Sacramental stories – rescue and recovery.

Gillian Straine: Richard, thank you so much for joining us on the Go Health podcast. It’s wonderful to be able to talk to you. Now you are the director of context based ministry training for the Scottish Episcopal Church and you’re involved in pioneer training and church planting. Welcome to the Go Health podcast. 

Richard Tiplady: Thank you, thanks for having me. 

Gillian Straine: And so that you’ve got this really interesting job right now for the Church, can you tell me a little bit about how you got there? What is your kind of your CV journey to where you are today? 

Richard Tiplady: Goodness, yes. I’ll try and keep it short because it could sound awfully longwinded, but I think it’s worth going right back to my origin story as it were, which is I became a Christian at 19 from a completely non churched background, through a friend who had become a Christian and that shapes and has shaped my entire understanding around Christian identity and mission and I guess the reality that there’s enormous number of people in the UK who know very little about the Christian faith and I was one of them. 

So from the very earliest days I have been a Christian. This I guess is what we might call a heart for mission and desire that other people would come to know Christ for themselves. And a heart for the Church to be transformative really. In society as well. So this has been a catalyst and a driving DNA thing for me. That’s been expressed in a whole bunch of different ways. My wife and I were missionaries in Nigeria in the mid 1990s. I lectured in a theological college. Then came back to the UK and went into leadership in mission agencies. I was the deputy Chief Executive of one mission agency, then the Chief Executive another I run my own management consultancy for mission agencies and then in 2010 did a rather substantial gear shift and moved back into theological education in the UK. I became the principal of a theological college in Glasgow for seven years, which was very challenging I have to say.  

Took a break from that little bit of sabbatical to try and finish off my PhD was determined that whatever I did in the future, I wouldn’t stay in theological education I’d go and do something else, but God seemed to have different plans and six months later through a friend who sent me a job description and said this job seems to suit you, lo and behold behold, I got this job started it just over three years ago and it’s been the absolutely ideal job for me to be involved in training and equipping people for mission and ministry, and particularly with thie sort of challenges and changes that we’re facing in the church in the UK at the moment. 

Gillian: And is your driving passion still there? I’m really interested that that’s how it began – to help the church to be a transformative thing in the world today and today you’re still training students, does that still drive you? 

Richard: Absolutely I am. Yeah I am, I’m still deluded and think that we can change the world and that’s what we’re supposed to do now. How we do that, of course, is is the well, there’s lots of books arguing it over, but I think that’s what we’re here for. And so the program that I lead is is, as we say, not just context based but it has a very strong mission focus, it has a pioneering emphasis. It’s training people for ordination, it’s training people to be priests but I want them to be focused on mission as they lead churches to be missionary communities, that’s my heart and drive. 

Gillian: And Richard, I can’t help but ask. We’re going to talk about a particular accident you had recently, but given that we are, we are just hopefully coming out of the third lockdown, our worlds being changed by the coronavirus pandemic.00:04:22 Gillian Straine 

How do you see the future for a church mission right now? The world has changed, the mission has not. We’re still here to proclaim the healing love of God and to make new disciples and to help more and more people at this critical moment to know the love of Christ. But the world has shifted. How are you equipping students today to go into the world? We have not talked about this question, I just, you know, just I just need to ask this since you’re chatting to us today. 

Richard: I’m absolutely going to refuse to make any predictions here because I think we just don’t know. But what I have been doing and I have been very pleasantly surprised about, is running short intensive training in Pioneer ministry for members of our churches, clergy, laity, anyone, all comers over the last year? And I’m about to start the 6th and 7th rounds of that pioneer course for people. And if pioneering, is about anything, it’s about starting from scratch, and it seems to me that we’re in a situation where we need to rethink things anyway, and what Covid has done is accelerated changes and forced us to face up to challenges that we never anticipated 00:05:37 Richard Tiplady 

But it’s forcing change. But I think the outcomes we won’t know, but I think we’re in a day where everything is up for grabs and we have perhaps been loosened up a bit in ways that we didn’t anticipate, so I’m I’m not going to commit to any outcomes in terms of what I see the future is going to be, but what I see is a lot of exciting desire to experiment to do things differently. There has been a lot of experimentation, innovation in the church in last year and people got a taste for it. And people have got a taste for saying actually we can do things differently, we don’t have to stick to the same old way of doing things, so why would we want to go back to that, yeah? 

Gillian: Yeah, so maybe this pioneering spirit might be the thing that’s going to help the church evolve. 

Richard: I hope so, I hope so. 

Gillian: So on the Go Health podcast, what we’re really interested we’re interested to meet interesting people and but to go deeper. Go beyond that CV type story, what’s the story behind the CV? We’re really interested in this in the way that events can impact on our spiritual lives and particularly events that are difficult or painful or cause suffering. There, there’s some something in those stories that we’ve seen helps us get a greater understanding of what it means to live well. What it means to live more deeply connected to God, to the world, and indeed helps us, bizarrely, when we think about pain and suffering and difficult things that we’ve gone through somehow we can find ways to flourish more deeply. 

