Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It's September the 3rd, 1992. Morning. High up in the Himalayas. 30-year-old Briton Jonathan Bamber lies bleeding on a snowy ledge.
He's close to the summit of Dupendia, a colossal spire of black rock soaring nearly 6,000 meters above sea level. He can hardly move. Pain pulsates through his left leg as blood soaks through his climbing trousers and into the lining of his sleeping bag. Jonathan needs help, and he's running out of time. Wincing, he cranes his neck and peers out into the void. Through gaps in the swirling fog, he catches fleeting glimpses of the surrounding mountains.
About a day after
the accident happened. I could start to smell my leg. I was somewhat familiar with statistics about compound fractures and infections and fatalities associated with them. And I knew that once it's infected, it is a matter of time before you die. There's no shying away from the reality that once a big open wound, massive open wound is infected, you're in deep, deep trouble. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes?
If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet academic and mountaineer Jonathan Bamber. Nearing the summit of a Himalayan peak, a freak accident leaves him grievously injured and stranded.
His fate rests in the hands of his climbing partner, Angus, who must descend in search of help. As a scientist, Jonathan can't help but face the grim facts of his situation. But, however slim the odds, he knows that he must cling to hope for as long as he can. Survival instinct is perhaps the strongest one we have. And I hadn't given up. Logically, I couldn't really see an obvious way to sort of get me off the hill while I was still alive, you know?
Didn't mean it. I wasn't gonna try. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. Saturday, August the 29th, 1992. Topendio Base Camp in the Kishtwar District of Northern India. Jonathan stands outside his tent, his climbing equipment spread out on the ground in front of him. The wiry, bright-eyed 30-year-old is checking everything is in order ahead of tomorrow's ascent. Campfire smoke drifts through the crisp evening air.
Around him, climbers and local Sherpas mill about, sipping tea from thermoses, throwing eager and anxious glances up at the snow-capped mountains that encircle this rocky plateau. Back home in England, Jonathan is an academic, a physicist with a passion for the environment. It's his job to try to better understand the natural world and the colossal processes that shape it. But right now, amid one of the most spectacular natural environments on Earth,
All he can do is stare in wonder. When I joined the expedition to the Kichwa and to climb to Pendio, I was what's called a postdoctoral research assistant at the University College London. It's not a permanent position, but it was a research position. And I think I was doing quite well in my career. And I had just met my then-girlfriend.
And I would say that things were pretty good. I was in a good place myself, feeling pretty fit. I've always been a very keen runner, athlete, sports person, not just the climbing, but I've always done a lot of long distance running and long distance cycling.
When you're on the mountain, everything else falls away. You just forget about the day-to-day sort of, did I remember to put the washing out or whatever it is, because you really are in the moment. You are thinking about everything you're doing and you're making sure you're safe. And that in itself gives you a focus. It's almost like a slightly meditative sort of thing because everything else falls away. And that, I think, was one of the big passions about it for me.
Originally from North London, Jonathan got his first taste of mountaineering as a student at Bristol University, before long he was hooked. He quickly graduated from the crags and gorges of Western England to some of the most iconic and challenging climbs in Europe. But for all his experience, nothing could have prepared him for the sheer enormity of the Himalayan mountains that surround him now. Luckily, he won't have to tackle them alone.
Jonathan glances over to the neighbouring tent where his long-time friend and climbing partner Angus Atkinson is going through his own equipment checks. Angus and I had done a lot of rock climbing in the UK together and had several trips to the Alps together as well. And you really do develop a bond with your climbing partner because your life is in their hands, literally.
And so you really do need to trust them and you need to understand each other and you need to be on the same wavelength, same page in everything you're doing to develop that trust and to maintain it. Of course, as with any extreme pursuit, mountaineering entails a degree of risk. But Jonathan is a scientist. He is well used to making methodical calculations.
The whole thing about climbing and mountaineering is that you minimize those unnecessary risks by making sure that you're safe, making sure that you do things in the safest possible way, making sure that you plan things, that you organize, that you understand the route you're on, that you have the equipment that you need and all the things that help you stay safe. It's a sort of a very calculated risk.
