[Spliff]

Most of you have already heard the story of Aron Ralston, the hiker who cut off his own arm after becoming trapped by a rock for several days in the Utah wilderness. Well, he's been telling the story himself over at the Guardian Unlimited. The description of the actual amputation is astonishing. I can't imagine myself every having the stomach to do this, but in such a dire predicament, maybe I would.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

To brush the dirt off my trapped arm, away from the open wound, I pick up my knife. Sweeping the grit off my thumb, I accidentally gouge myself and rip away a thin piece of decayed flesh. It peels back like a skin of boiled milk before I catch what is going on. I already knew my hand had to be decomposing. Without circulation, it has been dying since I became entrapped. Whenever I considered amputation, it had always been under the premise that the hand was dead and would have to be amputated once I was freed. But I hadn't known how fast the putrefaction had advanced since Saturday afternoon.

Out of curiosity, I poke my thumb with the blade. It punctures the epidermis as if it is dipping into a stick of room-temperature butter, and releases a tell-tale hiss of escaping gas. Though the smell is faint to my desensitised nose, it is abjectly unpleasant, the stench of a carcass.

All I want now is to simply rid myself of any connection to this decomposing appendage.

I don't want it.

It's not a part of me.

I scream out in pure hate, shrieking as I batter my body to and fro against the canyon walls, losing every bit of composure that I've struggled so intensely to maintain. Then I feel my arm bend unnaturally in the unbudging grip of the chockstone.

An epiphany strikes me with the magnificent glory of a holy intervention and instantly brings my seizure to a halt: if I torque my arm far enough, I can break my forearm bones.

Holy Christ, Aron, that's it. That's ****ing it!

I put my left hand under the boulder and push hard, to exert a maximum downward force on my radius bone. As I slowly bend my arm down and to the left, a pow! reverberates like a muted cap-gun shot up and down Blue John Canyon. I don't say a word, but I reach to feel my forearm. There is an abnormal lump on top of my wrist. I pull my body away from the chockstone and down again, simulating the position I was just in, and feel a gap between the serrated edges of my cleanly broken arm bone.

Without further pause and again in silence, I hump my body up over the chockstone, with a single purpose in my mind. Smearing my shoes against the canyon walls, I push with my legs and grab the back of the chockstone with my left hand, pulling with every bit of ferocity I can muster, hard, harder, and a second cap-gun shot ends my ulna's anticipation.

Sweating and euphoric, I again touch my right arm two inches below my wrist. Both bones have splintered in the same place.

I am overcome with the excitement of having solved the riddle of my imprisonment. Hustling to deploy the shorter and sharper of my multi-tool's two blades, I push the knife into my wrist, watching my skin stretch inwardly, until the point pierces and sinks to its hilt. In a blaze of pain, I know the job is just starting. With a glance at my watch - it is 10.32am - I motivate myself: "OK, Aron, here we go. You're in it now."

My first act is to sever, with a downward sawing motion, as much of the skin on the inside surface of my forearm as I can, without tearing any of the noodle-like veins close to the skin. Once I've opened a large enough hole in my arm, I stow the knife, holding its handle in my teeth, and poke first my left forefinger and then my left thumb inside my arm and feel around. Sorting through the bizarre and unfamiliar textures, I make a mental map of my arm's inner features. I feel bundles of muscle fibres and, working my fingers behind them, find two pairs of cleanly fractured but jagged bone ends. Now I know that soon I will be free of the rest of my crushed dead hand.

Prodding and pinching, I can distinguish between the hard tendons and ligaments, and the soft, rubbery feel of the more pliable arteries. I should avoid cutting the arteries until the end if I can help it at all, I decide.

Sort, pinch, rotate, slice.

[cszar2001]

There`s a picture of him climbing with a prosthesis in the latest issue of Time Magazine - incredible.
It was the only way for him to survive.

[demograph68]

I think I'm gonna faint....

[storer]

i would faint, except i decided not to read it.

[Spliff]

Here's the rest of the amputation:

Ten, 15, or maybe 20 minutes slip past me. I am engrossed in making the surgical work go as fast as possible. The surgery is slowing down now that I have come to a stubbornly durable tendon, and I don't want to lose blood unnecessarily while I'm still trapped. I'll need every bit of it for the hike to my truck.

Setting the knife down on the chockstone, I pick up the neoprene tubing of my CamelBak, which has been sitting there unused for the past two days. I cinch the black insulation tube in a double loop around my forearm, three inches below my elbow. Next, I quickly attach a carabiner into the tourniquet and twist it tight.

"Why did I have to suffer all this extra time?" God, I must be the dumbest guy ever to have had his hand trapped by a boulder. It took me six days to figure out how I could cut off my arm.

Continuing with the surgery, I clear out the last muscles surrounding the tendon and cut a third artery. I still haven't uttered even an "Ow!", I don't think, to verbalise the pain; it's a part of this experience, no more important to the procedure than the colour of my tourniquet.

I now have relatively open access to the tendon. Sawing aggressively with the blade, I still can't put a dent in the amazingly strong fibre. It's like a doubly thick strip of reinforced box-packaging tape. I can't cut it, so I reconfigure my multi-tool for the pliers. Using them to bite into the edge of the tendon, I squeeze and twist, tearing away a fragment. Yes, this will work just fine. I tackle the most brutish task.

Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.

"This is gonna make one hell of a story to tell my friends," I think. "They'll never believe how I had to cut off my arm. Hell, I can barely believe it, and I'm watching myself do it."

Little by little, I rip through the tendon until I totally sever the twine-like filament, then switch the tool back to the knife. There is also a pale white nerve strand, as thick as a swollen piece of angel-hair pasta. I put the knife's edge under the nerve and pluck it, like lifting a guitar string two inches off its frets, until it snaps. It recalibrates my personal scale of what it feels like to be hurt - it's as though I have thrust my arm into a cauldron of magma.

It is 11:32am, Thursday, May 1 2003. Pulling tight the remaining connective tissues of my arm, I rock the knife against the wall, and the final thin strand of flesh tears loose; tensile force rips the skin apart more than the blade cuts it.

I fall back against the far wall of the canyon: I AM FREE!

I glance at the bloody afterbirth smeared on the chockstone and the northern canyon wall. The spattering on the chockstone hides the dark mass of my amputated hand and wrist, but the white bone ends of my abandoned ulna and radius protrude visibly from the gory muddle.

[demograph68]

OMG...

[storer]

Originally posted by demograph68:
OMG...

that is the FUNNIEST. EMOTICON. EVER.

[entrox]

I'd say this is the definition of 'bad-ass'.

[mdc]

omg! that is crazy.

[videian28]

wow

[macroy]

Tom Brokaw had a special with him a few weeks back (Dateline?) - After he freed' himself, dude had to scale down another cliff (60ft?) and hike miles before he ran into a couple hiking with their kid.

They went back to the exact spot where he was stuck... pretty amazing story.

[ManOfSteal]

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