Wild Ginger Writing

 

This is what Nadine Crombie, a local resident living in Bayview said was on her mind when she lay there without strength in the dirt with the flowing creek beside her as she bled and suffered in agony from falling just 10 feet off of a log in McDonald Creek.

It was just like any other Sunday. Crombie would go out for a long walk with her dog, Jenny, a one and a half year old English Springer Spaniel.

“And so I was walking along the beach there and then I walked to the very end, and there’s McDonald Creek, and so I thought I was going to walk through the woods, circle around and go home that way,” Crombie said.

But that didn’t happen.

As she cut into the woods with her puppy, taking pictures and hiking through the brush, she came across a log that passed over the creek.

“And I’ve crossed lots of logs before and that’s like totally safe,” she said, describing the log as 30 feet across and about four feet wide. “I didn’t even think whether it was safe or not. It looked so safe.”

At first, Crombie made it across just fine. Just like she said. ‘Safe.’

But when she turned around, Jenny was hesitating and was refusing to cross over.

Crombie kneeled down, coaxing the dog over, taking some snapshots of her timid steps over the natural bridge. The dog stepped back and refused to try again.

So Crombie stepped back on to the log, walking along and making it back to the other side once more. But Jenny still wouldn’t have any of it.

“She crossed down below in the water,” Crombie said. “So then I came back to the log.”

On her third time traversing the log, she crossed over nearly to the end, but then something happened.

“There’s some branches on the side and I turned sideways to try to … there’s still lots of room to inch by … and I have no idea why I fell. Like I didn’t slip, I didn’t lose my footing. I don’t know what happened, all I realized was I was falling backwards and it was 10 feet to the creek.”

Ten feet down and she smashed onto the rough creek bed below with her hip and back cracking on boulders below. Somehow, the way she fell cradled her spine, causing no damage and luckily keeping her from becoming paralyzed.

“Then, when I hit, it hurt so much. I wiggled my toes to see if I was paralyzed, and I wasn’t.”

Crombie lay there, water from the creek rushing over her body.

“The water is flowing over me and I didn’t even feel it because I was in so much pain. I kind of thought in my mind that if I don’t get out of the creek I’ll get hypothermia. So I tried to move and I realized my hip was broken.”

“And then my rib, I knew something was broken down here. I didn’t really have it defined. So I inched myself out of the creek into the shore and I had my cell, but I was out of range.”

Despite having no signal, Crombie tried and tried to dial 9-1-1. She knew was out of range and she couldn’t get a connection.

“I tried my kids and no connection, and I actually thought I was probably going to die there because nobody walks by there and I was soaking wet and I was cold. So I figured it won’t be long and I’ll probably die and nobody will be able to find me down here. Nobody knew where I was.”

She then started to think it was her time to pass on.

“So I was like, ‘Okay God, it looks like I’m going to die and I’m okay with that.’ But then I started thinking about my kids and I’m all, ‘I can’t die yet!’”

Maybe she could get around the corner. Maybe she could crawl out. Maybe, just maybe, she could pull enough of her will together to live.

“The bank was too high. I thought if maybe if I inched myself down the creek a little bit and around the corner, I could get up the bank there. And I had big heroic ideas that I was actually going to crawl out of the woods. But no, there was no way I could have.”

In her last attempt, she pulled herself. She dragged and tore at the ground, despite a broken hip, rib and a lacerated spleen, she tore forward. But it wasn’t enough.

“I went fifteen feet. I inched myself fifteen feet in three hours, and then there was no more inches left. I was trembling like a sewing machine and I just couldn’t go any further. And then, and I said, ‘God, what do I do now?’”

And just then, after trying between 30 to 50 times to call the police and with no connection coming through, the impossible happened.

“All of a sudden I got a text, and you know how you get a text and your phone rings? It was from someone I hardly knew like way in the States and I thought, ‘Hey, maybe texts come through.’”

She frantically texted her daughter, Susan, 19, five words that would change the outcome of her life.

“I chose to text her because I knew she lived by her phone. She would get it instantaneously, you know?”

So she typed out ‘I need help hurt bad.’

No response. Crombie just lay there, tormented by pain, not knowing the outcome of her life. Not knowing if she would see the sun again. There was nothing that let her knew what was to come.

Her daughter did get the text. She did call the police and she did help narrow down her search.

“She called the police and then the police said, ‘Yeah, we’re trying to find her. We’ve got a bunch of people out there.’ Because they’re getting all these 9-1-1 calls and they figured somebody was out there.”

As it turns out, about eight of Nadine’s 30 to 50 calls had gone through, she just couldn’t hear anything on her end, so she didn’t know if anyone was connecting.

Her phone had clicked into emergency mode, which, because of a built in GPS device, immediately gave the RCMP a radius of her position.

“We were able to locate her down to the MacDonald Park area,” said Nakusp RCMP Cst. Sam Nakatsu. “Right where she was, she was literally right on the border of cell range. If she didn’t have the cell phone, we wouldn’t have saved her. I mean, maybe her husband would have gone to look for her later, maybe not.”

And that’s when Jenny came back to save the day. When her husband, Don Crombie, got word of the incident, he went out with the police officer and searched around the area he knows her to hike. But because of the roaring creek, Nadine couldn’t hear any yelling for her name, nor could they hear her.

“The dog was with her. And when the dog sensed someone was in the bush, she started barking, and that directed the RCMP officer,” Don said.

By the time the police received the first call to the time they found her, it was around a two hour response time.

“I got the call at about 10 to 3 p.m. I think it was thereabouts,” Cst. Nakatsu said.

When police and search and rescue found Nadine, it had been three hours since she fell into the creek. Three hours alone without a window of hope.

But when they found her, her whole perspective changed.

“Until I saw that police officer, there was no idea, I had no idea that anyone was even looking for me and I had no hope that anyone was looking for me either,” she said. “As long as I was inching along I had hope. But when I stopped, I couldn’t, had no more inches left. I was getting a little bit discouraged towards the end.”

“As soon as I saw that police officer, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh, I’m going to live!’ I was really thankful. I’m not afraid to die, but I didn’t want to leave my kids. I try to be there for them and I knew it would be hard on them. That’s what gave me the desire to keep trying and trying and trying.”

When everyone was on scene to help, there were three RCMP officers and four searchers who went “above and beyond” according to Nadine.

“It’s certainly the closest I’ve ever come to dying,” she said. “That’s what I’m really thankful to the community. I’m in agony, you know, but they’re all so positive and knew what they were doing. They were so gentle, took their time. They were really patient with me and really good. You couldn’t ask for anything better.”

Nadine was heli-lifted out to the Arrow Lakes Hospital to receive care on her wounds as well as her hypothermia

Because of the extent of her injuries, she was taken down to Kelowna to be cared for six days until she was sent back to the Arrow Lakes for the last week and a half.

This entire ordeal has changed her, Nadine said, and because of how prompt and well executed the search and rescue was and the care she received, she’s decided to give back to the community as well.

“I was just so impressed watching the nurses and stuff,” Nadine said. “At first I thought Susan is looking for a career and I ended up talking myself into it too. We’re going to do it actually together. We decided we’d both go into nursing.”

“I’d link to thank Barb Miller, Stephanie Wright, God, the officers, everyone that was there to help me and get me through this.”

And Nadine won’t be caught in that situation again, and if she is, she’ll be a lot easier to track.

“My children are getting me one of those expensive GPS that locate you to the inch now.”

– Sam Smith