I think that actually eliminating all risk from our lives would make life incredibly dull. After securing permits to climb several peaks in this area, Jonathan and Angus have spent several nights here at base camp, acclimatizing to the altitude and completing a few practice ascents. But it's all in preparation for the big one. Soaring nearly 20,000 feet above them, Tupendio is a virgin peak.
No climber has ever reached the summit. To become the first, Jonathan and Angus will need to be at the very top of their game. It was a lot more technical. It was what's called mixed route, so that's a mixture of snow, ice and rock. And so we needed quite a lot of equipment. We needed double ropes. And so we got all the kit together and probably about four or five days food because it was about a three or four hour walk across this huge boulder field
to get to the base of the route and the base of the route was where there was a small glacier and then you could get onto the rock face and the start of the spire that formed the mountain itself.
Reporting live from under my blanket, I'm Susan Curtis with Dunkin' at Home. Breaking news, pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back. I'll pass it to Mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story. That is so right, Susan. You know, it's never too early to get in a spicy mood. I'm talking cinnamony goodness that's so tasty, people don't want to leave their blankets either. Back to you. No, back to you. All you. The home with Dunkin' Pumpkin Spice is where you want to be.
Think you know the Brooks Ghost? Think again. Introducing the all-new, better-than-ever Ghost 16. Now with nitrogen-infused cushioning for lightweight, supreme softness that feels good every step, every street, every single day. So go ahead, take your daily joyride in the all-new nitrogen-infused Ghost 16. It'll turn your everyday miles into everyday endorphins. Let's run there. Head to brookserunning.com to learn more.
It's mid-morning on Sunday, August the 30th. Jonathan and Angus leave base camp and set off hiking across the boulder field. It's a bright, clear day. Streaks of white cloud whip overhead. They've checked the forecast. It looks like they have several days of good weather ahead. But they know that in the Himalayas, conditions can change abruptly. Four hours later, the two Brits reach the curved snout of the glacier. They stop to set up an advanced base camp.
a last waypoint to store some supplies. They drop their packs. It's still early afternoon, but they'll need every scrap of energy for tomorrow. They get into their sleeping bags and bed down. The following morning, in the dim pre-dawn light, the two climbers traverse the glacier. They're carrying as little gear as possible, just enough to sustain them on their two-day round trip from here up and down to Pendio.
After going as far as they can on foot, they unhook their ropes and ice axes and begin the ascent itself. Jonathan and Angus are lead climbing. This involves taking it in turns to stay back and provide belay support while the other forges ahead.
I would lead one pitch, I would be at the front end, and then Angus would lead another pitch, and we would do that through and through. It's more efficient to do that, and you share the burden of breaking trail, if you like, on the mountain. And it can be quite mentally taxing when you're on a new route and you don't know what's ahead of you. So you're kind of sharing that, and it makes it a lot easier. It's the afternoon of Monday, August the 31st. Jonathan and Angus are into their rhythm now.
climbing quickly, moving with fluidity and confidence. As they gain altitude, the environment continually changes around them. At around 14,000 feet, the already thin mountain air grows thinner still. At 15,000, they emerge above the clouds. At 16,000 feet, they cross the snow line, revealing a rock face marbled with pockets of thick blue ice. By the time dusk closes in, they're only a few hundred meters off the summit.
Everything is going to plan. Flushed with cold and satisfied with the day's work, Jonathan and Angus lay out their bivvy bags on a rocky shelf and hunker down for the night. Despite the deadly drop below, sleep comes easy. They're exhausted. All things being well, they will be standing on the summit shortly after daybreak. The hard bit will be the eight-plus hours of arduous descent. They're all too aware that most accidents happen not on the way up, but the way down. But when Jonathan wakes in the early hours,
He finds their plan has been foiled by the weather. And then next morning, there was quite a big snowfall and the weather closed in a bit. Visibility was very poor, couldn't see an awful lot, and there was quite a lot of wind and snow. And so rather than carry on, we thought it was better to sit out this bad weather. All day Tuesday, Jonathan and Angus sit hunched on their bivy platform while snow swirls around them.
