ROUND 1
I think any serious climber has been in much the same situation… Project blown due to injury—a split tip, tweaked finger, or pulled muscle. That’s where I was in 2017.
“Damn it, I can’t believe it… I’ve blown our projects! Not now, not when we are so close, this will put us back months!” The thoughts are agonising enough to distract me from my right knee, which I suspect I have either dislocated or broken.
I’m shattered, I’ve totally ruined my ability to climb. My knee is equally shattered, but the greater pain seemed to be the destruction of my dreams, something far harder to accept at the time than the mere physical injuries. How am I going to explain this to the guys?
To add insult to injury, the attending paramedics deny me my Joe Simpson moment. I’m only several metres from their ambulance. I tell them I can crawl, they tell me to await a suitable stretcher. I attempt to crawl, unsuccessfully. They restrain and medicate me further. At the hospital no breaks are found and I’m discharged in a leg brace to get follow-up scans to further diagnose.
Later follow-up reveals I have completely ruptured the MCL, ACL and PCL, ripped off a small bit of bone with a tendon, and suffered a rather large tear to my meniscus. The doctors recommend surgery to replace or repair the cruciate ligaments.
“What do you want to be able to do after surgery?” they ask.
I explain my intention to return to “climbing, off-track bushwalking, snowshoeing, ice climbing and trekking”.
The surgeon is more focussed on me “actually being able to even walk properly, let alone climb”, with no guarantees of the former and little likelihood of the later. To my mind, all those things I listed are part of “walking normally” and I am committed to continuing my climbing career.
Due to the extended wait time, I decide to embark upon a
