I leaned back in my harness thinking what a great day it had been, blissfully unaware that I had just climbed a 30m climb on my belayer’s 50m rope and the ground was steadily approaching…

Thank god for painkillers! The wonderful girl who had run up the trail to us had her first aid kit and helped me slurp up several crushed Paracetamol from a water bottle lid. I was soon to become very good at drinking while lying down, but at the time nearly choked on them! I was constantly moving my hands and feet, as though by stopping I thought I might allow paralysis to creep up on me unnoticed. For the first time I heard the questions that I would hear hundreds of times from a multitude of doctors over the next year: “Can you feel this? Can you tell where I’m touching? Push against me here.” It didn’t seem at all real and I felt as though I were separate from my own body and going through a checklist of problems for some injured stranger.

I was having a lot of trouble breathing and had a sharp pain in my side, so Seth listened to my chest, felt my abdomen, and did a head-to- toe check for any undiscovered injuries. I had my legs bent up close to my chest to ease the pain, and was panting desperately trying to breathe, and in the lighter moments of the evening I joked that it must look like I was having a baby! All of a sudden I needed to throw up. They tilted me sideways 90º, carefully keeping my spine in a straight line, and the gag reflex caused the pain to skyrocket in severity and I cried out from each convulsion. I was extremely worried that the jerking motion would damage my spine and the severe pain seemed to confirm it, but there was nothing I could do to stop.

Evacuation

More and more climbers were arriving at the scene every few minutes and I felt any control I had over the situation slipping away. It was dark by now and the only light I could see was from the many headlamps shining all around me… until the thunder and lightening began! I waited for the skies to open up with a tropical storm, but it seemed that God was merely trying to dramatise the scene for us with his sound and light show. The focus had turned to getting me to hospital without moving my spine and, after messengers were sent running all around the peninsula, we discovered there was no backboard or medical personnel anywhere in this international climbing destination! The group made do with a floppy wide stretcher from the first aid clinic, some bamboo, a narrow plank of wood, and lots of climbing gear and personal clothing. They took off my climbing shoes and tried to remove my harness, finally resorting to cutting it. It was still tied in to one end of the rope, while the other end dangled in the air well above my head and I couldn’t help but stare at it during the four hours I lay waiting.

Finally they were ready with the backboard and belay system. I lay helpless while a hundred pairs of hands grabbed me and I was blinded by piercing yellow headlights attached to foreign voices. I was lifted up into the air and back down again onto an unfamiliar hard narrow object. Strangers’ voices were talking frantically over my head, and I felt rope tightening across my ankles, my calves, and all the way up to my shoulders. Until that point I had managed to stay relatively calm but now I felt the level of panic in my brain speedily rising. My vision blurred and my head started tingling and I covered my face in shame while I cried with fear and apprehension. They taped my head down to the board and I was completely trapped in this foreign contraption – my life was literally in the hands of total strangers who had no more medical training than I did.

It was terrifying to feel so powerless. I didn’t know where I was going, how I would get there, what condition I would be in when I got there, and if I would ever come back or be able to climb again. These thoughts rushed through my head as they began passing me down the steep trail, hand to hand, person to person. I threw up twice on the way and each time they would stop, hold me sideways at 90º, and dozens of strangers’ headlights would stare at me while I convulsed and threw up and cried in pain. It was acutely embarrassing as well as painful. Around 11pm we reached the beach safely and they carried me into the shallow water to load me onto a waiting long-tail boat. During the 20-minute boat ride I could think of nothing but when I might ever return and in what physical condition I would be at that time. I focused on the cliffs around me as the boat rocked in the water and I tried to control my nausea.

Fire Wall (site of the accident) is approx in the middle of this wall – I was carried down to the sand on the makeshift backboard, to a long-tail boat which motored around the peninsula to the left of this photo, towards Ao Nang

From boat to pick-up truck

The boat motored into the sandy beach of Ao Nang (the nearest land with roads) and Seth accosted a Western couple making out on the beach to help him carry me up to the ambulance we had been told would be waiting. Eventually we realised a pick-up truck was our “ambulance” and they slid me into the back of it, unable to close the tailgate because I was too long. Seth hopped in and then it was just he and I, in the back of this pick-up truck in the middle of the night with no medical supplies or doctors or nurses, and a driver who spoke no English.

We sped through the streets of strange towns, passing cars around blind bends, (as per usual Thai driving), with the wind blowing us around like in a speeding convertible. Seth was gripping onto the backboard so I wouldn’t fly out the back and I was in agony from the bouncing truck and no Paracetamol for five hours. Three times I needed to throw up yet again so Seth would tilt me sideways 90º, balancing the board on the truckbed as we went over bumps and round sudden bends, and I would dry heave over the side, crying immediately after each time from the sudden excruciating increase in pain. After about 45 minutes we arrived at Krabi hospital, immensely relieved that we had made it and could finally let professionals take over.

Krabi Hospital

Some men roughly pulled me out of the pick-up truck while Seth paid the driver, and carried me carelessly into a dirty and partly open-air hospital. There were people smoking and patients with IVs hanging above their heads sleeping on benches pushed up against the walls. We entered some sort of emergency room and I begged for a painkiller. They finally came to me with some and to take blood.  I told Seth to see where the needles had come from and he wrote down the name of the drug and the time. We had been in wilderness first aid mode for a while, and this hospital wasn’t much different!

