Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  I had been travelling for well over the intended ten hours and making good progress, but was tired and cold. I ate a chocolate bar every two hours to ward off hypothermia, but was still very weary and decided to camp on any surface that looked solid. I came to a zone of interlacing fractures. The moon had vanished and, whenever I stopped, I heard the grumble of ice on the move. I tried to avoid a trench of black water, and mounted a bridge of twelve-inch-thick slabs, buckled by floe pressure. I had the small sledge with me and the big one 500 yards to the south. I clambered over the slabs with my skis on. The sledge followed easily in my wake.

  There was no warning. A slab tilted suddenly under the sledge, which responded to gravity and, unbalancing me, pulled me backwards. I fell on my back and slid down the slab. The noise that followed was the one I most hate to hear in the Arctic, a splash as the sledge fell into the sea.

  I kicked out with my skis and flailed at the slab with both hands. One ski boot plunged into the sea and one gloved hand found an edge of the slab. Taking a firm grip I pulled my wet foot and ski out of the water. I unfastened the manhaul harness. I was already beginning to shiver. I squirmed around until I could sit on a flatter slab to inspect the sledge in the gloom. It was under water, but afloat. I hauled on the traces, but they were jammed under the slabs. Seventy days’ worth of food and thirty of fuel were on that sledge – and the communications gear. Without it, the expedition was over. A nearby slab crashed into the sea: the ice was moving. I had to save the sledge quickly. Soon I would be dangerously cold.

  With my feet hooked around a slab, I lay on my stomach and stretched my left arm under the slab to free the sledge trace. I took off my mitt so that I could feel where the rope was snagged. For a minute or so I could not find the underwater snag. Then by jiggling the rope sharply, it came free. I pulled hard and the sodden sledge rose to the surface. My wet hand was numb but I could not replace the mitt until the sledge was out of the sea. Gradually the prow rose on to a slab and water cascaded off its canvas cover. Minutes later the sledge was on ‘dry land’. I danced about like a madman. Both my mitts were back on and I used various well-tried cold hands revival techniques to restore life to the numb fingers. Usually they work and my blood returns painfully to all my fingers; this time they did not.

  I took the wet mitt off and felt the dead hand. The fingers were ramrod stiff and ivory white. They might as well have been wooden. I knew that if I let my good hand go even partially numb, I would be unable to erect the tent and start the cooker – which I needed to do quickly for I was shivering in my thin manhaul gear. I returned to the big sledge. The next thirty minutes were a nightmare. The cover zip jammed. With only five usable but increasingly numb fingers, precious minutes went by before it was free and I unpacked the tent. By the time I had eased one tent-pole into its sleeve, my teeth were chattering violently and my good hand was numb. I had to get the cooker going in minutes or it would be too late. I crawled into the partially erect tent, closed its doorzip and began a twenty-minute battle to start the cooker. I could not use the petrol lighter with my fingers, but I found some matches I could hold in my teeth.

  Starting an extremely cold petrol cooker involves careful priming so that just the right amount of fuel seeps into the pad below the fuel jet. The cold makes washers brittle and the priming plunger sticky. Using my teeth and a numb index finger, I finally worked the pump enough to squirt fuel on to the pad but was slow in shutting the valve; when I applied the match a three-foot flame reached to the roof. Luckily I had had a custom-made flame lining installed, so the tent was undamaged. And the cooker was alight – one of the best moments of my life.

  Slowly and painfully some feeling came back into the fingers of my right hand. An hour later with my body warm again, I unlaced my wet boot. Only two toes had been affected. Soon they would exhibit big blood blisters and lose their nails, but they had escaped true frostbite. All around the tent cracking noises sounded above the steady roar of the cooker. I was in no doubt as to the fate of my bad hand. I had seen enough frostbite in others to realise that I was in serious trouble. I had to get quickly to a hospital to save some fingers from the surgeon’s knife. I had to turn back.

