Halo's and Fuzzy Dice

I woke up a little after midnight on Tuesday morning to find myself in ICU with my mother and sister by my bed. They'd had to argue with the security guard when they arrived at the hospital, he tried to tell her I wasn't there. I had been registered under "Waulsby" instead of "Maulsby". She persisted, telling the guy that her kid was here someplace and she damn well wasn't leaving until she saw him.

I was in a lot of pain, but instead of it being  intense pain concentrated in a small area, now my neck and upper back felt like somebody had been beating on me with a 2X4. My head had snapped forward in the crash hard enough to break my neck, which also gave me an incredible case of whiplash. Any muscles that hadn't torn had been severely stretched.  It was with great relief that I discovered I did not have a Halo, merely a neck brace. It was to be my constant companion for the next 6 weeks. It's made from several pieces of plastic held together with plastic screws and velcro, and wraps completely around my neck. Well padded, its as comfortable as could be expected under the circumstances, but everywhere it touched my back and shoulders it felt like a sharp edge digging into my bruised muscles. It's purpose is to prevent me from turning my head from side to side, or moving it up or down. Although there was no strength in any of my limbs, about 80% of the feeling in my left arm had returned, and when I tried the wriggle test, everything moved.

The Surgeon had gone in through the front of my throat, moving my larynx aside to get to the vertebrae and spinal cord. He'd ground away part of a vertebrae to get better access to the cord and moved everything back to where it was supposed to be, filled the part he'd ground away with a bone from lord only knows what, then installed 2 plates and 4 screws to hold it all together before closing me up with a series of staples going sideways across the base of my throat. I was flipped over, and 2 more plates were installed with 4 more screws to make sure that the next time I turned my head it wouldn't snap off and go rolling across the floor. He closed that with another series of staples going vertically up my neck.

Tuesday and Wednesday passed in a fog. The nurses were checking on me regularly, and a constant supply of morphine kept the pain down to a manageable level. The biggest immediate problem was being barely able to swallow. The swelling from the surgery left my throat almost closed, and I had to focus and concentrate to simply swallow sips of water. I was brought food at the normal intervals, but there wasn't the slightest chance that I could eat most of it as there was no way it would have gone down my throat. The food itself was another problem altogether. Most of it would have been inedible for a starving man, let alone one who could barely swallow liquids.The mystery meat that was part of my first dinner looked like a hamburger patty that had been run over by a car and then left in the sun for a couple of days. For 2 days my only nourishment came from puddings, soups, and tea. Even that was a struggle as it's not part of a nurses job to feed a patient. I could barely get the lids off the bowls let alone use a spoon to convey food to my mouth. My mom and sister showed up for dinnertime but the rest of the time I was on my own. When the nurse saw how little I had eaten she gave me a lecture on the importance of nutrition to the recovery process, and pointing to the mystery meat said it that I should have eaten the protien first. I tried asking for some protein shakes or something that I could drink that didn't require chewing and could be swallowed easily, but she insisted I eat what I had been brought. By the time I left the hospital after 5 days I had lost 15 pounds.

Every hour or so a crew would come in and carefully roll me to to a new position to prevent bedsores, and I was wearing some kind of hydraulically actuated pants that were constantly writhing about my legs. They were to prevent blood clots, and although they were far too warm, not to mention creepy as hell, the constant motion served to distract me from the pain elsewhere.

After repeatedly being hung up on by a switchboard operator who didn't speak English, Diane was finally able to get through to my room late Tuesday. It gave me a real lift to hear her voice, without my cell phone I had no idea what her number was, and without my laptop I couldn't send her an email. I had been without any way of contacting her. She had found out about the accident on Facebook when Scott Simpson, who had been training at Farnham with his team the Gan Sky Cows, which is where Matt and I had been going to jump, sent her a message asking how I was doing after the accident. She dealt with it well. Probably better than I would have if the roles had been reversed. From the description of the injuries she got the impression I would be fitted with a Halo, and with her usual sense of humor said she had bought some fuzzy dice and battery powered Christmas lights to hang from it. She was checking flights to Ottawa and decided she would wait until I was being released before she left Winnipeg. She had already booked some time off as I had planned to visit her after Matt and I had returned from the airshow, and she got some emergency leave as well so she could spend as much time as possible in Ottawa to take care of me.