Eventually they removed my backboard straps and wheeled me over to an x-ray table, motioning for me to stand up and get onto it. We explained again in our meagre Thai that I had fallen climbing and my back hurt a lot, but they didn’t seem to understand the significance. For the hundredth time I thought how lucky I was to know first aid else I might do what they were telling me to do. Seth insisted they find more people to move me onto the x-ray table and, while they were gone, I had to throw up yet again. Seth managed to make one nurse understand what was happening, expecting him to help turn me on my side, but he ran off to get a bin to hold under my head instead. A kind, but clueless, nurse.

I had my x-rays with no protective shield, but with lots of company since no one seemed to think they should leave the room for it (except Seth). Later they showed us the films and, with our extensive training in reading x-rays and understanding technical medical jargon in Thai, we decided that one vertebra looked a bit squished, but what did that mean and did they have anyone that spoke English there? Not at 2am they said.

Time for bed so they wheeled me to the base of some stairs and Seth stopped two short Thai men who were trying to lift me up in their arms to carry me up two flights of stairs (they had no elevator of course). “Pak tee-nee!” (We’ll stay here). But luck was on our side for once, and a receptionist-looking person must have seen that through all the dirt on our faces we were in fact rich Westerners and asked if we wanted a private room. I was wheeled into a room with a real bed, a door that closed, and even a bathroom and a bench for Seth to sleep on. We found out later that it cost the equivalent of £7.50 a night, including nurse care.

As I was about to fall asleep, two nurses came in to give me more injections. I defensively asked what they were for, and the name of the drug. An hour after the first shot for pain they were now wanting to give me the same drug again, and we had to insist several times we didn’t want it before they would leave. I fell asleep immediately while Seth bought medications he’d been instructed to buy, and went out for dinner at 3am.

Phuket hospital

The following day a very young doctor told us in broken English that I’d broken my Lumbar 1 vertebra. He wanted to do an operation on me that he had done only once before and had a small chance of causing paralysis. Needless to say, we got on the first (real) ambulance out of there! We went to Phuket which is 2 hours away and has one of the better hospitals in Thailand since it is an extremely touristy spot. There they did a CAT scan and more x-rays and discovered that I had a compression fracture of my Thoracic 12 vertebra (yes, the first hospital had noted the wrong vertebra was broken) and one broken piece of it was protruding into my spinal cord.

They could not believe I had survived the fall and all that transportation and dodgy hospital care without any neurological deficit [paralysis] whatsoever. Due to the spinal cord complication it was very important that I not move at all and have a stabilising operation very soon. My heart sank with this confirmation that my year-long trip around the world that had just begun, was now over. I could no longer pretend I would be better in a few days, and, with this acceptance that it was a serious problem, finally called my parents and my insurance company. Thai family friends recommended a hospital in Bangkok, and the insurance company said they would pay for my medical evacuation there, but informed me of the dangers of spinal cord damage from movement and jarring during transportation.

Bangkok hospital

We agonised over the decision of whether to risk the flight there, or have the operation in Phuket where they had inadequate equipment for dealing with complications that could arise during and after the operation. We decided on the former. I was intensely worried throughout the journey (especially when they turned me sideways on the stretcher to squeeze me around corners in the airplane), and was immensely relieved to arrive at the new hospital still wiggling my toes! I had an operation as soon as I arrived to insert two stainless steel bars, each 12 inches long, either side of my spine. “It is extremely important you don’t stand up for 6 weeks, or you’ll ruin everything. Have the bars removed in two years.” I was told.

About four days of pure agony followed the operation, interspersed with morphine breaks, and then three weeks of boredom and strict discipline lying in the hospital bed without getting up. I was lucky to have my mother, my dear friend Bethanne, and of course Seth, all staying with me the entire time, entertaining me and keeping me in high spirits.

Home

I then flew home to London, again on a stretcher across several seats, and watched my new doctor fail to conceal his shock upon seeing the x-rays showing an operation he had only read about in medical history books.  He called over other doctors who clustered around eagerly, amazed to see a real-life example of a medieval operation.  “Not to worry, we’ll take them out in a few months. We won’t have the right spanner for those bars, so we’ll have to cut them with a saw. Oh, and it is extremely important you start walking immediately.” Can’t these doctors agree on anything?!

It’s been two months since the accident and I am now getting around London reasonably well in a plastic body cast, and will have another operation in November to remove the metal bars. My much planned, year-long climbing and travelling trip is temporarily on hold, but I know I am extremely lucky to be walking at all, and the doctors say I could be climbing again by March. For this I have to thank the many climbers who so freely donated their climbing gear and clothes to the creation and padding of the backboard, and spent their evening at my side helping in any way they could.  And I will never forget the girl I saw walking around in her underpants after donating her shorts!

In Memory of Sean Leary

who helped carry me on the backboard that night, from the base of the climb down to the long-tail boat.  I ran into him in Yosemite several times over the following years, and he always had a huge smile on his face to see me healthy and climbing after the experience in Thailand.  Sadly, he died BASE jumping in Utah in 2014, on March 13th, only 2 days after my own bad day.  (Rock n Ice article on Sean).

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