They're not worried though. This is all part of the adventure. The storm will pass. Sure enough, by Wednesday morning, the weather has improved and the climbers can push for the summit. But they soon discover the blizzard has left its mark on the mountain. And what they hoped would be a fast final stretch proves not quite so straightforward. There was quite a lot of fresh snow on the face itself. And what we call spin drift, which is kind of like this powdery, loose powder.
snow that, you know, sloughs off really easily. But it still looked, you know, reasonably climbable and made things perhaps a little bit more difficult. The covering of snow has concealed fissures and weaknesses in the rock. It requires total concentration, but they can handle it. The two men make their way horizontally along a narrow jutting ridge before once more taking turns leading the ascent.
After a couple of hours of climbing, Jonathan is strapped securely onto the vertical rock face, 150 meters above their bivvy site, about halfway to the summit. He braces himself to belay while Angus pushes on. Angus was going up just to the right of the kind of steep ice on a mixture of snow ice and rock.
he is about 30 metres above me at this point, off to one side. So I'm belayed, so I can't move anywhere. I'm, you know, attached to the rock. But I'm not directly below him. He's actually slightly off to my left by maybe 15 metres or something like that, which is always good because it means you're not in what's called the fall line. And he was moving up on some mixed ground and I heard this shout blow
Maybe more like a scream or very loud shout. Below! Below is the standard warning when something has been dislodged and is tumbling down the mountain. Jonathan knows what to do. He pulls on his ropes and presses himself tight against the rock face, out of harm's way. But then he hears a dull thud. A split second later, he feels it. A sudden, searing flash of white heat.
It was a bit like someone had switched on every single nerve in my body. It was just this completely overwhelming sensation. And I wouldn't even describe it as pain initially. It was just this visceral reaction to something that had happened. An explosion of sensation. His nervous system goes into overdrive. His brain tries to process the chemical signals bombarding his body.
Dazed and still suspended in his harness, 18,000 feet in the air, Jonathan looks down at his left leg. I looked down and it was sort of the lower half of my lower leg was sort of just kind of hanging off really. You know, I had over trousers, Gore-Tex over trousers on, so I couldn't see kind of all the detail, but it kind of looked like it was just the clothing holding on my lower leg.
A football-sized boulder has smashed through his shinbone, right between the ankle and the knee. Angus must have accidentally dislodged it. But then, rather than falling in a straight line, it ricocheted off the slope and careened into Jonathan. It's a moment's bad luck, a freak accident. But Jonathan isn't thinking about any of that. His thoughts have been scrambled by the crescendo of pain.
I was so overwhelmed by the pain and the sensations that were going through my body at that point that thoughts had just been pushed out of my brain altogether. It was just like, what the hell has just happened? Where am I? What's going on? You know, what's just happened? Taking several stabilizing breaths, he's just about able to assess his situation. Clearly, his lower leg is broken. He's nearly snapped in two. He needs urgent medical attention. He needs a hospital.
Then he remembers where he is. I realized at that point, I guess, that my leg had been crushed, almost severed, that perhaps, you know, the lower half of my leg was just being held on by my clothing, and that we were very close to the summit of an unclimbed peak in a remote part of the Himalayas. And I think I just thought, well, that's it.
It's mid-morning, Wednesday, September 2nd, 1992. Jonathan still hangs off the vertical face of Tupendia, a hundred meters below the summit. He can't inspect his leg through his trousers, but the heavy bleeding tells him it's a severe compound fracture. The bone has punctured the skin. At least it's not a catastrophic bleed, though. If a main artery had been severed, he'd be dead already. One thing's for certain: he's not climbing down the mountain today.
I could see the blood pouring out. I didn't know the precise damage. It didn't really kind of matter, the precise details, you know. I could see that there was no way I could get myself down. I was not in a fit position to sort of do much at all at that point. I was in so much pain. So I had become a liability on the mountain.