Through the fog, 3 things stood out crystal clear. The first one was the first time I peed without a catheter. It might seem trivial to everybody else, it's something most people do many times a day and never give a second thought to. To me it was an important milestone because it meant that despite whatever damage my spinal cord had suffered, I still had control over my basic bodily functions. It happened on Wednesday afternoon after I had been transferred to a lazyboy chair, hours after the catheter had been removed. When I felt sufficient pressure had built up, I asked for a jug, which the nurse quickly brought me, and then stood over me as she looked down expectantly. Suffering from performance anxiety, I asked her for a little privacy, so she went outside the room and watched me through the window. I finally got her to draw the curtain and close the door and after several false starts decided to try an old trick from camp and asked for a glass of warm water. I dangled the fingers of one hand in the water, and finally after several long minutes, a trickle began, that quickly turned into a raging torrent. I could wax rhapsodic for hours about the beauty of the sound of my pee splashing and gurgling in that jug. If the ceiling had parted and a host of angels singing The Hallelujah Chorus had descended from the heavens, the sound would not have been as beautiful. It was The Best Pee Ever! After a minute or so passed I started to be concerned about the capacity of the jug, but I couldn't tilt my head forward to check the fluid level. There was no way I was going to even try and put the process on hold (so to speak) while I called for a second jug, but fortunately I was emptied before the jug was filled.

The second thing I remember was getting a phone call from Matt. I was happy to hear his voice, and expected him to tell me that he had been released from hospital and was at home in Ottawa. He wasn't. In fact he had barely moved from where I had last seen him, more than 2 days before. He was lying on a bed in the hospital corridor, his only treatment for that entire time having been regular doses of morphine and repeated admonishments to not move, "Or you could be paralyzed." They had decided to ship him back to Ottawa for treatment, and for three and a half days he lay in that corridor while various bureaucracies argued over who would pay for the trip and the extra insurance required because the ambulance was going to have to leave the province, and what authority would accept responsibility for Mathieu's health while he was being transported. The Civic Hospital Orthopedic unit in Ottawa had agreed to take him on Monday and held a bed for him the whole time.

That's when I found out about all the crap that reporters had pulled trying to get some info about the crash. One had taken the identification numbers off the plane and looked up the registration with Transport Canada. It's registered to Matt and his father, so his father found out Matt had been in a crash when the reporter called him to get information about the pilot. Once Matt's name was out, someone Googled his name, found out that he had been a participant at Mission 100 the week before and had helped set a new Canadian Skydiving record, and called Nouvel Air where it had taken place. He wound up Talking to Michel Lemay, the guy we had been going to be skydiving with. "Can you confirm that Mathieu Belanger was a participant in Mission 100?"

"Did your newspaper cover Mission 100, the biggest accomplishment in the history of Canadian skydiving, something that every participant in it is very proud of?" Michel asked. "Why would you not cover such a great story, but then be in such a rush to cover an unfortunate accident?" When his question was met with silence, Michel hung up the phone. I must remember to send that man a case of beer.

Some news outlets used pictures lifted off of Matt's Facebook page, and one reporter even had the gall to call the hospital and try to pass herself off as "A very good friend of the pilots wife, just trying to help the family by getting some information." The nurse who took the call turned and handed the phone to Kim who happened to be standing right next to her, and when the reporter stopped lying and identified herself Kim promptly hung up.

