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I pick up the knife.
chapter 64
millie
In April 2003, an American mountaineer and mechanical engineer called Aron Lee Ralston dislodged a boulder as he made a solo descent of Bluejohn Canyon in south-eastern Utah. The rock trapped his arm and pinned his right wrist to the side of the canyon wall. After five days without food or water, dehydrated and hallucinating, he had to break his forearm and amputate it with a dull pocketknife to break free. He then made his way through the rest of the canyon, rappelled down a twenty-metre drop, and hiked eleven miles to safety.
As a surgeon, I read his autobiography and watched James Franco play him in the film127 Hours, and wondered how desperate you’d have to be to find the strength to do such a thing.
Now I know.
I’m cool and collected as I pick up the rusty Stanley knife. Resilience isn’t just about exercising your strengths: it’s about finding the strength in your weaknesses. The inability to tune in to my emotions has sometimes made it hard for me to move through the world, but now it’s my saving grace. I’m a rational person: an analytical, problem-solving scientist. Self-pity isn’t an option. I can’t use brute force to break the handcuff: I’ve tried. My son doesn’t have time to wait for an unlikely rescue. I’ve known since the moment Stacey told me my son was trapped here with me I only ever had one choice – which means it wasn’t a choice at all.
I tug off one of my running shoes, and unthread the shoelace, tying it as tightly as I can around my wrist, using my teeth to pull the knot firm. I need a tourniquet, or I’ll bleed to death.
I have one advantage over Aron Ralston: my anatomical knowledge.
As any surgeon – or butcher – will tell you, severing a limb at the joint is the most efficient method: the bones are held together by sinew and tendon and muscle and cartilage, all far easier to part than bone. I know exactly where to cut to remove the last two fingers and knuckles of my left hand.
I’ll never operate again, of course. My surgical skills may be about to save my life but using them now will ensure I never set foot in an operating room again.
For most people, losing two fingers would be upsetting, distressing, shocking even: but in the end it wouldn’t impact their lives to any significant degree. You can still do up your buttons with six fingers and two thumbs. You can still ski downhill and send a text and roll pastry and bathe your child. But for a pianist, or a gymnast, or a world-class heart surgeon, it’s life-changing.
I’m a surgeon, but I’m a mother first.
It takes me less than three minutes to hack through the flesh and tendons of my left hand and sever my little and ring fingers and two knuckles. The pain is indescribable, as if I’m vaporising my hand with a white-hot laser, but I’m driven by the momentum of a strange euphoria:I am not going to let my son die in this place.I don’t black out, or lose consciousness, or shed a tear. It’s almost like childbirth: my pain means my son gets a chance to live.
As soon as it’s done, I wrench myself free from thehandcuff and tug off my running hoodie, wrapping it around my mutilated hand to staunch the bleeding. I can’t let myself pass out, or I’ll bleed to death before I ever regain consciousness and this will all have been for nothing.
I wrench open the chest freezer with my good hand. Stacey didn’t lie: Peter is curled up on the bottom. He isn’t moving, and when I lean inside and put my index and middle fingers to his carotid artery, I can’t find a pulse. His skin is white, his lips blue, his hair frosted with ice. I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know how I’m going to get him out on my own.
I climb into the freezer with him. Blood from my mangled hand spatters across the sides of the freezer as I fumble my baby into my arms. I’m shivering uncontrollably in the cramped space, though I don’t know if it’s from shock or the cold or a combination of both.
Somehow I haul him onto my lap. He’s dead weight, slumped lifelessly against my chest. I still can’t tell if he’s breathing: the cold will have slowed his respiration so much it’ll be hard to detect even if he is alive. The adrenaline that has got me this far is suddenly ebbing, and I don’t think I have the strength to get myself out of the freezer, never mind my son.
And then I feel it: his heartbeat.
Slow, but steady.
I am not going to let my son die in this place.
With a sudden renewed burst of energy, I heave Peter up to the lip of the freezer, bracing myself beneath him as I take his weight. It costs every ounce of strength I have left to lower him onto the concrete floor without dropping him. I clamber out and collapse beside him, enveloping his body with mine to warm him.
‘Sweetheart, come on,’ I plead, chafing his arms with mine. ‘Wake up, Peter. You need towake up.’
He doesn’t respond. The strain of moving himhas loosened the tourniquet around my hand and I’m starting to feel light-headed again from the blood loss. I use my teeth to tighten it, and then cradle my boy against me, rocking us back and forth as I gaze up at the cobwebbed ceiling. I was so focused on rescuing Peter I didn’t think beyond this moment, but if I can’t figure out a way to get us out of here, then I will have saved my son from a quiet, peaceful, quick death from hypothermia only for him to endure an agonisingly protracted one from dehydration. I might as well put him back in the freezer now.
And then suddenly the light goes out.
Stacey must have realised it was still on and switched it off from upstairs. For a moment I panic: the cellar is as black as pitch, and I can’t even see my child in my arms.
But he’s breathing. I feel him stir, and the soft puff of his breath on my face.
I’m a scientist. I’m blessed with a rational, analytic brain. I’m going to think us out of this cellar.
‘It’s OK,’ I tell Peter, hugging him close. ‘It’s going to be OK, sweetheart. I’m going to get us out of here.’
I am not going to let my son die in this place.
