THE INJURIES YOU CAN’T SEE
Matt Stewart couldn’t believe he’d fallen five storeys.
It’s not that he couldn’t remember the fall – the plunging realisation he’d clipped onto the wrong line and the unbearable pain he met at the bottom are still imprinted upon his memory.
It’s just that 18m seemed impossibly high.
The Queenstown climber was adamant exaggeration was at play, and from his hospital bed he downplayed the height to anyone listening. Yet his climbing mate insisted – 18m of freefall. But how does anybody survive that?
A touch to the left or right, and he likely wouldn’t have. Admittedly unlucky to fall at all, Stewart’s luck extended just enough to see him land on the grassy bank between two boulders – just half a metre in either direction would have escalated the Hospital Flat rescue operation into a body retrieval.
Memories of the aftermath are fuzzy. Eyes clenched with pain, Stewart remembers the sounds of his rescue more than the sights; the thudding helicopter