Matt was speaking in a near whisper as he was afraid the hospital staff would take  the phone away from him if they found out he had it. It was his lifeline to the world at that point as he tried to get transferred to Ottawa. Kim had been waging war with all the people who passed the buck for responsibility for getting him transferred, and it wasn't until they threatened to take the story of the survivor of the plane crash being left lying in a hallway to the media that they finally got action. Matt was finally transferred late Thursday, arriving in Ottawa that night.

The third thing was the steady parade of doctors, interns, residents, and surgeons that came by to see me. Every single one of them told me over and over how lucky I was, and how close my spinal cord had been to being severed. "First, ya gotta fall into the manure pile....."

Scott, Jan, and Dave, of the Gan Sky Cows came to visit on Tuesday night. They had finished training for the day at Farnham and fought their way across town from the south shore through Montreal traffic. As an indication of how stoned I was, at first I didn't recognize Dave Gransden. I've known Dave for 20 years, he was the first person who ever pinned me in free fall. That night I couldn't recognize him from 10 feet away.

Late Wednesday afternoon I was moved from ICU into a regular ward. The distance covered was only about 50 feet, but it was like moving into another world.

The Manure Pile

Humptey Dumptey sat on a wall,

Humptey Dumptey had a great fall,

All the King's horses and all the King's men,

Couldn't put Humptey together again.

Rescue, and Ambulance Rides.

The clearing was flooded with Firemen, Paramedics, and Cops. The Paramedics quickly had us immobilized on back boards complete with cervical collars, and slapped a dressing on the small cut on my elbow that had bled so profusely. The fact that we had survived a plane crash was just starting to sink in, and was driven home by the comments of some of the firemen as they surveyed the crumpled mess that only minutes before had been a flying machine. They carried us out to the Autoroute where the emergency vehicles had parked, blocking the highway and backing rush hour traffic up for miles.

Contrary to the news reports, we didn't hit a milk truck, I am not a doctor, Mathieu is not my son, and while we did, after a fashion, walk away from the wreck, our injuries proved to be anything but minor.

It was a short ride to the hospital in Mascouche, and although the pain in my neck was getting worse and my arm was becoming more numb by the minute, I kept thinking everything was going to be fine, we were both going to be okay.

Really, how bad could it be? We both got out of the plane on our own, we'd passed the wriggle test (wriggle everything, does it all work?), and most importantly of all, I'd always been lucky. All my life I've been the guy who could fall into a pile of manure, and come out smelling like a rose.

The problem with that was....... first, you had to fall into a pile of manure.

At the hospital I was immediately the center of a flurry of activity. I was slid off of the ambulance gurney onto the examination table, my blood soaked clothing was cut off, various nurses and doctors began a series of rapid fire questions about where it hurt, how bad the pain was on a scale of one to ten, what I remembered, did I hit my head, whether or not I had eaten that morning, did I have feeling in and could I move all my limbs, what the date was, and, of all things, who was the Premier of Quebec? The ones about the date and the Premier were to help them determine whether or not I had a brain injury, and they got confused when I tried to tell them that I was retired and didn't care, much less know what the date was, and that I didn't follow politics and know or care who the Premier of Ontario was, much less Quebec. The main problem seemed to be that it was felt I was much too young to be retired and that I was confusing a vacation with retirement. I finally gave up and told them I was unemployed, which they seemed happy to accept and moved on to other silly questions.

Then a whole bunch of them started treating me like I was a pin cushion. Half of them were stabbing me with needles to put something into me, the other half were stabbing me with needles trying to take something out.

Through what was to me a scene of total confusion, my focus centered on one person, a doctor who told me his name was Olivier. As people rushed back and forth, he was speaking calmly, clearly in control, directing everything that was happening, his hand on my shoulder, constantly reassuring me. If the Firemen and Paramedics were the King's horses, this was the guy who was in charge of all the King's men. Humptey may have been screwed, but I knew I was in good hands. That was when I started to believe the bullshit I'd been telling myself about how everything was going to be okay. When Matt arrived he asked me if I could excuse him for a few minutes "To check on your friend". After assessing Matt he decided to send me off to x-ray first.