And Richard, I’ve known you for a year or so now, and sort of almost this time last year, like 11 months ago I saw on Facebook, somebody put up a news story about you. You were climbing on the 5th of March in 2020 and had a terrible fall. I wonder, could you tell us about that day and what happened? 

Richard: Sure, sure, so I was I was down in the Lake District that day, I live up in in Glasgow, and I was meeting with a chap who I’d never met before, but we had a number of mutual friends, he had developed the idea of Mountain Pilgrims and I was very interested in that being a very keen Mountaineer myself and I found a great deal of spiritual flourishing and encouragement from my mountaineering experiences to to learn from what he was doing and and so I’d contacted him and we’d agreed to meet and go and spend the day on the Hills in the Lake District. And he wouldn’t take me through it – what makes something a mountain pilgrimage rather than just a nice day out, really? 

And so we had climbed a Hill called Pillar Mountain and as John, the chap I was with had identified certain mountains and pinnacles in the lake district streets, that he calls nature’s cathedrals, you know, soaring pinnacles. And we climbed into one of those and spent some time around that and we were just planning to go up to the top of the mountain before heading home. It was very snowy. Last February was hugely wintry conditions for most of the month. I think it was the first day out for a month that either of us had on the Hills. Beautiful day, but a lot of snow. Very frozen, solid snow and about 10 meters from the top in quite tricky conditions I had a bit of a slip and a bit of a fall I think is the best that we can put it.  

Gillian: How far did you fall? 

Richard: I fell 200 vertical meters. The ground distance is about 250 meters according to Mountain Rescue, so it was steeper than 45 degrees.  I was, we were trying to navigate the final crags and the gully that I was trying to get up was very icy and tricky and I realized that it was, I wasn’t feeling particularly safe so was trying to find a different route and was trying to carefully descend just a few metres and in that descent. This is the one bit that is slightly blurred, but I’m I think my crampons caught on each other. But I was descending and descending is always more dangerous than climbing and I found myself falling on very frozen snow on a very steep slope with rocks sticking out of it.

And despite my best efforts with my ice axe, there is a procedure called self arrest where you get your axe underneath you to try and slow yourself down and stop and initially that seems to be working but I hit a rock and lost my axe and before I knew it I was in an ice filled gully accelerating fast down a hill with no idea what lay below me, at all.  And came to rest in an avalanche field of all things. An avalanche that had probably happened the day or two before and the boulders of snow larger than a football sized boulders.  You know, quite big frozen solid boulders of snow acted as a form of friction to stop me and I actually came to rest about 20 foot before a 100 meter vertical drop which saved my life. An avalanche saved my life. 

Gillian: And did you know you were seriously injured? I mean, what when you stopped, you didn’t know you were near that cliff edge, presumably, or didn’t know straight away. Did you know you were injured and how did you react? 

Richard: I mean I could tell from where I had stopped that the slope disappeared fairly quickly. I didn’t know quite what it was It didn’t know how far the drop was, but I could tell there was a drop below me. 

I had, uh, during the fall, tried to do two things. One was stay feet first, that’s one of the things whatever you do was try to get feet first, and I was head first at least once, possibly twice. I was certainly sideways on occasion, but there are things you can do to adjust yourself, but try and get feet first because your feet are a crumple zone and you might break your legs, but that’s the only thing you’re going to break and you try and slow yourself down. You’re not going to stop, but you try and slow yourself down on the basis that you’re going to start by hitting something so you might as well not be going very fast, you might try to be going slightly slower if you can. When I came to a stop, the first thing that struck me was that I had just stopped. I was amazed I had stopped, the Mount Rescue folks told me that afterwards they estimated I was falling for somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds. Yeah, it is quite a long time and I was very aware when I was falling that this was quite a long time. Yes, it’s really a very in the moment and alert and aware while you’re falling around and trying to stay the right way round and slow down and what have you but again, very conscious this is lasting a long time. 

When I came to a stop I I found myself cradled as it were, by this avalanche and stopped by it. The very first thing I did was check that I wasn’t gonna slip again, but it was actually solid and I wasn’t gonna start sliding again but then it was about assessing my injuries and at the time what I knew was was that my my right ankle hurts a lot. My left arm was so painful, the whole arm, I couldn’t lift it, I had to sort of rest it on my body and I was bleeding copiously, I could see the blood dripping off my nose. I couldn’t see out my left eye. I had glanced my head of a rock on the way down and ended up with three parallel deep lacerations into the skull, well into the scalp. 

One of them actually, apparently you could see my scull, which isn’t that far down, but seeing the skull is never something you want, you know it’s never ever a good thing. 

Gillian: So you’re seriously, seriously injured, you stop, but you seriously injured and I’ve read I have to admit I’m a bit of an addict to sort of mountain survival books and you know the greatest one being touching the void is sort of the classic one by Joe Simpson- Touching the void. Joe Simpson falls into a crevasse and is really in a very tricky situation but gets himself out of it and managed to get back and he talks about a moment when you’re sort of so seriously injured that everything sort of crystallizes and sort of comes to a point where your focus is entirely, you focus on, slows down. I just wondered if you had that experience. Joe speaks of the faith needed to survive and how and how he thought of things to keep himself going. 