  I hated the thought of leaving the warmth of the tent. Both hands were excruciatingly painful. I battered ice off the smaller sledge, unloaded it and hauled it back to the big sledge. I set out in great trepidation. Twice my earlier tracks had been cut by newly open leads, but fortunately needed only small diversions to detour the open water. Five hours later I was back on the ice-shelf. I erected the tent properly and spent three hours massaging my good hand and wet foot over the cooker.

  I drank hot tea and ate chocolate. I felt tired and dizzy, but the wind was showing signs of rising and I knew I should not risk a high wind chill. The journey to the hut took for ever. Once I fell asleep on the move and woke in a trough of soft snow well away from my intended route. Hypothermia is a danger at such times. When I feared its onset I often spoke to myself aloud, trying to enunciate the My Fair Lady lines about the rain in Spain, because an un-slurred voice is about the only reliable assurance that I was not on the slippery path to hypothermia and, on a solo expedition, death.

  When at length I came to the old hut, I erected the tent on the floor, clumsily started the cooker and prepared the communications gear, which we called a Flobox after Flo Howell. I spoke to Morag in Resolute Bay. She promised to evacuate me the following day on the Twin Otter scheduled flight due to change over the weather men at Eureka.

  The fingers on my left hand began to grow great liquid blisters. The pain was bad so I raided my medical stores for drugs. The next day I found an airstrip near the hut and marked its ends in the moonlight with kerosene rags. When I heard the approaching ski-plane I lit the rags and prayed the First Air pilot, not Karl this time, would not funk the landing. He didn’t, and some forty-eight hours after my arrival at the hut I was on my way to try to save my left hand. At Resolute Bay Morag did what she could with immediate dressings and took me to a nurse. Morag, who had seen me survive kidney stone cramps and other batterings, understood frostbite at first hand. She later wrote to me: ‘I have had some (frostbite) in my time and can relate to the pain. It’s awful. All you want is for it to stop. I know that when you froze your hand you bound it tight. I have always believed that you stopped the circulation by that action, and that’s what caused you to lose the fingers. There you go, that’s my one gripe over twenty years. Mo.’

  That night I flew to Iqaluit on Baffin Island where, after intravenous antibiotic therapy, a doctor started to open up the big finger blisters. After transference to the Ottawa Hospital, I was in the hands of frostbite experts, Doctors Conrad Watters and Heather O’Brien. Their initial report stated:

  The left hand demonstrates severe thermal injury to all five digits. The thumb is blistered from the mid portion and the fingers are all edematous throughout the course.

  His right foot is remarkable for areas of frostbite covering a coin-sized area of the distal great toe and a corresponding portion of the second toe on the right side. He was unaware of this injury prior to changing his clothing to begin hyperbaric treatment. I am optimistic that he can get some benefit from aggressive and immediate hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

  Over the next two weeks I spent sixty hours sitting in a long oxygen tank like a goldfish bowl. A fat Frenchman sat in the far end of the tank facing me. He had diabetes leg damage. We both watched videos (in French) on a roof-screen of our container tube. The Frenchman was constantly and noisily flatulent in the enclosed tank. When the hyperbaric treatment ended, Conrad Watters reckoned a few millimetres of my fingers had been saved. The down side was that I couldn’t see properly. Everything remained out of focus and blurred for the next three weeks.

  I called Ginny, whose immediate reaction to my being less able to help with the cattle was, ‘Typical, and we’re already shorthanded on the farm.’ To a Times reporter she commented, ‘We know several people here on Exmoor who have lost
bits of fingers or worse in farm machinery or with ferret bites. As long as Ran doesn’t leave his finger bits on the edge of the bath, as he once did with a blackened toe, I’ll be happy to see him back next week. He did put on a lot of extra weight for the expedition, so now he’ll have to take it off again. I might hide the farm machinery and give him a dung fork to clear the cowshed by hand.’