There were 3 people working in x-ray, and they were cheerfully laughing and  babbling away about what they had done on the weekend, talking about their families, sports, the hot nurse that just went past the door, everything, except, me. They were polite enough, and slid me over to the x-ray table carefully enough, but I got the impression I could have been a side of beef for all the interest they had in me personally.

One of them came over and said "We're just going to check the pictures before we send you back." A minute later the conversation in the control room suddenly  ceased, and I heard all three of them make muted gasps, followed by total silence. The one that had spoken to me reappeared above me, and with eyes the size of dinner plates said very solemnly "Monsieur, I will ask you to please remain very still." He repeated it several times with different wording to make sure I understood.

When they went to move me back onto the gurney to return me to emergency, there were so many people helping I couldn't even see them all. They certainly hadn't been rough or blase about moving me onto the x-ray table, but getting me off they treated me like I was a glass sculpture that had been broken into several pieces and they wanted to be sure the pieces weren't disturbed. I soon discovered why.

As soon as Olivier had examined the x-rays, he came to me and said in a serious tone, "Lawrence, you need to remain very, very, still. It's extremely important that you do not move at all." Like the x-ray technician, he repeated it with different wording, and then said "I can see I'm scaring you."

"Doctor, you're not scaring me yet, that will come in a minute. For now, you have my complete, total, undivided attention."

"Good. Lawrence, you have a badly broken neck. Your C5-C6 vertebrae are subluxated, which means dislocated, and your C4 is cracked. Any movement could cause your spinal cord to be cut. If it goes at C5-C6 you will be paralyzed from the neck down, and if it goes at C4 you will not be able to breathe without a ventilator."

"Oh."

"You need surgery that we can't perform here, so I'm going to find the best place to send you to have that done. Do you have any questions for me before I go take care of that?"

Questions? My mind was as numb as my arm had become. I could think of nothing to ask, except to say "If I need to remain still, then you better give me something for the pain, 'cause sooner or later, I'm going to start squirming."

With a smile he replied "Already on the way."

Matt was only a few feet away and had heard the entire conversation. The conversation that followed bordered on tears for both of us. For myself the  realization of how close I had come to dying when we hit the ground, and how badly I was hurt, was devastating. Matt was wracked with guilt because he felt he had caused this. Somewhere in the conversation I found out Matt had a compression fracture of his L1 vertebrae, which is when I felt guilty because I felt I had caused it to happen to him. 

That's when somebody came came along and dosed me with Fentanyl, which I found out later is 100 times stronger than Morphine and takes effect almost instantaneously. Pretty quickly I didn't  give a shit about anything. "Pain? What Pain? Take more than a stinkin' plane crash to put me off my feet! Feet? Do I have feet? I must! I had them earlier, maybe they took them when they took away my clothes. Clothes? Holy Crap! Am I lying here naked?" I probably would have tried to get up and walk around if I could have formed a coherent thought to do so, but there was no danger of that. I was so utterly stoned I wouldn't have batted an eye if a squad of Nazi frogmen had burst into the room and kidnapped me.

Somewhere in that haze is when Caroline showed up. She had arrived at work and heard about a plane crash in Mascouche. She called Michel Lemay in Farnham, and Michel told her that all he knew was that we hadn't shown up. She jumped back in her car and headed for the nearest hospital. When she appeared over me I was glad I was trashed. She looked so worried that if I had been straight I would have gone to pieces. She held it together, moving back and forth between Mathieu and I, remaining calm even though she was obviously upset, trying to reassure us, just as much as we were trying to reassure her.

Out of all the questions I had been asked I hadn't been asked if there was anyone I would like notified about the accident. I didn't know Diane's phone number, so I asked Caroline to call my mom and let her know what had happened. She readily agreed, but later I felt guilty for having asked her to make a call like that.

