THAT’S ME


Pete Rowlands A


39, BRITISH MOUNTAIN GUIDE, STOCKPORT


ustria. April 12, 2013. British mountain guide Pete Rowlands is leading four clients down a pisted track in the Neidertal Valley. It was half-past noon and the situation – on gentle sunny slopes – seemed unthreatening. Then Pete heard a loud noise. He looked up to see an avalanche, approximately 100 metres wide, coming towards the team. He shouted a warning and the team scrambled to safety. Pete attempted to ski out of the path of the avalanche but just failed to make it. A wall of wet snow, some thousand tonnes in weight and travelling at 20 mph, smashed into him.


The force knocked him to the ground and drove him forward, downwards for 460 feet towards the valley until he came to a halt in a glacial river. He was unconscious, but the buoyancy of his rucksack kept his head out of the water and prevented him from drowning. It took some time for the others to reach him and drag his smashed, drenched and hypothermic body out of the freezing water. A helicopter soon arrived and flew Pete to hospital in Innsbruck. Forty-five minutes after the accident, he was on the operating table having shards of skull removed from his brain.


In a coma, his survival was in doubt. Yet, against many odds,


after ten weeks without consciousness he awoke. Initially unable to move or speak, he soon began fighting to regain control of his body. After 19 months in a hospital bed he was discharged. He moved back to Stockport and worked hard to regain independence. Today, five years since the accident, and despite severe restrictions still on his movements and speech, he lives independently and is fighting every day to get stronger.


There’s one photo of me in the coma. My dad took it, and my mum is leaning over me. He told me he took it as he thought that would be the last photograph he had of his son still alive.


The clarity of my mind was an amazing thing. To the onlooker I was still deep in a coma, but I vividly remember hearing my dad's voice at one point and thinking, 'Yeah, a bit pre-occupied at the moment, just need another month and I'm all yours.' The first audible noise I made was when my mum pleaded, ‘Come on, Pete! Just say something.’ After four months in a coma, I managed, ‘Mum.’ I gained consciousness. I can vividly recall staring at the ceiling thinking, 'Ok. I can't move and I can't talk; far from ideal but I'm alive.' My body was still ingesting the drugs that put me in a coma, and the nightmares it gave me can only be described as brutal and terrifying. It was just like the scene in Trainspotting,


when Renton goes cold turkey.


The crazy thing is that the avalanche actually saved my life. In hospital, things took an interesting turn one day when I shat myself in bed at the same time as the doctor came into the room. Embarrassed and not knowing what to do, I froze. When the doctor saw the strange position I was in, he thought it was the result of damage to my neck arteries from the fall and sent me off for a scan. He came back and told me I had lymphatic cancer. Think about this. If I hadn’t had the fall, I’d never have been in hospital. If I hadn’t shit myself they’d never have checked my neck out. I know me. As the cancer developed, I’d have passed it off as man flu and would never have gone to the doctor about it. By now, I’d be dead. As it stands I’m in now remission and have a year before I’m in the clear.


I remember my internal dialog returning. Hearing this voice in my head. I must have been totally devoid of thought for nine months.


I don’t think there’s any better preparation for what I went through than being a climber. That experience, dreading for your life, moments of great fear and enormous effort, keeping going, then the moments of sheer joy that follows it all. That’s what got me through.


The human brain is plastic, it can re-wire itself. In the early days, they thought I’d die. If I didn’t, I’d only be able to blink to communicate and would need callipers to stop my limbs distorting.


I had to make my body move again. As I lay in bed, I found that if I stretched my legs, I could touch the bottom of the bed with my feet. If I really tried, I could actually push the bottom of the bed. I pressed the bottom of the bed for days in tiny movements, like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Eventually, I managed to push and move the bottom of the bed. So started the painstakingly long process of learning to walk again. I was a teenager in the 90s and love Techno and Drum and Bass. The simplest and most fun thing I found was to turn my stereo up and, with LTJ Bukem ringing in my ears, try to dance. My balance returned and armed with a stick I was able to walk. This was fantastic. I was lucky enough to walk, proudly, into Christie's Hospital for chemotherapy and radiotherapy.


For those who require similar treatment, my heart goes out to you. Be strong. I can only tell you the truth; Radiotherapy was pure, living hell.


SUMMIT#90 | SUMMER 2018 | 27


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