  15

  Amputations

  I returned to Britain with another failure under my belt, a scant amount raised for our charity and a disappointed sponsor. Kidney stones and frostbitten digits are no more acceptable to critics as reasons for failure than are unseasonal polar storms or crevasse accidents. I suppose that, over a twenty-six-year period of polar travel, the frostbite odds were always narrowing. This time they caught up with me, which was a shame because everything was otherwise looking good, the sledge was going well and I was in peak condition.

  There is, of course, no point in crying over spilt milk since, if you go for the big ones and you win some in your lifetime, you can be sure you will lose at others on the way. The best course, I’ve usually found, has been to shrug, note what you’ve done wrong and apply yourself quickly to trying again. This, my standard policy over the years, sadly did not look like working this time because my damaged fingers were liable to be amputated fairly shortly, which would seriously affect extreme cold projects in the future. One of my firm rules in selecting individuals for polar travel had always been to avoid anyone, however experienced or skilled, who had any history of frostbite damage. Badly bitten noses and ears were okay. Fingers and toes were not.

  I also knew that this Arctic failure, coming hot on the heels of the Bering Strait cancellation and the Antarctic solo kidney stones, was asking for trouble from the UK media, who are almost as eager to savage a failed expedition leader as a football manager who has lost a couple of key matches. Most of them enjoyed being witty at my expense. The Times offered me solid advice.

  It is a reasonable bet that if Sir Ranulph’s frostbitten hand allows it, he will be planning to trudge through the snow again. Doggedness and fortitude saved his life on this occasion, but he was fortunate to survive and time is not on his side. The older someone is, the more they are liable to suffer from hypothermia, frostbite and diseases associated with the cold. The reflexes that come into play to protect skin when its temperature is dangerously lowered are less efficient, so corrections to skin temperature may be slow and frostbite more likely. So Sir Ranulph should opt for holidays in Spain.

  Media barbs the week after I returned home from Ottawa were easily kept in perspective by the more immediate worry of what to do about my damaged fingers. They throbbed most of the time and complained loudly with needle-sharp pain when brought into contact, however lightly, with any object, even clothing material. To avoid this, especially when trying to sleep, was often difficult. Two of my friends who were surgeons advised speedy amputation of the damaged fingers to avoid complications such as gangrene. After checking the records of a number of specialists, Ginny found a surgeon in Bristol, Donald Sammut, with a history of brilliant treatment of damaged fingers. The south-west of England produces very few frostbite cases, but so what? Damaged fingers are all the same once cut off, whatever the original reason for the trauma, and I was greatly relieved when Donald agreed to deal with my fingers.

  A friend from the Institute of Naval Medicine in Portsmouth, for whom I had previously completed cold water research work in his immersion tank, telephoned out of the blue. Under no circumstances, he warned, should I undergo any amputations until at least five months after the date of the accident.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, perplexed.

  The Navy surgeon explained that he had seen many divers with toe and finger damage which had been operated on too early before the semi-traumatised tissue that lies between the dead ends and the undamaged stumps had had time to heal properly.

  ‘This is the tissue,’ he stressed, ‘that will be needed – after the dead finger ends are cut away – to stretch over the stumps. So it must be strong, elastic, healthy tissue; not severely damaged, as it is now. More fingers have been shortened unnecessarily by premature surgery than by the original damage from the bends or from frostbite. So don’t you let them cut you up too early, Ran, or you’ll regret it. Your new stump material will simply fail to do its job and you’ll end up back on the chopping block with ever shorter fingers.’

  Donald’s own policy on the best timing for the surgery was similar. He advised me ‘The best method is to advance the “frontier” skin, which is immediately adjacent to the frostbite and is inflamed. It is crucial that this skin returns to supple normality before any attempt is made to dissect and advance it.’

