It is disturbing and overwhelming, but exhilarating as well. I love them; but this is a much more profound feeling of euphoria that you arrive at, because you've also been through a great deal to get there.
Not as much as he has, obviously, but you've participated in it in some way. Aron, do not give up. Now wearing a prosthetic arm, Aron Ralston still climbs mountains and explores canyons.
He also travels the world as an inspirational speaker. Search Search. Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 12, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. The year before his accident, Ralston quit his job as an engineer with Intel to climb all Colorado's "fourteeners" — its peaks over 14,ft.
In May , he began "canyoneering" in Utah, navigating the narrow passages of Bluejohn with a mixture of free-climbing, daring jumps and climbing with ropes.
He was negotiating a 10ft drop in a 3ft-wide canyon listening to his favourite band, Fish, when he dislodged a boulder he thought was stable. I fell a few feet, in slow motion, I look up and the boulder is coming and I put my hands up and try to push myself away and it collides and crushes my right hand. The next second, the pain struck. In an "adrenalised rage", for 45 minutes he "cursed like a pirate". Then he reached for his water bottle. As he drank, he had to force himself to stop.
Having failed to tell anyone where he was going, he knew he would not be found. It was like, all right, brute force isn't going to do it. This is the stop-think-observe-plan phase of rational problem-solving. I have to think my way out of here. He ruled out the most drastic option — suicide — but the next most drastic alternative came to him immediately.
That little back-and-forth. Then, 'Wait a minute. I'm not talking to myself. That's just crazy. You're not talking to yourself, Aron.
After two days spent fruitlessly chipping away at the rock with his knife and devising a clever but futile system of pulleys with his climbing clips and ropes to hoist the boulder clear — he was defeated because climbing rope is stretchy and he couldn't obtain the required tension — he put his knife to his arm, only to find it was so blunt he couldn't even cut his body hair.
In Boyle's film, when Ralston realises he can use the knife like a dagger rather than a saw, the camera follows the knife's journey into his flesh so the audience can see blade come to rest against bone inside his arm.
This scene is "beautiful" to Ralston. He vividly remembers how it felt to have the knife in his arm, touching his bone "because it meant, I'm gonna die. It went from, 'I did it! By the fifth day, Ralston had found "peace" in "the knowledge that I am going to die here, this is my grave". In the middle of his final night, hallucinating through hunger, lack of water and 3C temperatures, he had a vision of a small boy.
I see myself scoop him up and there's this look in his eyes, 'Daddy, can we play now? Now it's like, I am going to get through this night. The next morning, finally, came the rage and its revelation — that Ralston could fling himself against the boulder to break his own bones. From then, it was easy. The snap of his bones "like, pow!
It's an 'it'. It's no longer my arm. As I picked up the knife, I was very cool and collected. With massive willpower combined with the hormonal surge, such a person could survive in some pain with only small amounts of water — no more than three days, however. Drinking urine would probably worsen dehydration because of the salts it contains called urates. Several sources, including the U. Army Field Manual, advise against drinking urine in survival situations.
The effect is similar to that of drinking seawater, in which more fluids must be excreted than taken in to get rid of the excess salt introduced. In the operating room, amputations are done using a modified saw. This is, in fact, how Ralston described the actual event in Outside magazine in and WorldWide magazine in , though the film did not show this.
The film shows Ralston applying a tourniquet before removing the arm, although in his real-life account he reveals that he forgot to apply the tourniquet. Nader Paksima, hand surgeon and chief of orthopaedic surgery at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in New York, believes that the blood vessels would be mostly clotted from the initial injury and there would be little bleeding — and that therefore the tourniquet might not be completely necessary.
Mark Adelman, chief of vascular surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center, agrees and says that — as the film shows — some bleeding would occur during the cutting because the arteries would not yet have gone into spasm.
But once the limb is off, he adds, almost all the bleeding would stop as the arteries spasm and contract. Amputating the forearm would involve breaking the radius and ulnar bones.
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