I mean what was going on for that moment you’re by yourself. You’re quite, you’re obviously quite distanced from whoever from the man you were walking with. What was going through your mind and how did you do that next bit. 

Richard: It’s it is very interesting to reflect on just how pragmatic you are in those circumstances. There is no room for emotion. There’s no room for fear. There’s no room for anxiety. It’s it. You are in absolute survival mode. I guess it’s kind of fight or flight and having stopped having checked that I was secure. 

Having thought about my injuries, it was, It was just immediately – right what do I need to do? I need to get rescued. I am not, I’m not doing that. I’m almost certain I’ve broken my ankle, you know it’s very painful. I’m bleeding. I can’t move my arm very much. Obviously I had another injury, which I suppose, I mean I broke my neck but didn’t know about that until later. And I’ve got to get rescued, so I need to call mountain rescue. So just very pragmatically got my phone out. There’s an app on my phone that gave me the Ordnance Survey reference, dial 999 and describe my location exactly where I was to the police who then pass you on the mountain rescue. 

I had a rescue whistle because of John, I needed him to know where it was. So every 30 seconds, six blast from the whistle to announce to the world I’m here and in trouble and also hoping possibly someone down in the valley bottom might hear it as well. But it literally is of right what? I mean I wasn’t in quite the same situation that Joe Simpson was in, but it’s the same thing. What do I need to do? You are remarkably pragmatic, what do I need to do to get rescued, right? I better let John know where I am. Right now I need to, I’m in the snow and it’s cold, I better get into my survival bag to keep myself warm because it’s going to be awhile before they get here. So I take my rucksack off, get my bag open, get the survival bag out with a broken arm and a broken leg, climb into it and the right get my first aid kit out , better get this blood cleaned up.  

Just very step-by-step pragmatic, things to do, and just as I was starting to clean myself up, John arrived and took over the kind of cleaning up of me. There was a lot of blood and the scalp does bleed a lot when it’s cut and then we settle down to wait for rescue. 

Gillian: And how long did rescue take to come? 

Richard: Remarkably quickly, my accident was about 2:00 o’clock. Two helicopters came. There was a Great North Air Ambulance which is equipped with doctors and they can do surgery on that. But also like shortly afterwards the Coast Guard came because they can winch whereas the air ambulance can’t. So the air ambulance arrived about 5 to 3 so 50 to 55 minutes after the call. And then went off to basically wait. The Coast Guard arrived at 10 past three, did a visual assessment. You know, looked at us, you could see the door was open, you know, they checked out the landscape, then flew off to go collect the mountain rescue guys, flew them up to the top of the mountain and they abseiled down to me and got to me at half-past 3. So within an hour and a half of my call I had mountain rescue with me to start the treatment.  

Amazing full assessment, treatments, working out you know what happened to the best of, that is what was happening, whether there was sign of internal injuries because what they told me afterwards was they fully expected, after that kind of fall, for there to be substantial internal injuries. And I’m very, very fortunate that mine was so limited. 

And and then was winched up into the helicopter. A scary and painful experience I have to say and and and then take it off hospital for the treatment to begin leaving 20 people on the hillside who had come to my help then to walk home. 

Gillian: Amazing, isn’t it? All the people ready to leap in at a moment’s notice to to help life, do you remember much about your transfer to hospital and what happens next? 

Richard: Incredible. 

Gillian:  Presumably got some pain relief at some point well. 

Richard: So I carry…well, I I live with a chronic pain condition that’s managed with Co-codamol so I had some of that. The only thing that really, my arm hurt. The most painful bit was being when I was when I was winched into the helicopter I was winched with the winchman on my left. So I tilted in towards him so my entire body weight was onto my left arm which was painful because my broken neck bone was pressing onto the nerve in my left arm, so that was two minutes of very painful agony and gritted teeth. But other than that, the adrenaline was such that I didn’t really feel any pain being dragged into the helicopter across the floor and then the door closing was a wonderful experience that was, that’s that moment of being dragged into a helicopter and the door closing – that’s when I felt safe and that’s when I knew I was safe and we had about a 10 minute, 15 minute flight to Carlisle and they gave me a bottle of water and we just sat and chatted. I mean, I’m covered in blood, I’m a right mess, but we’re just sat chatting and it was actually the start of the healing really just a nice chatty conversation. 

Got out at Carlisle and to everyone’s surprise I climbed myself out the helicopter with a broken ankle and walked over to the ambulance. I think it didn’t really crossed my mind not to. Was driven around to A&E, fully expected to then have him sit and wait for awhile. I mean, I thought I’d be seen fairly quickly, but you know, but of course was straight into resuss whether the entire major trauma team about 15 people have been assembled because all the news they’ve got is someone’s fallen a very long way down the Lake District Hill, and they’ve been helicoptered here – they’re assuming it’s bad. 

