I had to turn away and slap myself again.
“Get a grip.”
I told myself I could do all the blubbing I wanted in the morning – I could lose the plot then – but not now, not here, not when I was actually needed.
I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be able to keep going, keep pushing down and subduing all the negative thoughts. I would need a break soon.
I had already heard that a weather front was coming in, and that it was expected to last three days, so no helicopters would be able to reach us. Potentially, then, we would be looking after everybody for the next three days… The thought filled me with dread.
I organised the night shifts, with myself taking the first shift, from nine o’clock until midnight, followed by John, then Taka and then Hachiro. We would be able to make clearer decisions in the cold (and it would be cold) light of day. I didn’t know what we were going to do, how long we were going to have to keep playing at being doctors. We would cross that bridge when we came to it.
Before I could begin my shift I needed some food. I asked John to look after everyone for a while and made my way to the mess tent. There was nobody and no food in there. I wondered into the kitchen tent and found Bill.
“We’ve cleared up, I’m afraid,” he said. My heart sank. I was so hungry, so exhausted. “But if you go to the Sherpas’ tent, they might have something.”
I thanked him and turned to look at the steep hill I had to climb to reach the Sherpas’ tent. I was completely exhausted. I plodded very slowly up the hill of ice and stones – I felt as if I were climbing Everest itself.
The Sherpas had a slightly different diet to the Westerners – mainly vegetarian, as meat is prized and very expensive for them – but they were kind enough to give me some rice, potatoes and dal bhat. They were just about to clear up, but they dumped a huge pile of food on a plate for me.
I scrubbed the dried blood and sweat off my hands and bolted down the food, chasing it with cup after cup after cup of lemon tea. I barely tasted any of it, but the warmth was nourishment enough.
Twenty minutes later, I was back in my hospital mess tent with John, ready to begin my solo vigil.
John left and the tent instantly became eerily quiet. The rush and panic, the cacophony of groans, grunts and yells, all evaporated like ice in the desert.
I found a sleeping bag and mattress for the Gurkha who had agreed to assist me. The deal was that he could stay in the tent with his captain, but I could wake him up to help me during the night when needed.
I sat down in a chair, zipped up my downing jacket and turned on my head torch. There was a source of light in the mess tent from a very low-energy bulb powered by a car battery that had been linked to a solar panel, but it was so dim that the bodies wrapped up in the sleeping bags seemed more and more like corpses in a morgue. The light from the head torch brought me some comfort in the darkness.
My mind started to wander, sticking cruelly on thoughts about the horrors of the day. I thought about Mark, the Gurkha captain, I heard Richard’s cries of pain, I thought of the limp, lifeless corpse of the Sherpa whose name I would never know.
I thought about the blood on my hands.
If I’d sat there for three hours, just thinking, the weight of my reflections would have crushed me before long. I would have gone mad.
I decided I would read my book for a while, so I woke up the Gurkha and told him to keep an eye on everybody while I went to my tent and grabbed my copy of Many Years From Now, the biography of Paul McCartney, which I had been thumbing idly throughout my time at Base Camp, without too much engagement.
Now, however, the option to teleport myself into the surreal world of The Beatles was heaven. It was like an oasis for my mind, transporting me away from the horror of what I had witnessed.
It would prove to be only brief respite.
As I sat like a WW1 matron surrounded by my patients in the mess tent, reading, my eyelids started to get heavy. Keeping them open became a difficult challenge. It became almost impossible to focus on the words as they blurred and distorted on the page, skipping about capriciously.
Then, from out of the darkness: “Jules, mate, mate, mate...”
My eyes sprang open, suddenly unburdened by the tiredness that had seemed omnipotent only seconds before. Was it seconds before? What time was it?
I looked down at my watch, my head torch illuminating the dial.
21.33.
“Jules, are you there?”
I looked around for the source of the voice, shining light on body after body; sometimes I’d catch a glint, a reflection from an open pair of ghostly eyes, like cats in the shadows.
“Jules, over here.”
It was Richard. He lay on his back, propped up absurdly by an array of mismatched pillows.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Have you got any more painkillers? It’s hurting like…” he let out a small groan.
I knelt down, put my hand behind his neck and lifted his head gently and gave him two more of the blue tablets. I knew roughly when they’d all had their last dose, so I wasn’t too concerned about giving them more.
I held a cup of warm water to his mouth and he swallowed the pills.
“Thanks mate,” he said, as I laid his head back down on the pillows.
I returned to the solace of The Beatles.
“Jules?” Richard’s voice again.
I made my way back over, taking care to avoid stepping on the sleeping lions along the way.
“I need to go to the toilet. Sorry mate.”
I hadn’t really considered this. I looked about at all the people in the tent… Jeepers, if they all wanted to pee, this was going to be a nightmare.
I went over to the Gurkha who had stayed with his captain and shook him awake.
“I need your help.”
