Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
‘I plunged 25ft after sleepwalking out of holiday flat window’
Callum Fernie, of Broughty Ferry, will never forget a last-minute lads’ holiday to Marseille after he was involved in a horror accident.
Sleepwalking on the first night of his holiday, he opened a window and plummeted to the ground.
Callum put his miraculous escape down to him being asleep at the time, as his body would’ve been in a more relaxed state.
The maintenance engineer at Michelin said he had no recollection of the night in question after waking up in a hospital bed the next day.
The 22-year-old today told the Tele: “My friends have explained what happened to me but I have no recollection of it.
“I was sleeping on a sofa bed in the living room area. Apparently I got up, turned the handle on the window frame and fell out.
“The window I went through had a barrier that came up to about knee height.”
Callum’s friend Dominic Peralta had tried in vain to grab his pal before seeing him go through the open window and plunge to the ground.
Callum narrowly missed generators located near where he landed.
He said: “When I hit the ground I apparently tried to get up straight away.
“My friends alerted the emergency services.
A DUNDEE man who plunged 25ft from a holiday apartment in France has said he is lucky he wasn’t left paralysed after the freak fall.
“An ambulance and a fire appliance attended. Where I l anded wasn’t easily accessible so the fire crew was required.”
The Barnhill football player was left with a broken pelvis, a broken left arm and a small bleed on his brain after the incident in July.
He said: “I could have been paralysed. Doctors reckon that because I was asleep I was relaxed when I landed and my body hadn’t tensed up before I hit the ground.
“When my friends contacted my brother Michael to tell him what had happened, I think it sounded so bad.
“They heard ‘bleeding on the brain’ and I think people thought I was dying.
“There were a few frantic calls to the hospital at that point but nobody there spoke English.
“I was in the Assistance Publique Hospital in Marseille for five days.
“If I hadn’t had health insurance the whole incident would have cost me 9,000 euros.
“I had two hours of surgery on my left arm as I had damaged a nerve, and I’ve now got a metal plate just above my elbow.”
Callum added: “I have been incredibly lucky. You hear of people suffering a lot worse falling from lower heights.
“I came back to Edinburgh Airport in a wheelchair and spent a further two weeks in Ninewells.
“When I arrived in Dundee they discovered I had also damaged my right arm so that went into a cast.
“The hospital staff in both Marseille and Ninewells have been fantastic. I am extremely grateful, but now I’m keen to get back to work.”