I knew for a fact there would be no helicopters coming that day, and the nearest hospital was in Lukla – ten day’s trek away. No hope of Mark doing that, then. The only way to get him out was by helicopter, and with the avalanche and earthquake, no helicopter was likely to make it up to us anytime soon.
No one was coming to help us. We were all alone, stranded halfway up the highest mountain in the world, with the temperature starting to plummet towards -15°C. We were as far from civilisation as we could possibly be.
On the other hand, I realised it was actually a stroke of luck that there had been no helicopters at Base Camp at the time of the avalanche. A fragile chopper would have stood no chance against the force of the impact. It would have been decimated. The debris would have been even more dangerous – propeller blades, heavy electric equipment – so it might merely have added to the death toll.
“My theet… my theet,” said Mark, through pursed lips.
“Your what?” I asked, bending over him and putting my ear to his lips.
“My theet.”
I came back to my senses. His feet weren’t in the sleeping bag; they were lying limply beside it.
I realised they were sodden wet. After the impact, he had stumbled around Base Camp with a possible broken neck and with no shoes on. How was he alive?
I got down on my knees and carefully removed the soaking wet socks, being careful not to jerk him.
His feet were like blocks of ice – they didn’t feel like feet at all. The skin was hard, with an alien bluish hue that concerned me greatly. His blood had all gone to his core, naturally. His feet had inflated; they were bloated like puffer fish.
“We’ve got to warm his feet up, we’ve got to warm his feet up,” I repeated in my head, over and over again.
If he caught frostbite, his already slim chances of survival would be effectively destroyed.
John was over on the other side of the tent, checking on some of the other patients. I beckoned him over, cautious of panicking Mark.
I whispered, “Can you see if you can get some socks for the injured? Just ask everybody in our expedition if we can borrow loads of clean socks.”
After John left, I grabbed the small gas heater and positioned it about a foot away from Mark’s feet. I didn’t want to burn him – it was likely he wouldn’t notice if I did anyway – but it was vital to slowly warm his feet back up again.
I kneeled over him like a monk at prayer, all the while breathing in that putrid smell of blood, sweat and fear.
“Can you feel that?” I asked, touching his feet.
He couldn’t feel anything.
Any normal human could and would be unable to keep their skin in such close proximity to the gas heater for that length of time. The fact that he couldn’t feel it at all concerned me greatly. He had clearly lost a lot of blood, and the rest had gone to his core… He was, in fact, dying.
John returned, clutching a mismatched array of hiking socks. The good thing about climbing types is that they always seem to carry an excessive amount of socks.
Carefully, we pulled two pairs of socks on to the frozen blocks of ice at the end of Mark’s legs. I pulled the heater slightly closer.
“Can you feel that?” I asked again.
Nothing.
John and I exchanged concerned looks. In the best of situations, frostbite is a difficult condition to deal with. We were not in the best of situations; we didn’t know what we were going to do.
“Can you feel that?” I said – I squeezed his sweaty, stinky feet with my blood-soaked hands. “Mark, can you feel that?”
“I can’th…” he began. I closed my eyes. “Yeth… yeth…”
He could feel something! That meant there was still some live tissue in his feet, that his feet weren’t dead. That was the best possible news at that point.
We kept the heater on him for another five minutes or so as the feeling gradually returned, then we slid his freshly sock-covered feet into the sleeping bag and zipped it up about halfway – it wasn’t possible to get it zipped all the way up without risking damage to his neck.
We got a second sleeping bag and put that over him as well, to try to keep him warm. We kept the gas heater nearby, blasting heat in his direction.
I think, without that heater, he would have lost his feet and probably his life.
For now though, he was reasonably stable. He was managing to breathe on his own, but I needed to get some fluid into him to replace the huge blood loss. I asked John if he could get a cup of warm water and very gently hold it to Mark’s lips, and try to get Mark to swallow some without choking. If he choked, I was terrified it would finish off his neck.
I also asked a Sherpa if he could sit in the corner, near enough that Mark could see him at all times. The only way we’d been able to position him meant that he was facing the canvas of the back of the tent – I didn’t want him to think we’d forgotten about him, or that he was all on his own. I wanted him to be able to see a human face whenever he opened his good eye, to know that we were still there for him if he should need us. I thought that terribly important for him. I thought it could help keep him alive.
He was so badly injured, so entirely dependent on my care, that it was like dealing with a small child – he was so grateful, so thankful for anything that I did to help ease his suffering.
Again, the canvas door of the tent opened. Again, I feared the worst.
A man entered, helped by two others, clutching his hands across his chest. He was clearly in a lot of pain, but appeared to be relatively coherent and was walking of his own accord.
He stood in the doorway, a little unsure. I approached him.
He was wearing an all-in-one downing summit suit, with the name ‘Tony’ typed on the front.
“Hi Tony,” I said. “Are you alright?”
He stared at me, perplexed.
“I’m not Tony,” he said.