Got off the trolley and climbed myself onto the table. Was told right we’re gonna have to cut all the clothes off so we can start to treat you. I’m from Yorkshire – you don’t cut my clothes off, they’re expensive so I said, well, let me see if I can get them off so I stood up and started taking my clothes off… broken neck, yeah nobody knew but yeah, right in there so I got all my you know good quality winter gear off and then let them get to treat me and then I was wheeled off, very quickly too X Ray for full assessments and and a CT scan as well, because you know, head injury and what have you – confirmed the broken ankle confirmed a broken elbow. But the strange thing was that most of the pain was in my shoulder, but that’s when they discovered…they were looking I think for probably a skull fracture with a head injury, but that’s when they discovered a broken neck. 

Gilian: And then they didn’t let you get up again, presumably. 

Richard: Then they immobilized me very quickly. Yes, that’s when they made me lie down and got these huge great solid sort of square foam things, one either side of my head and taped in place. And then am three hours of maxillofacial surgery with 65 stitches and after a while I asked for some paracetemol. They were trying to give me morphine. I don’t like morphine, I don’t react well to it, so I’ve had it in the past and it tends to make me hallucinate so I was resisting that. But after a while I thought a bit of paracetamol might help, but apart from the local anesthetic into the scalp for the stitches, really I was relatively pain free. 

What they did say to me, I broke the, I was told the C7 – it’s the bottom of the seven neck vertebrae and they said if you’re gonna break a neck bone, that’s the one to break. So I’ll bear that in mind for the future, obviously having huge control of which one to break [laughter], but I was very lucky in that respect. The bone had not just been fractured, but slightly dislodged, so it was sort of pushed off to the left a bit, so that was pressing onto the arm nerve. So I do still have a little bit of lasting nerve damage in my arm that may or may not recover. 

The treatment hospital was just everything you hoped for.  You know, professional caring. I asked him to phone my wife. You know one of the doctors phoned my wife, ’cause I would normally check in with her on my walks and I haven’t done because I didn’t want to text you and say I’m going to be late because I’ve fallen off a mountain and then and she jumped in the car and drove down to Carlisle to sort of come and see me. 

Gillian: I’m glad this is a podcast and not a video recording because I’m pulling all sorts of faces – it’s just! I mean, it’s just horrific story and it must have been so painful and frightening. 

I want to go back and ask you some more about your thoughts and feelings during the event and how it’s gone, but just can you just update as how you are now? You’re up to 11 months in, are are you back to fighting fitness again? 

Richard: I am fully recovered I, I think is the best way to describe it. Yeah, fully recovered. I mean I was in a moonboot for eight weeks for my ankle. The fracture in my arm was really just left, you know, fairly minor. I had an operation three days after the accident where they removed the disc from the neck and fused – attached a bracket and screws to hold my neck bones together while they fuse and I was well then, as you say, the accident was the 5th of March, in the middle of July I climbed Tinto Hill in  Lanarkshire, which is a couple 1000foot hill. 31st July I did Ben Ledi which is near Callendar in Scotland, just short of Monro height and in August I did 2 new Munros I’ve never done before and I spent the autumn while for that brief period last year when we were allowed to play again, I went back out and did a few Munros and I’m now out every weekend in the Campsie Fells near Glasgow well, ’cause I can travel to climb those. And yeah lots of physio support needed for the ankle but fully recovered, completely physically covered, thanks. 

Gillian: So I’m really intrigued about that moment when you said you started the healing. When you’re in the helicopter and you had a bottle of water, talks with somebody presumably you’ve never met before. That’s really fascinating. 

And perhaps also at what moment did it hit you? You’d fallen off a mountain, you are just you know, feet away from a cliff edge – this is as close as it gets to dying on a mountaineering, you know this. When did that hit you? Was there a moment when you went ‘Oh, you know that was really close’? Or did it gradually creep up on you? 

Richard: That’s been a really interesting thing to process. Very early on, both my wife and I realized that the ‘what if’ question wasn’t really affecting us, it wasn’t really hitting us at all. It was almost as if for both of us our minds are going actually there is enough to deal with here, you don’t need to deal with the what if – it didn’t happen therefore, let’s not go there. 

And I did have a rather interesting experience that I’ve not really reflected on much other than to notice, but while I was sitting there before anyone else had got to me, once I had put the call into mountain rescue I had this tremendous sense of being protected. I remember thinking I feel protected and I don’t know what by and I’m not going to delve into that, I’m just I’m just going to note it. But yeah, I just it’s quite important I don’t try to unpack that, it’s just I knew that there was a strong sense. 

The what if seems to horrify everyone else I mean, the mountain rescue guys you know, some of them are just…I mean they were surprised to find someone like sitting up talking when they got to me. You know, it is the, the location is notorious for fatal accidents. There was another serious accident in the same location in the autumn where three guys fell part way down the precipice that I stopped just short off. So it is a notoriously dangerous place, but that rather interestingly that’s never, never really come round. It’s really..I’m not consciously trying to deny it. It’s almost like the mind has gone ‘didn’t matter, didn’t happen.’ 

Gillian: That’s right. 

