BY ALAN SIMPSON
A
FRACTURED knee proved to be the luckiest break of all for a student who fell
800ft while mountain climbing.
Without that injury Sarah Woodroffe could have ended up crippled for life,
doctors revealed yesterday.
She had broken her neck, which would have almost certainly left her severely
paralysed if she had managed to walk. But the pain from the knee injury
prevented her making the attempt As she left hospital in Glasgow yesterday,
wearing a neck brace and leaning on walking sticks, Sarah was looking forward
to making a complete recovery within a year.
"When I slipped on the mountain I thought, 'Oh no, when on Earth am I
going to stop? Please let me stop soon.' I could hear myself saying 'ouch' as I
went down and down. My ice axe would not stick and I dropped it on my way down.
There were boulders where I fell, and in between the ice I went through two
areas of them.
"I came to rest on a snow slope. I had no idea I'd broken my neck. If it
hadn't been for my knee, which hurt quite a lot, I would have walked down the
mountain.
"I was absolutely determined that I was not going to die on that mountain
but all I could do was lie in the snow." Sarah, from Lincoln, fell the
equivalent distance of toppling off Britain's tallest building, Canary Wharf in
London's Wapping. She was descending 3,770ft Bidean nam Bian in Glencoe with
fellow Durham University student Alex Bowden on January 5 .
The Glencoe mountain rescue team were astonished when she called out to them as
they struggled to find her in zero visibility. Eating cherry cake and drinking
tea from her flask had helped her surivive her five-hour ordeal. She did not
realise how badly she had been hurt until she was airlifted to the spinal
injuries unit at Glasgow's Southern Gen-eral Hospital. She had fractured a
vertebra in her neck which had been prevented from going through her spinal
cord only by a cushion of soft skin. "Sarah is very lucky indeed,"
said senior registrar Jennifer Brown. "Not a great deal of force was
needed to push the fragments of bone back through the vertebra into the spinal
cord. This would have caused loss of movement in arms and legs."
© Express Newspapers Ltd
| New Stuff | Stories | CD's DVD's | Videos | Message Board | Home | Monthly Specials | Links | Members Only | Ads | Bulletin Board |
NBAK |