Already lightheaded, Jonathan's brain tries to do the calculations. The blood loss. The time it'd take for them to get down. The conclusion seems inevitable. Still, he's not about to quit.
His one beacon of hope is Angus.
With excruciating effort, Jonathan manages to feed some slack through his carabiner. This enables Angus to rearrange his ropes and set up an abseil. An hour later, he has made it down to Jonathan's pitch. The first thing they need to do is get him off the rock face and onto solid ground. I don't really remember exactly what the conversation was. There's not much you can chat about in those circumstances. I think it was very, very functional.
The best bet seemed to be to get me down to the belay ledge that we had slept on because that was somewhere where I could lie down and he could make me secure. Angus straps an ice axe to Jonathan's leg as a makeshift splint. His nerve endings scream in protest as the bone straightens out against the metal. Then Angus starts lowering Jonathan down 100 meters or so back towards the ledge. They go slowly, but the wind repeatedly clatters Jonathan into the rock face.
After a painstaking hour or so, he is down on the ledge, 15 meters from last night's bivvy spot. But how to get the rest of the way? As snow swirls about him, Jonathan props himself up on his elbows and stares straight ahead. He has no choice but to haul himself along the narrow traverse. Every time my leg moves...
and goes up or down or touches anything, I get these bolts of excruciating pain. And the pain was so intense and, you know, I'd lost quite a lot of blood that my vision started to deteriorate a bit and I couldn't see to the sides. I could kind of only see like a little tunnel quite narrowly in front of me and I felt that I was maybe slipping out of consciousness.
With a massive drop, near centimeters to his right, he creeps forward one agonizing inch at a time. Finally, he collapses onto the ground at the bivvy site, panting heavily. I think that crawl at 15 meters, just 45 feet along a kind of flattish ridge was one of the biggest challenges of my life, to be honest. Just, it took everything I had.
I was absolutely exhausted. I felt it had drained almost all, the whole experience, you know, the loss of blood and the pain and the injury and everything. And that exertion to get to the ledge had sort of drained me of so much of my kind of lifeblood and energy. It's at least another hour before Angus is able to join him on the ledge. They check his leg. Luckily, it seems the bleeding has slowed.
Which means the immediate danger of hemorrhaging has passed. This buys them some time. Angus helps the shivering Jonathan into a sleeping bag and makes sure he's securely fastened to the rock face. The ropes and ice screws will at least prevent him from rolling off and falling to his death. Then they must work out the next stage of the plan. It was really clear at that point. I think that Angus couldn't get me down on his own. There was just no way. I was in too bad shape. It just wasn't possible.
So I think we both agreed that the only way to kind of proceed, the only chance of like getting me off was if he abseiled back down the route, went down to base camp, goes down to the roadhead to call out rescue services, to call out like the Indian Army to come with a helicopter and, you know, pull me off the mountain and get me to some sort of civilization where they have a hospital.
A helicopter won't be able to land up on this ledge. Angus will need to come back with others, then lower Jonathan to a location from where a chopper can extract him. All of this will take several days at least. As Angus bids farewell and leaves, in his heart Jonathan doubts he'll last that long. And so he kind of made sure I was secure, I had some water, and he said goodbye and started to abseil off the route.
I guess honestly, you know, as he left, I was pretty sure I wouldn't see him again. The statistics are that 72 hours after you have had an untreated compound fracture, that's where the bones go through skin, three quarters of people are dead. There's no shying away from the reality that once a big open wound, massive open wound is infected, you're in deep, deep trouble. It's late afternoon, Wednesday, September the 2nd.
Angus had just been through pretty
torturous ordeal himself in terms of getting me down to the ledge and he was then going to abseil all the way back down the mountain anything could happen to him absolutely anything and if he doesn't get down or you know so there's a he has some problem then like that's it finished I'm I'm over because nobody knows what's going on up here Jonathan tries to keep his spirits up two days provided nothing further goes awry that's how long it should take for Angus to return with help
Jonathan is young and fit. His lungs and heart are strong from years of mountaineering. And his cool-headed rationality should keep him from panicking. There's something else too. He has survival in his DNA. I think my own personal background gave me a very strong sense of survival and issues around survival because my father was a Holocaust survivor.