Richard: And I think I’m quite a pragmatic individual and I think from the very first moment and through all my recovery, for want of a better word, this has been a project. What do I need to do to try and help myself get better? From very first minute it was well, I need to get rescued. I need to get help, you know. I need to take some painkillers on the mountain, I need to get into survival bag. I need to do my physio…I used to have an amazing head for heights, I could stand next to a 2000 foot drop on the Aonach Eagach ridge in Glencoe and it didn’t frighten me at all I was just like, well, that’s a big drop. Now I’ve got a bit of a…it’s taken a while to get the head for heights back let’s put it that way now. I think that’s the brain going…’you are stupid get away from that edge. You know that’s a good survival mechanism, you know having a fear of heights is a good thing.  

Well, I’ve heard before there’s the construct of type A and type B personalities you know, and sort of more driven versus the more calm and relaxed type. I remember reading once that type A personality, which I think I probably am, are more likely to have heart attacks, but if they have heart attacks are much more likely to recover from them and I think that’s me. I am in a sense…to the extent that one can, I took control of my own healing.  

I wanted to know what happened to me. John who I was with filmed a lot of the rescue and came to visit me in hospital and showed me the film and the photographs. So my processing of what happened started very quickly. And I’ve read a lot about mountain survival since then, and I’ve engaged a lot with the sort of physio process, I’ve tried to take ownership as it were of my recovery process and that’s given me quite a sense of agency and control. But I’ve also been very happy to talk about it. There was an enormous amount of media interest because of the nature of the accident. I mean, I was within a few days I was in the times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail. I was interviewed by BBC Scotland. I’ve been on two TV programs about it and I decided that it would be good to talk about it for my…in a sense engage with that for my own purposes. 

Because I needed, I knew it would be good to process it and talk about it and yes, sort of cement well what happened really. And I wrote it all up for myself even in hospital. I started writing notes on my phone to capture my learning, my experience and before memory faded. What happened? Why did it happen? What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What can I learn from this? So taking ownership of the situation, a bit like…as you know, a few years ago, when, as I say, I developed this chronic pain condition. Having access to academic journals, I was reading all sorts of academic articles about my condition that actually helped me enormously and also helped my doctor as I went to them and said, look, this article really describes what I’m experiencing, this one doesn’t, so this was quite helpful and he was quite happy to engage with that, so taking ownership I think was, was important. 

And you mentioned the people dimension as well, I mean, that in a way, the ordinariness of the helicopter ride and just the chat was remarkably healing actually because it just was like, no – life is going to go on here. The same with the Mountain Rescue guys, when they arrived – uterlly non judgmental “You idiot what have you done” – none of that, caring practical. One of them told me the reason he was in Mountain Rescue was that he’d been rescued himself, So it was like, you know we’re all in this together, we’re not judging you. So so again, just yeah, caring human contact. 

Gillian: That’s really interesting what you say about your pragmatism around dealing with the trauma of it, really, for what I understand is the most important thing is engaging with what we’ve been through rather than burying it as well, because there’s lots of evidence that the trauma gets trapped in your body. But if you are, you know your project to recover and engage and I think that’s we connect with a lot of people who’ve been through other difficult circumstances and illnesses and events. 

I was recently listening to a really interesting podcast by a man who does a lot of work around the somatization of trauma and in hurricanes, he compared two different hurricane response, one where people got to almost rebuilding their houses, and one where they were stopped from rebuilding because the government was going to tell them where to rebuild and that was the community that was more traumatized because it couldn’t work their way out of it. 

Richard: Because you’re not able to exercise any agency in those situations, are you? I think, yeah, if you’re told you can’t do it yourself, then you’re you’re even more passive and more a victim of the circumstances, really. Whereas I think what I was…from the very first moment. In that sense, you know self- treating, everyone’s amazed that I called Mountain Rescue myself. I mean, I even had to walk about 10 metres with a broken ankle to get to a point where I could winch from a helicopter, but even that is like I’m up and I can walk, you know, and that’s within 2 hours of the accident. Yes, I think it’s about not letting trauma define you or control you. It’s about regaining a sense of agency. It’s about moving forward from a situation in a way that allows you a sense of agency, control, dignity, power over a situation. It’s not this is not going to define me. I’m going, it’s going to be part of my experience, but I’m going to learn from it. I’m going to move forward from it. I’m hopefully going to be better because of it. 

Gillian: And I’m curious you, that’s how you took control of the situation you were in. You reacted and that drove you through your recovery. But we don’t have control over so much is how other people react to us. Now you just you fell off a mountain, you nearly died. Everyone, particularly those close to you, will have different reactions to it that might clash with pragmatism, and so on. And I wondered  how you cope with that? Or people, the loved ones around you, maybe people around you professionally, you know, “Richard, you nearly fell off a mountain- what did you think you were doing?” “Oh my gosh, you nearly died.” Or you know how do you? How do you? How do you cope with that? Because that’s of impacts on your healing as well. 

Richard: Yes indeed, yes, and I think the answer there would have to be quite selfish and say I’m the one that had the injury. I’m the one that has the best understanding of what I need to do to process it. Uh, yes. I listen and learn, but in the end I guess it’s a bit like a grief reaction. No one can decide how someone should respond to grief. You respond however, you see fit at the time and it’s the same way with this, you know, I’m the one the accident happened to, so I’ll decide – thank you very much.  

