Aftershock by Mountain Jules

Author:Mountain, Jules
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2017-04-13T06:56:48+00:00

The day after

The sound of helicopters filled my head.

I opened my eyes, adjusting slowly to the yellow-coloured gloom. For half a second – half a glorious second – I forgot where I was, what I was doing, what had happened.

Then it all came rushing back into my consciousness: Everest Base Camp, the avalanche, the injured people, the stench of blood, sweat and urine, fear. Was it all just a bad dream I’d had? No, that vile smell was still there – that sticky, pungent, bloody, bleachy smell. It seemed to permeate all my clothes. Each and every fibre of material seemed locked in the stench of fear and death. No, it was no dream.

A helicopter passed overhead, casting a shadow on my tent.

Helicopters.

My heart lifted slightly – helicopters! We’d been told there would be at least three days of bad weather, three days before any helicopters would be able to reach us.

But here they were – undeniably here.

I wrestled myself free from the clutch of my downing sleeping bag and crawled to the entrance of my tent. I had to see one with my own eyes. I had to be sure I wasn’t imagining the sound, that it wasn’t some sort of post-traumatic hallucination.

I yanked the zip open and light spilled into the tent. I shielded my eyes and crawled out into the snow.

I could see a helicopter, as cold and real as the snow around my knees. It was coming in to land on the piles of rocks the Sherpas had placed on top of the glacier to act as a helipad.

My heart leapt at the thought that help had arrived. Did this mean that the injured could get real medical help and were going to be transported to hospital – and that it was all over?

I felt a pang of guilt, wishing away the people I had helped keep alive the previous day – wishing away Mark, Richard, the Gurkha captain – but a part of me wanted them to be gone, taken away by a helicopter to become someone else’s problem.

Nine hours in that ‘hospital’ tent had been enough for me. I had steeled myself, prepared myself for another few days of the same, another few days covered in blood and urine, watching people whimpering in agony, with only Paracetamol to give them. It wrenched my very soul and I felt their pain. Too long in that environment would destroy anybody. I wanted the problem to be someone else’s responsibility.

As I stood up from my tent and watched the helicopter land, I felt redoubled respect for those in the medical profession.

Few Westerners alive today would have been through what I had been through just eight hours earlier. Only if you were involved in a war zone, or a massive pile-up on the motorway, a tsunami or some other sort of natural disaster, would you be forced to care for so many horrific injuries, tasked with keeping dying people alive for an unknown amount of time.

I’m not sure

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