He was a German Jew living in Nuremberg at the rise of the Nazis and my grandfather was beaten to death in Kristallnacht and my mother's family came from a place called Auschwitzium which is where Auschwitz was built. I think that gave me some kind of acute awareness of what it is to survive and maybe a desire to survive. Jonathan wraps himself in his sleeping bag and squeezes his eyes shut.
Seven hours have passed since the accident. The sun drops lower in the sky.
The searing pain in Jonathan's leg has now receded to a dull, persistent throb as long as he lies absolutely still. Every minute feels like an hour, every hour a day. With nothing else to do, he is relieved to find his camera in his pocket. He peers into the viewfinder and snaps a couple of pictures of the sprawling mountain range below. I do remember taking some photographs. I mean, it was quite a spectacular location, amazing vista.
Not in a morbid way, but I really did think, well, you know, almost certainly these are the last photographs I'm ever going to take, so I might as well get some nice ones. It's now about six o'clock in the evening. Jonathan watches as the light hits the mountains, turning gold, then pink and purple. The sun melts slowly into the horizon before night finally descends across the Himalayas. His isolation is complete. When it got dark, I mean, it does feel incredibly lonely.
And you just, I felt just like totally alone in the world at that point, I think. I'm not in the slightest bit religious, not religious at all. But I do remember I just sort of saying over and over in my head, God help me. And the God there was not a religious God. It was, I think I was appealing to the universe. I was appealing to the world, help me, get me out of here.
Jonathan squeezes his sleeping bag tighter and pulls the zip up to his chin. The temperature is below freezing now. He cups his gloved hands over his mouth and breathes into them, savoring the fleeting warmth. He knows hypothermia is likely, but as the hours drag on and the night deepens, his insulating gear and sleeping bag seem to be doing the trick. The cold is biting, but not life-threatening, at least not yet.
Eventually dawn appears at the base of the clouds, but daylight brings no respite from the grinding passage of time. In fact, Jonathan now has a constant reminder of how little of that he has left. A putrid odor has started drifting up from inside his sleeping bag. The interrupted blood flow is turning his leg black, the result of tissue death or gangrene. With infection taking hold, the wound is seeping a rancid brown pus.
That's what Jonathan's smelling now. Blood poisoning, or septicemia, comes next. Jonathan knows all this. If only he didn't. They say knowledge is power, don't they? It's all about information, but it's a bit double-edged. It can tend to erode your confidence and belief and all sorts of things if that information is kind of acting against your best wishes or your best endeavors, if you like.
And so once I could smell my leg, I think I got quite concerned about that. There was obviously nothing I could do about it, but it was something that started to really eat away at my sort of belief that I was going to get off the mountain. As the shadows lengthen again, Jonathan's resilience starts to waver. Soon enough, night falls for a second time.
But as the bitter wind howls through the moonlit peaks, his rationality helps keep him just about level-headed. Panicking or getting like stressed or overly anxious wasn't going to help anything at all. And I knew that, I realized that and actually
If I wanted to stay alive and I wanted to help get myself off the mountain, the best thing I could do was remain calm and collected and do everything I could to sort of keep myself, I don't know if I can use the word well, but, you know, keep myself going and together. Because if I wasn't together, like, it would be so much harder. By just before dawn on Friday, it's been over 40 hours since the accident. Jonathan doesn't dare sleep.
Sometimes you hear people say, you know, they look back at their life, they sort of think about the regrets, they think about things they wish they'd done differently. I didn't really do any of that.
I had lots of time. I mean, the only thing I had was time. So yeah, I thought about things. I thought about my life. Of course, I thought about family and friends and how they'd react to this if I didn't get off the mountain. My main concern was how long would it take Angus to get down and how long would it then take someone to get a rescue organized and a helicopter to come out.
