An army major from Fife says he owes his life to emergency services and the NHS after he was left with a brain injury following a climbing accident on Glen Clova.
Joe Dickens had been climbing with family member, Josh Foster, in the Cairngorms when he fell from the rocks and was left suspended upside down and unconscious.
The incident sparked a huge emergency response by Tayside Mountain Rescue Team, the Special Operations Response Team (SORT) and the UK Coastguard.
Joe was airlifted to hospital where he was put into an induced coma for 12 days.
Joe from Inverkeithing, recalled his last memories from the day last June, before waking in hospital next to his wife, Shuna.
The 38-year-old said: “I was on a day off from work and decided to go climbing.
“We were doing lead climbing where you climb up and put in your own protection so you put bits in the rock so if you fall they’ll catch you.
“We were climbing quite well and I remember having a break with a coffee sitting at the top and looking at the view, thinking it was beautiful – then I looked to my right and my wife is sat next to me and I’m in a bed.
“She tells me, ‘it’s not June 10 anymore, it’s June 22 – you’ve been in a coma, you’ve had a climbing accident.”
‘I don’t remember the climb’
Dad-of-two Joe said he doesn’t remember the moments leading up to the accident due to his brain injury but said he believes he may have slipped and caught his leg in the rope.
“We don’t know what went wrong because I don’t remember the climb,” he said.
“Where Josh was stood it kind of blends away a little bit so he couldn’t see me when I was injured, he just felt the rope get pulled on really hard – that was my body weight.”
Josh then climbed without protection to secure Joe upright and bring him back to safety until he could find help.
‘I had to re-learn how to walk in a straight line’
Joe sustained an injury to the back right of his skull, causing damage to his frontal lobes.
He remained in hospital for around a month and a half, where he had physiotherapy at Cameron Hospital in Leven.
He said: “The recovery was very quick – I had to re-learn how to walk in a straight line and how to go up and down steps again.
“I started my graduated return to work in November, which was five months into the accident.”
Joe said the work of the Tayside Mountain Rescue Team that day allowed him to watch his daughters grow up and continue doing the job he loves.
He said: “The stuff the mountain rescue team did for me, I’m eternally grateful for – and my wife is as well.
“My youngest daughter couldn’t walk before I had the injury, she would not have remembered me if I had died and my oldest would have remembered the consequences.
“It has also allowed me to go back to work – I’m an educational and training services officer so my bit is about developing people in the army and giving them the chance to develop new skills which is a huge honour.”
Since his accident, Joe has raised over £10,000 for Tayside Mountain Rescue in thanks for saving his life.
He said: “The mountain rescue team weren’t the only people that got me back to where I am now but without any of those people – including Josh, the paramedics, coastguard and NHS – there is a good chance I’d probably be dead.
“It’s all very well me saying thank you but to be able to give something back – it’s kind of a military right in that kind of way of looking after other people and working yourself hard to take care of others, it’s kind of the ethos of my role.”
Tayside Mountain Rescue Team leader, Paul Morgan, said: “Joe was exceptionally lucky to have the immediate support of his climbing partner and the Tayside Mountain Rescue team’s quick arrival.
“It’s fantastic he has thought of us and that we’ve helped him so much in his recovery but having met Joe myself, he is an incredibly resilient character so we have to give him massive praise for how he has approached his own recovery.”
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