I mean, I know that, so I was, I mean obviously I was off work for a little while, but I was doing an hour to work every day within, you know, a few days of getting home from hospital just because I wanted to keep on top of things but that helped me again feel I’m not, I’m not out of the loop I’m, I’m gonna be on top of this I’m gonna I’m gonna get back to normal and I know that there were some who thought that was inappropriate, but it’s like none of their business actually, it’s my decision and I’m very much helped by the fact that Irene my wife and I took a very similar approach to this I must say, very pragmatic, you know – let’s get on with this, let’s move forward, let’s just move ahead. I mean, my mum was pretty upset, you know, her little boy nearly died, she probably was the most upset and I think probably slept the least of it all. You know I can’t do much to control that. I think I come back to my key points if you’re the one that’s suffering, whatever it is, if you’re in this situation, you’re entitled to be in charge of your own process and everyone else needs to accommodate that. 

Gillian: Richard, can I go back to the moment just before you fell down the mountain. You said, you know that was a fuzzy bit? You think maybe your crampons got tangled, as you know, came down the hill a little bit, and, that’s probably what caused it?  

Richard: Yes, yes.  

Gillian: And then you fell off a mountain and there were 20 odd people involved in your recovery. All your loved ones were thinking my gosh, you nearly died. You know the huge amount people impacted or involved in your rescue. Are there feelings of guilt and blame for this? And how do you cope with that? Because that for me that’s kind of the elephant in the room question isn’t it?  

Richard: Yes. Guilt certainly, and before that anger as well. That first…I was in hospital for six days. I was extremely angry with myself for getting myself into the situation where this could happen. That was the first point, so I think that I’d like to unpack a little before I come to the guilt thing. Because it kind of proceeds it a little.  

From a sort of risk assessment point of view – there is the likelihood of something happening, and then there’s the seriousness of something if it happens. The likelihood of what happened to me was slim, but the seriousness, if it does happen, it’s very, very serious. I berated myself terribly for the first couple of weeks for allowing myself to be in a position where it could even happen. I was able to give myself credit straight away that having had it happen, my training and my experience and my skills and knowledge made it less serious and it could have been…Two members of the mountain rescue team later on told me that I did all the right things and had I not stayed feet first and slowed myself down my injuries would have been far worse or the avalanche wouldn’t have stopped me. So I got a lot of affirmation that once it had happened I did all the right things but I was very cross with myself for a long time that I was stupid enough to get myself in a position where such an accident could happen and I should never have been in that position. So I had to process that and deal with that and to some extent come to terms with it and just say sometimes accidents happen. Yes, I was in a position I shouldn’t have been I’ll learn from it.  

But then I think the guilt came, probably mostly from the guilt that I made 20 people drop everything to come and get me and two helicopters. And you know, the the massive and then the the, the grief and trauma I put my wife through and my family and friends and colleagues. I had suffered the injury but I called an awful lot of pain to a lot of people by this. I mean they there is a phrase used to criticize mountaineering, it’s called an unjustifiable risk, it’s a term that’s been used in history to criticize mountaineering. There is no possible justification for mountaineering. It’s, you know, you’re putting yourself at risk for your own injury and the hurt of others so that you can send a lump of rock. How stupid is that? But we do it. So I felt a lot of guilt about putting a lot of people out and it took a while to process and I thought about this and how I processed it. I don’t feel it now, really. But I thought about how I processed it and I have had time to work on this. Ironically, but thankfully, they’re all quite biblical. Not so good or bad, but quite biblical.  

The first one is you feel the need to make amends and there is there is there is a sense of I need to make amends here so even from the hospital bed. But then my first week I’m doing a lot of fundraising for the Mountain Rescue team. You know, probably a four figure sum was raised – could be about 2000 pounds raised for Cockermouth Mountain Rescue team to say thank you, you know, Sorry for what I made you all have to do. Thank you so much. 

So that element of dealing with guilt we try and atone by making amends. I mean even this this may sound really trivial, but it was also important when I went down to say thank you to them in August I took a massive box of sweets and biscuits and goodies and it could never ever pay for what these people did for me, but it was just a way of saying thanks. So there’s  an element of sort of, like I say, trying to make amends. I mean I could never pay for the cost of The Great North Air Ambulance and the Coast Guard helicopter and 20 people missing work for the afternoon to, I could never actually pay for that, but I wanted to do something.  

The second thing was, I mentioned it earlier, this experience of non-judgmentalism from the mountain rescue team. That they didn’t blame me for what happened, there was no you know judgment, at least one of them had been in a similar situation. They were utterly non-judgmental and accepting of me and so putting that in it sort of biblical framework that’s just forgiveness, isn’t it? It’s just forgiveness. It’s like we’re not judging you. We’re not blaming you. This happened and we accept you. Infact, allowing me to go and see them, which I kind of “we embrace you,” you know, “we’re pleased to see you.” 

Who were glad to come, you know, five people gave up their Saturday morning on a day off, having given up an afternoon at work, then a few months later, they give up another morning to come and meet me and have a coffee and have a chat, socially distance outside sort of chat in Cockermouth at their base. 

