A man miraculously survived after becoming impaled on a fence and left hanging upside down for five days as he desperately screamed for help.
Dale Whitehurst was forced to have his legs amputated following the ordeal, which lasted an estimated 112 hours.
He admits he thought “my number was up” as he waited for help in agonising pain and was plagued with hallucinations as the summer temperatures soared.
The 44-year-old got lost while walking home near Wolstanton Retail Park in Stoke-on-Trent last June when he attempted to take a short cut over a seven-foot metal palisade security fence.
But he slipped and jagged spikes jammed through both of his ankles.
“As I slipped my jeans ended up around my ankles and cut the blood flow off to my feet and I smashed my head, which knocked me out,” he told the Mirror.
“When I woke I was upside down impaled and could not feel my legs. I could see my mobile but it was out of reach.
“I tried to free myself but the pain was unreal and my jeans just twisted tighter around my ankles.”
Dale said the fence, near Lowfield Drive, is down an embankment and obscured by trees - so he was hidden from public view.
“I could hear people walking by and I screamed for help but no one came,” he said.
The rest of that first day he dangled helplessly as the sun beat down with temperatures peaking at around 22C.
But as night fell he was freezing cold and in desperate need of food and water.
Dale managed to get hold of an empty Coke can, urinated into it and drank it.
The pain in Dale's legs was so severe that he frequently lost consciousness.
He said: “The first day it was agony, I was in and out of consciousness.
“The second day I couldn’t really feel them. And I tried pulling myself up and my hands were all cut to ribbons from trying to pull myself up.
“I just couldn’t, every time I tried the pain just knocked me out again.”
He estimates it was by the third day that he had started hallucinating, and is unsure if by then the footsteps and talking he could hear nearby were in his head.
“I saw the missus sitting on the bed, and I asked her for a drink of water and she was ignoring me and I was getting more and more frustrated and my hands were scraping the soil and then I realised this isn’t carpet, I’m still there.
“Then I realised I was still trapped and dying. I thought my number was up.”
His now-ex partner had reported him to police and a desperate search was underway, with pictures in local shops, Dale understands.
On day five he heard people walking past again and “screamed as loud as I could”.
“All of a sudden three lads appeared and one ran to get help, and one ran to get me water and one stayed with me,” he remembers.
Dale was told later one of the men was an off-duty police officer.
He can recall police responders and an ambulance crew arriving and firefighters cutting down nearby trees to free him before he passed out.
The next thing he knew he was in Royal Stoke Hospital and being told by a doctor both of his legs needed to be removed because they were just “dead flesh and full of sepsis, which was killing me”.
“The doctor was standing over me saying he’s going to cut my legs off and I was arguing with him, and then I passed out,” said Dale.
His mum later said doctors had told her he would not survive the night when he was first admitted.
“I had oxygen trapped inside every organ and they had never come across a person with these injuries before,” Dale said.
“All the doctors said it’s like a miracle.”
“I even had one of the doctors come in to get me to sign something to get access to my X-ray pictures because they’ve never come across a case like it,” he explained.
“I survived five days hanging upside down, no food, no water and as far as I know I am the only person in the world to have survived something like this for that amount of time.”
But on initially being told he needed a double amputation, he admitted he thought “just let me die”.
If Dale's estimates are correct, he was only a few hours short of the ordeal endured by trapped canyoneer Aron Ralston, whose story was told in the film 127 Hours.
“He only had one hand crushed, I had both legs speared and was upside down,” Dale said.
“I would gladly give my left arm if I could have my legs back.”
He said: “I remember waking up and seeing my feet inflated black like a balloon full of blood and my head was twice the size - I was like papier mache head.
“I had all flies going around my feet because it was just like rotting flesh, just big balloons of blood.
“One of the nurses in the critical care unit came across and sprayed my feet, because they couldn’t get rid of the flies, they were all buzzing around my feet.”
His left leg, which was the worst, was amputated first within 24 hours to just below the knee, then a week later his right was removed.
Due to further infections, his wounds didn’t heal until around Christmas time and he had to get used to being in a wheelchair.
But in recent weeks, he has been learning to walk with prosthetic legs.