Perhaps I lack imagination, I don't know, but there wasn't much else going through my head. Calm logic is prevailing over fear. But as the hours tick by at a glacial pace, logic also leads Jonathan to some darker places. He knows he won't last much longer without antibiotics. It might already be too late. Is he really worth the risk to Angus and the others? You know, in these extreme environments, rescues put the rescuers at risk.
And I felt that potentially I could be putting other people at high risk and I wasn't going to survive anyway. So like, why would I do that? And so it did seem, you know, I did at times I thought maybe it's best actually if I just kind of put them out of that risk by just rolling off the ledge. And that seemed like the most rational thing to do in some ways. But again...
Cold rationality bumps up against something else in him, something powerful and innate. I guess unless you really think it's the only thing you can do, really your last option, then you will explore all the other ways out, won't you? And so I didn't. And I thought, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try and get out of this.
I did think about what Angus would think and how it would be for him. We've been through some really wild experiences and narrow scrapes and ups and downs. You know, he's one of my closest friends. Imagine what he would feel and think after all that effort of abseiling down and going back to base camp and climbing back up. And I wasn't there.
That would be pretty cruel. And so I felt that if there was a chance that I'd survive and that they'd put all that effort in just to get up to me, then let's give it a go. Jonathan starts crying out for help from the ledge. At about that point, I thought, well, I don't know what I was thinking, really. You know, perhaps I was starting to become a bit delirious, but I just started shouting like, hello, hello, hello.
I either do nothing at all, I just lie there, completely passive, or I do something. And the only something available to me was to shout, like, "Is anyone there? Hello, I'm here." Let somebody, maybe the universe, let the universe know that I'm still alive, I'm still here. His voice reverberates through the void, insignificant against the vastness. But then, a few moments later,
At that moment I just, you know, I was totally overwhelmed with emotion and just thought,
Like, they're here. Someone is coming to save me. And that was the first point after this horrendous ordeal where I had some sense of hope. A few moments later, peering over the edge, Jonathan sees two brightly colored helmets bobbing up through the early morning mist.
Just to see two other human beings there who had come to get me, I can't describe how sort of reassuring and sense of hope that that gave me and kind of uplift, you know, lifting my spirits and my energy levels. And yeah, it was very, very emotional. And I probably the happiest I've ever been to see another human being.
50 hours after the accident, Jonathan is finally reunited with Angus. With him is another climber called Luke from Base Camp. Together, they're going to try to carry Jonathan down to safety. They give him some powerful painkillers and antibiotics to fight the infection. Then they discuss the descent. Angus would lower...
me on one rope and Luke on another rope. And Luke would help me down because I was completely unable to do anything for myself. And so he would stop me bashing into the rock as we were lowered and try and protect my leg from getting bashed into the rock. Because every time my leg moved, you know, I'd get a spasm of pain. And so slowly, slowly, they managed to set up belays and lower me down the mountain.
I was very ill. I mean, you know, I was in a bad way. As they were lowering me down the mountain and we'd stop and if there was a patch of snow, I would see all the blood on the snow and realize that even after four days I was losing blood. And, you know, that can only happen for so long before there isn't any more. He's by no means out of the woods. At the rate they're moving, it will be another two days before they're back at base camp.
It takes all afternoon just to down climb the first section of Topendia. When it starts getting dark, they have no choice but to stop and set up their bivvy bags. Jonathan is deteriorating quickly now. The concept of a day became meaningless for me. It was light and then it was dark, but
I was so out of control over my own destiny, I had no influence over my own destiny that I didn't really think about what time of day it was. It was just this sort of cycle of, "Okay, it's light, let's keep going. It's dark, we have to stop." Everything kind of merged into just this linear process of, "What do we do next?" When the sun comes up on Saturday, September 5th, they continue their painstaking journey down the mountain.
the mountain that has kept Jonathan imprisoned for nearly a week now. But finally, sometime that afternoon, a distinctive sound filters through the haze, bringing him back to reality. A chopper is cruising towards them, but there still isn't anywhere for the helicopter to land. It turns tail and flies away. In a heartbeat, joy turns to despair. It kind of hovered, it circled around. I think it could see us. We could sort of see...
see someone in the helicopter, but it circled and turned and went back out and we had no idea why. So for a moment we felt, or at least I felt really elated, but then that went to frustration and deep, deep, deep, deep disappointment very quickly. The three climbers have no choice but to continue under their own steam. Finally, after two brutal days, they arrive back at their advanced camp at the foot of the glacier.