Shortly afterwards Olivier returned to tell me I would be moved to Sacre-Couer hospital in Montreal. Before I left he stitched up the cut on my elbow, and while doing it he mentioned that he often took his kids to the wind tunnel at Skyventure Montreal. Throughout the time we had been at this hospital he had been a kind, calm, reassuring voice, and had displayed the best bedside manner I had ever seen from anyone involved in the medical profession. I told him that the next time he went to the tunnel he would find some extra time in his account, and he just laughed, I'm  sure he thought it was just the drugs talking, but I meant it.

 Matt and I weren't happy to be seperated, at least up until now we'd had each other for support and encouragement, I felt very lonely as I was wheeled down the hall to my ambulance. It hadn't yet been decided if he would be fitted with a front and back clam shell type brace and then shipped back to Ottawa, or shipped to Ottawa and then fitted with a brace. Either way, it was likely he would be home for Tuesday night.

The drive to Sacre Couer took about half an hour, and every single time we went over the smallest bump in the road I expected my spinal cord to finally give way and leave me dead, or a quadriplegic. Most of us have thought at one time or another about being the victim of an accident that would leave you paralyzed, or dead. The fentanyl had long since worn off and been replaced with morphine, which left me lucid enough to ponder the possibility for the entire drive.

The whole time I'd been at the first hospital, I was examined at regular intervals by a steady parade of interns and residents. They'd shine a light in my eyes, have me wriggle my toes, push with them, lift up with them, squeeze their hands with my hands, try and spread my fingers while they tried to hold them together, and on and on. By the time it started at the second hospital I had the routine memorized, which was a good thing, because it was repeated over and over and over again for the next five days.

To prep me for surgery they told me they would have to put me in traction. Sounded reasonable enough until somebody showed up with this great big C shaped piece of cast aluminum with screws at each end. They positioned it with the screws just above my ears, and then proceeded to twist the screws into my head. Normally, I'm pretty squeamish, so they must have dosed me with something other than morphine because it didn't bother me in the slightest as the points of the screws were driven in and I felt my skull being chipped away by the points. A cable was attached to the middle, it was fed through a pulley at the head of the gurney, and then they very carefully, began to add weights to it. They planned to add a total of 15 pounds but stopped at 10 because the screws started to shift.

Just before I was wheeled off to surgery one of the interns asked if anybody had explained to me how the Halo was going to work. That was the first time anybody had mentioned anything other than having to wear a neck brace following the surgery. When I said no, he replied that I should ask when I got to surgery. I knew what a halo was, a couple of people I know have had to wear them after a severe neck injury. It consists of a brace that sits on the shoulders, back, and chest, to hold a framework up around the head, that is topped by a circular frame resembling the halo on an angel, hence the term Halo. The Halo holds a series of screws that are driven in all around the skull to hold the head firmly in place. Just a few months ago I finished reading a book by Dan B.C. called "Above All Else", and in the very first paragraph he describes regaining consciousness in a hospital after a plane crash, wearing a Halo. He had written entire chapters on what he had endured in the process of recovery, and in rehab. Was I facing the same thing? There were 21 people on board that airplane, and only 4 survived. He had gone on to a full recovery, and in fact I had enjoyed the privilege of jumping with him many times in the last couple of years at his home drop zone in California. He was one of my heroes, and I admired him not just for what he had accomplished as a skydiver and for the advances he had made in the sport, but for his down to earth, approachable, easy going attitude. I could only hope that things turned out as well for me as they had for him.

When I got to surgery I asked everybody who got near me what I would be wearing when I woke up, a neck brace, or a Halo, and they all told me to talk to the surgeon. Before I had a chance though, I was given a general anesthetic and wheeled into the operating room.

"If You Can Get It Through The Door......."

It's now been 5 weeks since the accident, and I'm finally ready to write the story of those 5 days in Montreal. It's too long to tell in one post, so I will tell it in stages. For those of you who read these posts because of the unique and humorous way I view the world, you will probably be disappointed at the next few stories. They aren't very cheerful, and in fact some may find them depressing.