And then the third thing you might call it bearing fruit in keeping with repentance. What am I going to do to learn from it? What am I going to do to improve to make sure it doesn’t happen again? And I had signed up, I’ve done Winter Mountain skills training in the past. But I just thought I probably should refresh my knowledge and I’ve signed up to do a two-day scrambling refresher courses. Well, you know to go and do some decent mountaineering training again, and it’s kind of like having what happened, happened how can I make sure it’s even less likely to happen in the future? So that I learn from it and I’m better in the future. And so there’s quite a lot going on there, but they’re all as I say, in different ways sort of ways that we do try and deal with guilt. It was surprising to me that I felt as guilty as I did, but I did it and I wasn’t going to deny it. I had to sort of own it and then process it and name it. 

Gillian: I’m always surprised…I watched your TV shows about the accident and I have to admit I do love those kind of air sea rescue shows and there’s a good one about the lifeboats that runs as well. I’m always really struck by how nonjudgmental the volunteers are who run the Lifeboat Association, the Mountain Rescue and this is deeply countercultural because there’s something deep within our culture, sadly, that always wants to ask straight away – whose fault was this? 

Richard: Yes. 

Gillian:  Who made the mistake? A kind of dualistic…well, they’re just cast into the outer darkness of hell now because you’ve done one mistake! And when the rescue services come in, how…and also with ambulance service, how how they lack judgment and how and how and how we should all be learning from that actually, and particularly in the Church, there’s sort of a them and us thing. There’s always been around how we deal with sin really, isn’t it? And down to our concept of what is sin.  

Richard: Indeed, if sin is well, missing the mark, well I missed the mark and that’s why I fell. 

Gillian: But we were created like that, we were created not to be perfect – instead of we’ve gone too far with the Augustinian view of sin, which is all about – it’s your fault and guilt rather than where we were just you know, made or kind of messed up in the Garden of Eden, so we’re at a distance. So why would we expect to get things right? But that’s not the take we have is it? 

Richard: It isn’t, and what was interesting, I mean, there’s obviously a story in the news, recently there was a very serious accident in the Lake District with a guy called Chris Lewis, a Mountain Rescue guy fell, a very similar distance myself on a rescue about two weeks ago, and he’s broken his back and he will probably be in a wheelchair. But it was two people who had broken lockdown to go and climb a hill that they were there rescuing and looking at the social media responses to this to say that the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade are out in force, you know hugely. I mean you know there’d be people gathering with pitchforks and burning torches at the people’s houses if they knew where they lived. You know  deeply, deeply judgmental. And Mountain Rescue have been, even in that situation where people broke lockdown, have been “we are there to rescue people”.  

And for me there was a number of news articles you know, as I mentioned various newspapers, a couple of local newspapers in Carlisle working to also publish stories and there were one or two people on there that were quite critical of me. People who’d never met me, but who were basically telling me that I was stupid to be out on the hill in the first place and it was my own fault and, you know, what are we  going to do to make amends. I mean, there were then immediately people coming back in saying don’t be ridiculous, you don’t know the circumstances, leave the guy alone, that sort of thing. But there is a desire to find fault and there is something remarkably healing about acceptance and whether that was the Mountain Rescue team, whether it was the hospital. Uhm, just “you are in extremis, you are in need…we are going to care for you, we are going to heal you. It’s in us.” All that came across and it was just…In and of itself that there’s this sort of physical treatment of getting stitched, and you know, bones being fixed and having operations, but there’s that gentle touch of the nursing touch as well was really important to me in hospital. My face was absolutely covered in blood, I mean, when you cut your scalp, you bleed copiously, and I had three very deep cuts and the morning after I had got into hospital and I didn’t sleep much that night. I think I’ve only slept an hour because of the adrenaline. A nurse just came and gently cleaned my face and cleaned all the blood off. Even while she was doing it, it was really moving, someone was just cleaning me up. You know, and it was just care and it was just love in action really, that in and of itself was quite healing, as an experience. 

Gillian: Yeah, yeah, yeah, gosh, it’s very basic and intimate, isn’t it? Being washed by another person and being…because we’re so used to being in control. I remember, I know after I gave birth, you know the same kind of experience – your so used to being in control and knowing what you’re doing with your life and then that somebody else doing that for you. Yeah,  it’s a very, it’s a very deep thing. And I just think what you were saying there about the guilt and blame transcends, you know…it’s not just about hillwalking or extreme sports and you know, tiny moments, lack of attention leading to big accident, you know we all have accidents, but actually in so many illnesses…you know cancer, you know what caused this illness? What did you do to deserve this? Or, you know when relationships go wrong, things go wrong. I think people could relate to that in all sorts of different fields of suffering. 

Because it’s, you know those kinds of events or suffering, they cause us to change in some way. I love the quotation from Simone Weil the French philosopher, that ‘suffering leaves a trace upon your soul’, leaves a trace upon one’s soul – it changes who we are and actually the process of healing and recovery is then in some way relearning who we are because of what we’ve been through. Either because it’s been so devastating or because it teaches us something about life. And I wonder if could you sum up in some way how, what you’ve learned about the process of healing. Is there been anything that surprises you? I mean, healing is obviously about, you know, being able to walk and those cuts in your head and all those kind of physical things. But if healing is a deeper process that leads us to greater wisdom about God and about being in the world.  