To their surprise and utter relief, there's a gaggle of people waiting for them there. What happened was that some of the villagers had come up to see if they could help or see what was going on and try and help. And they brought some planks of wood up and they concocted this makeshift stretcher that they strapped me to, these planks of wood. And...
because there was this boulder field between the mountain and base camp and it was really rough. The boulders were like meters high. And so they negotiated this boulder field on this makeshift stretcher and carried me down to base camp. Jonathan lies back on the makeshift gurney. There's nothing more he or Angus can do now. The following morning, an Indian army helicopter transfers him from base camp to a hospital in the town of Jammu. I think at that point, I felt that
There really was a chance that I was going to get out, that, you know, I could survive because I got off the mountain. The most dangerous part was over. Those small moments of lucidity that I did have, I think I realized that there was a real chance that I could survive. Jonathan blinks up at white fluorescent lights as he's wheeled through the emergency room. The doctors confirm his self-diagnosis. The rock shattered his tibia and fibula and took a fist-sized chunk out of his shin.
He's suffering from acute blood loss as well as gangrene from the compound fracture. If he hadn't received antibiotics when he did, he probably wouldn't be alive right now. After returning to the UK, Jonathan undergoes extensive surgery and, incredibly, avoids amputation. The recovery is long and painful nonetheless. Nine operations.
Four years on crutches, you know, in and out of hospital, countless rounds of IV intravenous antibiotics because I had this infection in the bone and they just couldn't get rid of it.
So I had this ulcer on my leg that sort of used to was oozing stuff that looked a bit like cottage cheese. And you know, that was for years. And I can remember waking up at night sometimes, sort of maybe a year or two after the accident, and I would just be swimming, literally swimming in my own sweat. The bed would be soaking because I had this incredible fever and I just couldn't shake off this infection.
Gradually, very, very gradually, the infection subsided, the ulcer disappeared. I was still on crutches, but I found that I could walk maybe three steps with a little bit of weight on the leg. And over about a year, it went from steps to walking to 10 meters, 15 meters, something like that. And gradually and gradually, it just improved and improved. After finally losing the crutches,
Jonathan steadily works back up to cycling the eight miles to work each morning. These days, 30 years on, he's back to climbing mountains and running ultramarathons. And what of Angus? The incredible strain that he underwent in saving Jonathan's life did take its toll. I think that Angus has found it very difficult and I know that after the expedition he pretty much completely gave up climbing.
That said, the two remain close and Jonathan even persuades Angus to come climbing with him again, but this time they choose the milder terrain of the West Country. I think that that was really good for both of us actually to kind of bond over a rope if you like together and to share those sort of experiences again and I think that really helped.
I think everything is life-changing in some ways, some in big ways and some in small. Every experience you have moulds you in some way or other. This obviously was a massive experience and it affects me every day in different ways. Just in sort of things I can do and I've just had some surgery on my ankle, you know, maybe partly because of the biomechanical imbalance in my legs. So it's so difficult to say who I'd be if it hadn't happened.
I still really, really love being in a natural environment. And that's something that I treasure when I do do it. I think I do have a very strong survival instinct. You don't know until you need to use it, whether you do or not. But I guess I do. And, you know, I wanted, I was keen to sort of live the rest of my life, really. In the next episode, we meet Chris Lemons.
He's a commercial diver working on oil rigs off the coast of Scotland. It's his job to carry out maintenance tasks hundreds of feet below the surface. But when a freak accident leaves him cut off from his support team, Chris finds himself alone on the seabed with just a few minutes worth of oxygen left in his tank. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen to Chris' story today as a Noisa Plus subscriber.