  Throughout this period I took penicillin to keep gangrene from developing in the open cracks where the damaged but live flesh met the dead and blackened ends. Mary Bromiley, the physiotherapist who had over twenty years dealt with my aches and pains, applied laser treatment and electrical stimulation to the stumps. Every three weeks I also drove to Bristol to Melanie Downs-Wheeler, a specialist physiotherapist, who taught me gripping and bending exercises for each semi-mummified finger, and then, the dreaded moment, out came her debridement tweezers and for the next fifteen minutes, which is all I could stand, she picked away at the dead and damaged tissue in the semi-live areas to ‘encourage healing there’.

  Most days I tried to help Ginny with the cattle and sheep. I bought her two black alpacas for her birthday. She named them Punto and Mucho and they soon became inseparable companions to the black sheep. After their bi-annual shearing they resembled Spielberg’s ET, gangly with huge liquid and appealing black eyes.

  The tax investigation into the affairs of our company and ourselves, sparked off by my enquiring back in 1995 about self-employment rules, had been ongoing ever since, at considerable cost in terms of my accountant’s responses to the voluminous questionnaires from the Revenue. Since one of the main lines of attack by the taxman was that all Ginny’s farming activities were a mere front to offset or avoid taxation, the five-year-long investigation with its often threatening overtones both worried and depressed her. No farmer worked harder or more meticulously than did Ginny, and in weather conditions that were at best sturdy, at worst foul, for Greenlands is, at 1,300 feet above sea-level, one of the highest – if not the highest – working farm in the south-west. Driving sleet and fog off the adjoining moors and the nearby Atlantic were the norm for much of the year. Midnight calving and difficult deliveries in sodden clothes were common every spring, and snow drifts would cut the farm off from the road over the moors, our only access point, for up to three weeks a year. So Ginny did not need officious taxmen telling her that her only aim in life was to defraud the Revenue. We were referred to as ‘Registered Investigation Case F18579’. An old expedition friend who had become a part-time tax commissioner in Northumberland advised us to take the matter to our local commissioners. This we eventually did, and finally the adjudicator at the court concluded that the Revenue had handled our tax affairs very badly, should pay the court costs and close the investigation. There was no compensation or apology after five years of worry and doubt.

  Our long-time expedition patron, Prince Charles, asked us to visit him at his Highgrove home. He wished me well with my pending amputations and we joked about old times with Dr Hammer. The Prince had been the active and caring patron of all my expeditions for twenty-five years, during which we had raised millions of pounds for the charities he had nominated.

  After four months of living with grotesque, witch-like talons, purple in colour, sticking out of my stumps, I could take it no longer and, with another month to go before Donald Sammut was due to cut them off, I decided to take the matter into my own hands. Each and every time over the previous sixteen weeks that my fingers had hit or merely brushed against anything, never mind something hot, I had sworn at the pain. Ginny suggested that I was becoming irritable.

  The answer was obvious. The useless finger ends
must be cut off at once, so they could no longer get in the way and hit things. I tried tentatively to cut through the smallest finger with a new pair of secateurs, but it hurt. So I purchased a set of fretsaw blades at the village shop, put the little finger in my Black & Decker folding table’s vice and gently sawed through the dead skin and bone just above the live skin line. The moment I felt pain or spotted blood, I moved the saw further into the dead zone. I also turned the finger around several times to cut it from different sides, like sawing a log. This worked well and the little finger’s end knuckle finally dropped off after some two hours of work. Over that week I removed the other three longer fingers, one each day, and finally the thumb, which took two days.

  My physiotherapist congratulated me on a fine job, but Donald Sammut was not so happy. He later recorded my visit: ‘Ran appeared one day on a routine appointment and calmly told me he’d chopped off his fingertips. We had quite a heated exchange over this. He risked making it worse.’ I apologised to Donald, but felt secretly pleased with myself since life improved considerably once the gnarled mummified ends no longer got in the way. Ginny agreed that I had done the right thing. She no longer had to tie my tie for me, nor put in my cufflinks before I gave a conference talk.