ISTANBUL (AP) – An American researcher who spent 11 days stuck in a Turkish cave after falling ill said that he thought he would die there before a complex international rescue operation got him out.
Mark Dickey, 40, appeared relaxed as he spoke to reporters at a hospital in Mersin, southern Turkiye, where he is recovering from his ordeal.
Asked if he ever gave up hope while trapped 1,000 metres underground, Dickey replied, “No.
But there’s a difference between accurately recognising your current risk against giving up.
“You don’t let things become hopeless, but you recognise the fact that ‘I’m going to die’.”
Dickey fell ill on September 2 with stomach bleeding while mapping the Morca cave in southern Turkiye’s Taurus Mountains.
He vomited blood and had lost large amounts of it and other fluids by the time rescuers brought him to the surface on Tuesday.
What caused his condition, which rendered him too frail to climb out of the cave on his own, remained unclear.Dressed in a blue T-shirt and with an IV line plug attached to his hand, the experienced caver from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, thanked the Turkish government for acting quickly, decisively to get the medical supplies needed to sustain him down into the cave. He also praised the international effort to save him.
Teams from Turkiye and several European countries mounted a challenging operation that involved pulling him up the cave’s steep vertical sections and navigating through mud and cold water in the horizontal ones. Rescuers had to widen some of the cave’s narrow passages, install ropes to pull him up shafts on a stretcher and set up temporary camps along the way before the operation could begin.
Medical personnel treated and monitored Dickey as teams comprised of a doctor and three to four other rescuers took turns staying by his side at all times.