It has often been said about the load carrying capacity of the Cessna 182, that if you can get it through the door, it will get it off the ground. We put it to the test as we stuffed it with 2 sets of gear, tents, sleeping bags, camping gear, lawn chairs, a couple bags of clothes, coolers, a case of water, a full load of fuel, and more maps than I thought it would take to navigate around the world. Matt assured me they were all necessary and I knew I was in for a little bit different type of flying than I was used to doing on my own. For instance, if I wanted to navigate from Ottawa to Kingston, I'd head kinda southwest, turn right when I hit a big river, the river would lead to a big lake, next to the lake would be a city, just past the city there would be an airport. Land there. Simple, low tech, and utterly reliable. The plane was heavily loaded when we left Rockliffe at 5 in the morning, we had just enough useful load left to pick up Caroline and her gear in Mascouche. I'm glad Matt was doing the weight and balance for this flight instead of me, I wouldn't have known where to start.

We left  just before dawn, heading east. It was a gorgeous morning with almost no wind, and the sun creeping slowly above the horizon in front of us. The Gatineau hills were off to the left, the valleys shrouded in mist that was slowly burning off as the sun warmed the ground. I wished I had kept one of my cameras nearby to be able to record the incredible view as we cruised along above the Ottawa river. I can distinctly remember thinking to myself what a perfect day it was, how much I was looking forward to spending the day skydiving, and then flying on to Oshkosh, and how happy I was to be alive. This would be the adventure of a lifetime.

It was only a few minutes later that it all went to Hell in a Handcart, and the courses of our lives would be changed forever.

The Crash.
Matt and I will be pondering and dissecting the 5 minutes immediately before the accident for the rest of our lives. As we approached Mascouche just after dawn, I was Pilot Flying, and Matt was Pilot In Command. I could write several thousand words on how it came about, but the only way to sum it up would be to say that on a perfect VFR day, two competent pilots managed to fly a perfectly good airplane into the ground. I feel I'm responsible, Matt feels he's responsible, and we're both right. Aviation accidents don't usually result from a single bad decision, but from a series of choices that are like forks in the road. If we had made a different choice at any one of those forks, we probably would have had a completely different outcome. In hindsight, there are so many things either one of us could have done differently, so many things either one of us could have said to the other, but we didn't.

The plan was to do a straight in approach rather than fly a standard landing pattern because of noise abatement concerns. I had a lot of trouble identifying the airport, and by the time Matt had directed me to it we were almost on top of it. I put the plane into a vicious side slip to bleed off altitude, Matt got the gear and flaps down, but when we were still a couple of hundred feet up I knew that I had let the situation get ahead of me. The more high performance the airplane, the further ahead of it the pilot has to be. When the plane gets ahead of you, you wind up having to react to the situation instead of dictating how the situation will unfold. By the time I realized I couldn't make the landing and Matt took over, I had set him up for failure. He got the plane down on the runway a little more than half way along, but with all that luggage and fuel on board we had so much mass that the thing just wouldn't slow down. At the end of the runway was a grass over-run, beyond that there was a tall stand of pine trees. There was no way we would have gotten it stopped before we hit the trees, so our best option was to power up, take off again, and do a go around for another attempt.

It was not to be. We were into the over-run when we lifted off again, and we weren't able to clear the trees with enough speed to keep flying. Matt and I have micro-analyzed those brief seconds between takeoff and going into the trees hundreds of times, and there were many things that could have been done differently, but it wouldn't have affected the outcome. We actually rose just high enough to clear the tops of the trees, but by then the stall warning was getting louder and louder. If it had been me flying, I would have kept the yoke back, trying to keep the thing in the air, it would have stalled, dropped a wing, and spun in, killing us both. Matt took the only choice that was left to us, and let it settle into the trees.