Richard: I think I’m possibly still in process with that. I mean, one bit of learning is to stay away from big edges that’s …[laughter] 

Gillian: I love your pragmatism, don’t fall down… 

Richard: Yeah, yeah, that’s right, stay away from big drops. I think it is more that OK so my my neck is fixed but I’m living with pain in my neck now all the time and will always have some of that, but I’ve always I’ve got permanent nerve damage now you know in my left arm and I am really really really well recovered from what happened to me, but I’m still in a sense carrying the scars. I just live with it. I just move on and accept it as part of the sort of fragility of life. I think perhaps because, as I say, I’ve been living with the pain condition anyway, that’s chronic that can’t be fixed, that we, I was very fortunate that most of my injuries could be fixed. Well fixable either immediately or through, you know, a fairly protracted period of physio. But but there are other things that you’re just going to carry with you for the rest of time, and it doesn’t doesn’t limit you, it doesn’t restrict you, it  just becomes part of who you are and it becomes part of your your story. I think I’ve been ’cause my accident was such a larger physical accident and my injuries were largely physical, it has been for me about not letting those things define me, but take ownership of them but also control of them.  

I mean, one of the things you couldn’t make up is the one of my students who lives in Jedburgh works at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, where I was taken to, and she’s a neurosurgeon and she knew about me before I was even transferred there so she had access to all my sort of injury records and everything and has been informally supporting my recovery even though not formally. She said that she thinks that part of my recovery has been my determination to get back on the hills, not let this define me to not say I’m now injured, I am now a victim, I’m now struggling. But I’m gonna get back on the hills as quickly as I can. I’m gonna get life back to the best of my ability. I have no idea what that would mean, I mean, OK it’s broken ankles, it wasn’t, you know, massive the serious in that sense and even the broken neck was to say was the kind of best form of broken neck. So, so I think it’s a case of no, I’m just gonna carry on. I’m I’m not going to let these things control or define me anymore. I will learn from it, I will seek to be better. You know, because it was a mountaineering accident, I need to be a better mountaineer, I need to better at what I do because I wasn’t…I don’t mean this in a blaming way, it wasn’t good enough what I did before, so I need to be better at it next time and I didn’t mean it’s going to be perfect or I’m going to not make mistakes in the future or get things wrong but I’m gonna do better. 

Gillian: Yeah. Can I ask, in what way has it impacted your spiritual life? I mean, I hate this question so I’m not going to ask it, but when people ask me when I was seriously ill, oh – did you pray and did it help? And I always hate that, I don’t know why I hate that question. It’s sort of the obvious question if you go around with a dog collar and you’ve had a bad experience of you know, well, did you pray?  It’s a difficult question to answer ’cause it’s more complicated than that, of course. But I just wondered, were you ever angry at God about what you’ve been through? And also I’m curious about your image there is that you are scarred, wounded or scarred. Has your experience in any way made you better at your job? You’re forming people to go out in the world, they’re gonna get scarred, they’re gonna get wounded, has it made it better, has it made you better at your job of training professional prayers? 

Richard: Scared to…I don’t know if I’m the right person to answer that, but I’ll I’ll share what I can. I mean, did I pray? No, I didn’t. There wasn’t time to pray. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but there wasn’t the ‘Oh God, oh God, Oh God’ fall, it was just I was, you know, it was a moment of extreme mindfulness. I was so in the moment it was unbelievable. I just had to concentrate on the circumstances, you know. I had this like I say I had that sense of being protected. The Daily Mail decided that it was a miracle. 

Gillian: [Laughter] That’s a good source. 

Richard: A good authority…Quite a few people took it upon themselves telling me that God had obviously saved me for a reason. No pressure obviously. The challenge there, I think, is that the week before my accident the very same weather system that created the avalanche that saved me, created a Avalanche in nearby Nevis that killed someone else. So you know when people, people tried to say God sent the avalanche.Well, that’s nonsense that you know, ’cause did you send out to kill one person to save another?  I’d love to see your theological thinking about that. I think the way I processed it and the way I thought about you, says if God had spared me, I had been spared to serve him. And therefore I will simply continue to do what I’ve sought to do anyway, which is to serve him with my life and give myself to him. And it’s been an opportunity to, I suppose recommit, re-own that sense of coming to Christ and his purposes, you know, so long as I am here in our breath in my body, it is a privilege and honor to serve him. So I will come to you to do so. And I have been given. 

Yeah, I was like I suppose it’s like Hezekiah, you know the shadow went back 10 intervals, you know I’ve been given longer so I will continue to do well, what I or to the best of my ability, what God has given me to do? 

Gillian: Richard, thank you so much for giving your story to Go Health podcast and going back over it again. I’m sure your experience of recovery and your ongoing living with pain while being so committed to this mission to inspire new generations of Christians will be inspiring for our listeners too, so thank you so much. 

Richard: Thank you, thank you.