I put my arm behind Richard’s neck.
“We’re going to get you into a seated position – this is going to hurt a bit mate, but try not to make too much noise and wake the others.”
Together, we slowly lifted him up into a seated position. I could hear his ribs pop – he let out a whimper of pain.
The beams from our head torches darted around the room as we moved.
“We’re now going to lift you into a standing position, and this is going to hurt again,” I said. “You are going to feel this a lot.”
We locked our arms under his and lifted him slowly to his feet. Richard wasn’t a small guy – he was at least six foot – and his entire weight was on us. We hauled him up with everything we had.
He yelped with pain.
“Shh! Everybody else is sleeping – you’ve got to try to keep the noise down,” I said.
Richard accepted this information with no argument – he was as exhausted as the rest of us.
He was now standing – swaying – held upright by the Gurkha.
I fetched a green plastic washing-up bowl that had been discarded in the corner of the tent.
“I’ll hold this for you,” I said. “Can you pee into it?”
Richard said he could. He grimaced, clearly in a lot of pain.
I held the bowl.
He managed to do the rest, thankfully. We looked away, as if privacy was a major concern at this point, as if anybody really cared about that any more, as if we were still civilised.
Once he had finished, I set the bowl down on the floor and we began the laborious process of lying him down again.
I heard his ribs crack again – the pain would be terrible – but his yells of pain were more subdued, forcing their way out from behind clenched teeth.
We got him back into his sleeping bag.
He then slept peacefully for the rest of the night – which was a relief.
I took the bowl of steamy pee out of the tent and thr
ew it into the snow outside.
As I moved slowly back across the tent to my chair, to the escapism of The Beatles, there was a rustling among the bodies.
The noise of Richard had evidently woken up one of the injured Sherpas.
“Pee pee,” he said. “I need pee pee.”
The Sherpas, as a general rule, don’t tend to wash as much as the Westerners while up Everest. They see it as an unnecessary luxury, I suppose.
I approached the Sherpa to help him, and the stench of his clothing was almost overwhelming. It smelt like rotten cabbages, sweaty socks and dried blood.
I put that to one side: here was a man in need of help, an injured human being who needs the help of another human being.
His injuries were far worse than Richard’s. He had some kind of head wound, and was as pale as anything.
I teamed up with the Gurkha again; we lifted the Sherpa to his feet. I held the green washing-up bowl and looked away.
Richard, who wasn’t suffering from any head injuries and who had complete control of his mind, was fairly accurate. The same could not be said of the Sherpa – whether due to his injuries or the fact that he just didn’t care anymore, I don’t know, but the result wasn’t pretty.
After he had finished, there was some pee in the bowl, some down his leg, over his sleeping bag, and over my bloodied hand.
There was no way we were going to be able to dry him off – we didn’t even have the facilities for that. We didn’t even have the facilities to wash – so we had to hope that the warmth from the heater would do the job for us.
We packed him back in his sleeping bag and he drifted off for the night.
How many more times were we going to have to go through the peeing process? It was exhausting.
I went back to my chair.
Time crept onwards; it seemed ever more reluctant to move forward, the closer to midnight it got.
At 11:30, I was almost daring to think about bed – sleeping in my coffin tent seemed like a lavish treat to me at that point.
“Julsh?”
The last voice I hoped to hear. It cut through the murky silence like a knife.
“Yes, Mark?”
“I neeth the toileth.”
Shit. What’s the golden rule about people with neck injuries – keep them very still to avoid more damage. But I had to do something – I couldn’t let him pee his pants. This was going to be a major frigging operation. It really required three people – one to hold his head and neck, while the other two took the weight of his body.
Shit.
I thought about rolling him on to his side to pee, but I feared this could prove fatal, so I decided the easiest thing to do was to lift him straight up, keeping his head still.
I woke the Gurkha again. I could see from the look on his face that he was thinking the same as I was.
I unzipped Mark’s sleeping bag.
“This might hurt a bit,” I said, limply.
We very slowly lifted him, with me holding him under one armpit and the Gurkha under the other. With my other arm I supported his neck, which had only a crude piece of polystyrene to keep it from snapping.
It was like lifting a 90-year-old man out of a wheelchair. His body felt so lifeless, so devoid of strength.
As we moved him, he made tiny pained noises. He sounded like a man at death’s door. Whereas Richard yelled and screamed in agony, Hank couldn’t even muster the energy to do that.
The blood had started seeping from the bandage at the back of his neck again. I supposed this was from his heart starting to beat very fast with the trauma, and pumping blood out.
When we finally got him to his feet, he was so unsteady, so precariously balanced that he needed constant support, not only due to his injuries, but due to the lack of blood in his system.
“Can you get your cock out?”
“Yeth, yeth,” he said.
He could hardly speak because there was so much blood everywhere, all over his face.
He couldn’t look down so I held the green bowl up in the air at head height so that he could see it, then lowered it down to his groin.