The trees were all tall pines, all the same height, planted closely together. Since we were in a stall we went in at a relatively slow speed, with the wings level. The top part of a stand of trees like that is actually very soft, and as we sank in further and further, encountering thicker branches, the speed was quickly reducing. The plane was getting torn apart piece by piece but the solidly mounted engine out in front of us kept any branches or tree trunks from coming into the cockpit. As plane crashes go, it was actually going quite well.

Until we ran out of trees.

In the middle of that little forest was a clearing. When we reached it, the wreck stopped decelerating so nicely and dove almost vertically into the ground, then slid across the clearing, coming to a stop against the trees on the far side. I've been in several car and motorcycle accidents, and know what it's like to collide with another vehicle or stationary object. Those other accidents were nothing like this. There's nothing that can prepare a person for the violent impact of doing a nose dive into the ground from 40 feet up in the air. The shock of colliding with the ground was severe enough to break bones and tear muscles. It was that initial impact that caused all our injuries.

As suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch, there was near total silence, except for the sound of water, as if we were next to a small waterfall. An instant later the smell hit me: it wasn't water, it was all that fuel pouring out of the ruptured fuel tanks. I couldn't turn my head to look but Mathieu could, and he could see the fuel gushing out of the wings. Even injured as we were, we couldn't stay there.

It was only a second or two before I said "Time to go." The windshield had popped out when we hit the ground, and since the landing gear had torn off, the fuselage was sitting on the ground. As if we'd rehearsed the movements, we both released our seat belts, stood up in the opening left by the windshield, and Matt stepped out to the ground. I went to do the same on my side of the plane but the trees blocked my way. As I shuffled across to the other side Matt held out his hand to help me.

But I knew I was forgetting something. Something that was very important.

The "Post Crash Checklist". It's short and very simple. Shut off the fuel, which was pointless in this case, and turn off the Master Electrical Switch. No point surviving the crash and then dying in a fireball. I paused, reached back in, flipped the switch to off, and Matt helped me from the plane.

As the two of us shuffled away the pain was quickly burning through the adrenaline, and by the time we collapsed about 40 feet away we both knew that we had been very badly hurt.

Suddenly Matt dragged himself to his feet and hobbled back towards the wreck. He came back carrying his cellphone, and as he fell back down to the floor of the clearing he had already dialed 911. He quickly and succinctly told them what had happened, exactly where we were, that we had gotten ourselves out, and how many people were on board. Then he said "Hang on a minute, I'm going to put you on hold."

That's right. He put 911 on hold. He quickly called Caroline, the girl we were stopping to pick up and told her, in a classic example of understatement, "We won't be going skydiving today, we had a problem with the plane." So she headed to work.

My head was bent sharply forward with my chin touching my chest, and the pain  in my neck was agonizing. I could feel my left arm quickly going numb as if all the circulation had been cut off, and realized that my shorts were soaked with blood. I knew I should stay still, but the pain in my neck was so excrutiating that every minute or so I would roll from one side to the other in a fruitless attempt to find a position that might ease the pain even slightly.

Most importantly, we both passed the wriggle test. That's when you wriggle everything and it all works: both hands, both feet, all fingers and toes.

We've all heard sirens before, usually in the distance, and most people usually regard them as more of an annoyance than anything else. But believe me when I tell you that no sound ever sounded as sweet as hearing them and knowing that they were coming for us. There was nothing more we could do for ourselves, from here on we had to count on the professionals.

Which is when a guy dressed in mechanics coveralls ran into the clearing. he stopped next to Matt, and looking down with a look of astonishment on his face, asked: "Mathieu?" His name was Mathieu as well, and 14 years earlier the two of them had done their primary flight training together. He had seen us crash, and had called 911 before running over to help. They spoke briefly, before Matt sent him to me. He convinced me to stay still, cradling and supporting my head until the firemen came crashing through the woods.

Stupid place to plant a bunch of trees.