“That’s what it says on your jacket.”
We all had downing suits, all-in-one jumpsuits, that we would wear only on summit day, when we trekked from Camp 3 to Camp 4 and from there to the summit.
When the avalanche had hit, this man had been relaxing in his tent in his pants and a T-shirt. The avalanche had ripped the tent off him and he’d lost everything. He was left out in the open, wearing nothing but his underwear and a T-shirt.
He wandered around in the snow in his socks, half-dazed, trying to find something – anything – to wear.
He came across a jumpsuit, splayed out in the snow like a corpse – another piece of debris discarded by the avalanche – and he pulled it on. He had no idea who ‘Tony’ was. That didn’t matter at the time.
“I’m Richard,” he said.
“I’m Jules.”
I asked Richard what the problem was and he indicated that it was his chest.
I pulled the jumpsuit open to have a better look. The skin across his chest was a deep purple-brown colour, like rotten fruit.
I felt each rib gently and in the middle ribs Richard let out a sharp squeal of pain.
It was clear that he had broken his ribs, so I checked his stomach to see if the breaks had caused any collateral damage. Broken ribs we could deal with; a punctured stomach or lungs would be different.
“Mate, you’re lucky,” I told him. “You’re actually fine. You’ve broken a couple of ribs, but that’s all. It’s going to hurt like hell, but that’s it – you’re going to be OK.” This seemed greatly to reassure him, as per my intention.
The avalanche had launched him clear of his tent and he’d managed to walk away with only three broken ribs. It was nothing short of a miracle. Richard was a lucky guy – although he probably didn’t feel it at the time.
I gave him some Paracetamol and a cup of warm water, which he swallowed thankfully, before I sat him on a chair.
“You’ll have to keep as still as you can – no sudden movements. There’s nothing else we can give you to ease the pain.”
I wondered how long it would be before we would see any evac choppers.
Richard groaned and grimaced as we helped him sit down, his eyes screwed up in pain. With any movement, the pain was very evident – he was one of the louder patients in the tent, but that reassured me that he was going to be fine.
“Jules, thank you… is there any food going?”
It had been a long time since breakfast. I mean, breakfast felt like a different life, a different universe – and it was now getting on for 4.30 in the afternoon.
I approached John. “People are beginning to get hungry,” I said. “We need to feed them.”
We called on Bill the chef, who knocked up a large amount of soup, which we could then distribute among the people in the mess tents.
Soon, there was silence save for the sounds of slurping and gurgling. Immediately after surviving a catastrophe, hunger isn’t important – the body focuses itself on the more pressing issue of staying alive. But when you get to somewhere safe, when you’re warm, when everything goes quiet, then hunger comes back with a vengeance.
Those who were able to move lapped the soup down like they hadn’t eaten in days. This was great, because all of them, with the exception of Richard, had lost a considerable amount of blood. It was good that they were getting some warm fluid back into their bodies.
The more severely injured were not able to feed themselves.
Mark lay quietly in the corner, facing the canvas of the tent, not making a single sound or movement. We couldn’t feed him any of the bits in the soup – the risk of his choking on them was too great, and there was no way we were going to risk sitting him upright again.
So, over the course of about half an hour, John fed Mark drop after drop of soup, sieving it, cooling it down and feeding it to him like a baby. All the while, Mark gurgled, thankful for the warmth it was bringing to his body.
The level of concentration this operation required was intense – John barely blinked the entire time, kneeling inches away from Mark’s battered and bloody face. It was an impressive spectacle to behold. I’m sure Mark will never forget it; nor will John.
The tent door opened again.
A Gurkha captain stumbled in, blood seeping down the side of his head. He steadied himself.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We were coming out of the Icefall, coming down,” he told me. “There were six of us; we were in the Icefall… We ran, we ran.”
They were clipped into the rope that marked the route through the Icefall. The captain told me how one of the team got his karabiner stuck and couldn’t move as the avalanche advanced on them.
The captain had unclipped from the rope and run. They were wearing crampons, which are unwieldy at the best of times, and impossible to run in.
He was trying to run, with the wall of snow, ice and rock hurtling along behind him, gaining all the time. Something struck him in the side of the head. He remembered nothing more.
The Gurkha captain was wearing a beanie hat, which I attempted to remove to see the damage to his head.
The blood had matted and congealed, sticking the hat to his head. I decided it was better to leave it on – removing it would only re-open the wound and could do further damage, and I had no bandages left. At the very least, the beanie hat would keep his head warm, and it was no longer bleeding.
I had no bandages, no plastic gloves – my hands were covered in blood already.
He seemed compos mentis enough. I felt confident he wasn’t in any immediate danger.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, as I seated him and gave him some Paracetamol and warm water and soup. “Is there anything to eat?”
I nipped out to ask Bill if there was anything a bit more solid than the soup that we could give to patients who weren’t so ill and who could still eat.