Without even being able to look down, he managed to fumble and open his flies and do his business. He was more accurate than the Sherpa.
The Gurkha held him while I put the bowl down, and then we lowered him immensely slowly back down again. He continued to make the tiny pained noises that chilled me to my bones.
We then spent ten minutes sliding cushions in here and there underneath him, to try to get him comfortable in the hope that he would get some sleep.
I was completely shattered. My back was killing me, and I was covered in blood and urine. But I knew I would have carried on for another 20 hours if it had been necessary, if I could have helped these people further.
I went back to my book. Finally midnight came. I needed to go and wake John up, so he could take over.
I walked out and the cold hit me like a brick. With the gas heater and the 20 bodies in the tent, it had become very warm inside.
I had also all but forgotten about the destruction outside.
I had walked the trail from the mess tent to my tent countless times over the past few weeks; I knew the route with my eyes closed. John’s tent was next to mine.
But the route had completely changed – the avalanche had entirely altered the topography of Base Camp. I staggered about in the darkness, with only my head torch for guidance.
The rocks, tents, landmarks that had paved the way home had all moved – I had no means of navigation.
I fell to my knees in the snow, my head spinning, my body on the brink of exhaustion. I felt like all my systems were shutting down and that I was going to pass out.
That would mean death. Out here, in the open, in the freezing temperatures, I would die.
I didn’t come all this way to die.
I forced myself to my feet.
I stumbled to John’s tent, fell on my knees and unzipped it.
“John, John, time to get up,” I said.
At first, nothing, then…
“Yeah, yeah, no, good, yeah.”
I could hear John rustling about in the darkness, then his headlamp torch flicked on. It would take him a while to get his gear on.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital mess tent,” I said.
I stumbled back the way I had come. This time it was a little easier to remember the path.
About 15 minutes later, John arrived, his bleary eyes looking determined and steadfast. I felt confident in his abilities to take over.
I explained the situation; who had had more painkillers and who had peed. I told him to wake up the Gurkha if he needed any help.
“Go to bed,” John said.
I took his advice.
“Night John.”
“Night Jules.”
It sounded just like it had done all those times in our shared rooms in the lodges on the way up the Khumbu Valley. I instantly thought: “Good night John Boy; Good night Mary Ellen”. It’s weird how the brain works when it’s exhausted.
On the way back to my tent, I stopped to try and wash my hands in the ladies’ toilet tent – the men’s toilet tent had been destroyed in the avalanche.
There was no water. I pulled out a bottle of hand disinfectant from my pocket and covered my hands in the gel, using the entire bottle. I scrubbed and scraped but I could not remove all of the blood. I could not shift the smell of urine.
I crawled into my tent on all fours – I’ve never been so tired, so emotionally exhausted. I pulled off my downing jacket and downing trousers and somehow managed to get into the sleeping bag.
I fell into a deep, deep sleep.
In the night, I was awoken by the sound of a scream, a hysterical scream. I could hear a dreadful wailing in the darkness. I wasn
’t sure what was going on; I couldn’t see a thing.
I managed to unzip my sleeping bag from inside, enough to get my left hand out. I moved my hand around in the darkness, searching for the small pocket on the inside of the tent where I kept my head torch.
I grabbed it, pulled it out and pressed the button on the top to get some illumination.
I sat up, and the dreadful wailing came again. I could see through my tent canvas that the white pod was lit up like a beacon. I realised what the screaming was – it was Katherine from Adventure Consultants, reliving the horrors she had seen the day before.
Her screaming was so eerie – I had never heard anything like it before. I felt desperately sorry for her, and grateful for the fact that I had not had to go through what she had experienced.
I turned off my head torch, shoved it back into the side pocket, lay down flat and closed my eyes.
The day after
The sound of helicopters filled my head.
I opened my eyes, adjusting slowly to the yellow-coloured gloom. For half a second – half a glorious second – I forgot where I was, what I was doing, what had happened.
Then it all came rushing back into my consciousness: Everest Base Camp, the avalanche, the injured people, the stench of blood, sweat and urine, fear. Was it all just a bad dream I’d had? No, that vile smell was still there – that sticky, pungent, bloody, bleachy smell. It seemed to permeate all my clothes. Each and every fibre of material seemed locked in the stench of fear and death. No, it was no dream.
A helicopter passed overhead, casting a shadow on my tent.
Helicopters.
My heart lifted slightly – helicopters! We’d been told there would be at least three days of bad weather, three days before any helicopters would be able to reach us.
But here they were – undeniably here.
I wrestled myself free from the clutch of my downing sleeping bag and crawled to the entrance of my tent. I had to see one with my own eyes. I had to be sure I wasn’t imagining the sound, that it wasn’t some sort of post-traumatic hallucination.
I yanked the zip open and light spilled into the tent. I shielded my eyes and crawled out into the snow.
Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest Page 13