‘My wife said I was irritable, so I cut off my frozen fingers’
BRITAIN: Many a wise husband might choose to spring into action following a hint from his wife, but even among the closest of couples, self-mutilation might be a little much to expect.
Not for Sir Ranulph Fiennes and his late wife Ginny.
The Arctic adventurer said yesterday that it was following gentle criticism from Ginny - a respected explorer in her own right who planned and acted as base camp leader for many of her husband’s expeditions - that he took his notorious decision to cut off his own frostbitten fingertips.
The former SAS officer said she told him he had become irritable due to the pain. So he hacked through flesh and bone himself, saving a £6000 surgery bill. ‘‘My wife said I was getting irritable, so we decided we would try to cut them off with a Black and Decker and a saw,’’ the 73-year-old said.
He said she had often performed a similar operation on the hooves of her cattle. The late Ginny Fiennes kept a herd of pedigree Aberdeen Angus on their farm in Exmoor, which she lovingly called her child-substitutes. Upon finding out the amputation would be necessary, she had responded with characteristic humour, saying ‘‘damn, now we’ll be short-handed on the farm.’’
Fiennes first met Virginia Pepper when he was 12 and she was nine, shortly after his war-widowed mother moved from South Africa to the West Sussex village of Lodsworth.
Mrs Pepper asked him to play with her two sons. ‘‘I was taken to the attic where they kept their train set,’’ he said shortly after her death from cancer in 2004.
‘‘When a train fell off, I bent down to pick it up and there, under the table, was Ginny. She had extraordinarily big, blue eyes and, for the next four years, I was lovelorn.’’
The pair married in 1970 and forged a partnership which saw her admitted into the exclusive Antarctic Club and him to the Guinness Book of World Records. It was she who suggested navigating the Nile by hovercraft and she who put together the Transglobe Expedition that won him the title of Britain’s greatest living explorer.
Following her death Fiennes remarried, honeymooning with horsewoman Louise Millington, now 49, at the Mt Everest base camp. Their daughter Elizabeth is eleven.
In his autobiography Fiennes described how, following a 2000 expedition, he had amputated the tips of all four fingers and the thumb of his left hand. While travelling solo to the North Pole his sledge, weighed down with 70 days’ worth of supplies and equipment, slipped into the sea and became trapped under a slab of ice. To retrieve it Sir Ranulph had to reach into the sea having removed the outer glove on his left hand.
Once he withdrew the hand, exposing it to air temperatures of -63C, he knew instantly what had happened.
‘‘My fingers were ramrod stiff and ivory white,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They might as well have been wood... I had seen enough frostbite in others to realise I was in serious trouble. I had to turn back.’’
The former SAS officer was airlifted to hospital in Canada and given hyperbaric oxygen treatment but the damage had been done. The first one to two inches of each finger and thumb became what he called ‘‘mummified’’.
On his return to the UK, surgeons told him he would have to wait five months for the necessary amputations, to allow the partially-damaged tissue halfway down his fingers to heal sufficiently to be made into fingerends.
They also said the procedure would cost £6000. ‘‘Over those five months, if you touch anything with the dead bits it goes right down to the nerve endings and it’s very painful,’’ Sir Ranulph told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. So he performed the operation himself, using a vice and a saw, describing his own frostbitten flesh and bone as like those of a corpse. Two weeks afterwards a plastic surgeon at Bristol’s Frenchay hospital tidied up Sir Ranulph’s handiwork and the wounds healed without incident.
In cases of severe frostbite, the flesh becomes so cold it crystallises and blood cannot travel to oxygenate the cells, causing irreparable tissue -damage. In 2013 Fiennes had to pull out of a polar expedition five years in the planning after once again falling victim to frostbite on his left hand while training for the 2,000 mile trek.