I’ve got a mountain
Emily just after the accident.
After months in recovery, Emily can’t wait to get back to Skye.
And the decision it helped her make would affect the rest of her life.
“I wrote down all the things I didn’t like about my leg and why I didn’t want it any longer,” she says. “That’s why I got rid of it.” Emily was minutes from death after she was crushed by a boulder on a Scottish mountain.
Her right leg was so mangled she agreed to have it amputated.
But Emily has never let her cheery positivity waver and insists losing the limb is actually going to change her future for the better.
The 23-year-old student’s dream is to show she’s finally put her nightmare behind her by standing atop her beloved Cuillin ridge on Skye.
Emily, who is studying to be a doctor, was on a trip to Torridon with the hiking g ro u p she c h a i re d at Manchester University.
“There were 13 of us, including my flatmate Laura, who ended up holding on to my leg for an hour,” said Emily, speaking about her ordeal three months ago.
“Everyone was experienced, but this was just a freak accident.”
With only two days of their trip left, Emily and four of her group left Torridon youth hostel planning a lazy day pottering about while the others went further afield.
She was – and she knows this saved her life – just 200 yards from a road and its ready access when disaster struck. As she scrambled across a rocky section, a boulder dislodged.
“It was huge and I fell back, trying not injure my neck or head,” recalls Emily. “The boulder landed on me and I remember shouting, ‘Oh my God, my leg! My leg!’
“Laura couldn’t move it but my friend Johnny managed to pull it off. “The pain was indescribable. “The doctors said the bone was pulverised. I thought my leg was straight when my ankle was actually flopping to the side of it.
“All I could do was grit my teeth and hope the pain would go away. But it didn’t and I could feel myself slipping towards unconsciousness.”
Her friends applied a makeshift tourniquet to stem the blood flow. It took 40 minutes for emergency GPs to reach Emily and give her pain relief.
But even that, and the gas and air administered by the Torridon and Kinlochewe Mountain Rescue Team who were soon on the scene, made little difference.
Getting her on to a stretcher for the helicopter was excruciating.
And she’d lost so much blood she needed eight pints via transfusion.
“It was just horrendous but I know that if I’d have been properly up a mountain and harder to reach I’d have died. Every minute counted.”
Emily was flown to Raigmore