He whipped up a meal of rice and potatoes and brought it through in two large cauldrons, which we put just inside the mess tent, along with some bowls. We were then able to dish it out to those who wanted to eat.
Very few actually wanted any. Most people were still fairly consumed by their injuries and couldn’t focus on eating rice and potatoes – the soup had been enough.
Another member of the Gurkha regiment entered the tent and approached me, asking if he could stay with his captain.
I had cleared every other non-essential person out by this point. Everybody who was not injured had been asked to leave. Just John and I remained, taking care of the patients.
“You can stay,” I said to the Gurkha, “but you need to help me if I need you.”
He agreed to this, pulling up a chair next to the captain.
There seems to be great camaraderie among the Gurkhas.
We now had a team of three, a skeleton crew tasked with the care of all these people. It was starting to get late, the light was failing rapidly, and as it did so the temperature began to plummet.
I needed a breath of fresh air for two minutes.
I stepped outside. Stopping, taking a second to think about what was actually happening, I could feel it all welling up inside me.
I walked round to the side of the tent, out of sight. I just wanted to blub, to cry. From being around so much pain, suffering and death in one place for that extended period of time…a very cold feeling came over me.
“Stop it,” I told myself out loud. “Get a grip, get a grip. These people need help; they need you to support them in whatever little way you can.”
I slapped myself across the face again.
“Get a grip.”
I slapped myself once more, talking to myself like some sort of madman.
“Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip.”
I took a deep breath, pushed all other thoughts to the back of my mind, suppressed the horror and fear that was threatening to stop me from doing what I needed to do.
I stopped myself from thinking about anything but the task in hand, and focused on getting on with it. I needed to bury myself in the middle of it to avoid having to look at it properly.
I took a few more deep breaths, focusing on the depth of my breathing – in, out, in, out – then I stepped back into the tent, as if nothing had happened.
The next task was getting these people prepared for the night. We needed to get them all lying down and as comfortable as possible.
I stepped out of the tent and called for more mattresses and sleeping bags. I also suggested to Taka and Hachiro, whose charges were mostly less seriously injured than those we were caring for, that we move all their more serious cases into our tent, while the less seriously injured should head to the white pod for the night. That way, we could manage all the seriously injured in one tent, which would make it easier for the four of us – John, myself, Taka and Hachiro – to get at least some rest, as only one of us would need to be on duty at a time. Each of us could do a three-hour shift while the others slept.
We would also get one mess tent back to feed our expedition team, and uninjured people from other expeditions. It was very important that the uninjured stayed well and healthy, so they could help look after the injured.
This plan meant, however, that my tent would be full to the brim.
It was a major logistical process, trying to fit enough mattresses into the tent for all the injured people. This was not a neat, tidy hospital ward with everything in its place. It was a makeshift, chaotic emergency room; the result of a hundred spur-of-the-moment decisions. We had to move patients around, stand them up or shift them from chair to chair while we got the mattresses in place. The floor was also littered with people’s bags, coats, hiking equipment. John and I unceremoniously chucked out everything that wasn’t vital. We would place a mattress, find a sleeping bag, eas
e a patient into it and then move on to the next mattress, the next patient.
Two people wanted to stay sitting up, rather than lying down: the Gurkha captain, who was now in good spirits, and a Sherpa with very bad injuries – we suspected he had a broken arm, broken collarbone and a lot of broken ribs. Every time he moved, even a few inches, he was clearly in excruciating agony. The thought of lying down must have filled him with dread.
“I want to sit up,” he kept saying. We made him as comfortable as we could.
Richard, who sat with the face of a man in constant pain, also needed to be helped to lie down. I called the Gurkha who was assisting me. We carefully placed our hands under Richard’s arms and helped him to a standing position. He groaned loudly as we lifted him upright.
We moved his chair and put a mattress on the floor by the entrance to the tent. We got a sleeping bag, opened it right out – the plan was to lower him onto it and then wrap the sleeping bag around him.
We lowered him slowly. A jarring, grinding cracking noise escaped from his chest – the sound of the break scraping as he moved. He let out an almighty scream of pain.
We could feel the cracked ribs opening and closing as we lowered him. He screamed in pain again.
We managed to get him into a sitting position, tucking his legs into the sleeping bag and positioning pillows behind him.
“I’m not comfortable,” he said. “Mate, I’m not comfortable.”
What a performance it was!
We pulled his leg a bit, moved the other leg around, then the first one again. We had to move everything for him, because every time he tried to move himself he would pull his ribs.
Finally, we got him lying flat. He screamed as his ribs cracked back into position. He still wasn’t at ease. We shunted him about, and then his jumpsuit wasn’t comfortable, so we had to move that down. It took an age to sort things out to the best of our ability so that he could rest for the night.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he kept saying. His extreme appreciation for what we were trying to do was very touching. I felt very emotional. I just wanted to burst into tears. So much appreciation for what I considered to be the minimum anyone who could would have done for him.
Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest Page 12
