HERES ANOTHER ARTICLE...THE DUDES ONLY 55... NOT THAT OLD
CALGARY - By the morning of his fourth day in the bush -- trapped face down under his all-terrain vehicle -- Ken Hildebrand considered cutting off his leg to free himself.
Throughout the ordeal, he kept his head and kept his faith. The outcome of surgery today will determine if he will also keep his right foot.
"I definitely have a way to go before I'm healthy," Hildebrand, 55, said from his bed at Lethbridge Hospital, where he has spent eight days being treated for leg injuries and frostbite. "But I still have all my parts, my mind and my family."
With a Bible at his side, Hildebrand appeared nervous as he contemplated the operation Monday night. He had polio as a child, leaving him with a weak left leg. Amputating the foot on his right leg could mean life in a wheelchair.
Even those who know him and are familiar with his character are amazed he's still alive.
"He was out there 96 hours straight and he didn't give up," said Troy Linderman, director of Crowsnest Pass Emergency Medical Services, where Hildebrand is a volunteer emergency worker.
"I don't know how he survived. I know I wouldn't have survived that long in that environment, that cold."
Hildebrand, who lives in Coleman and also works in Fort McMurray, was checking his trapline on Jan. 8 near Livingstone Gap, about 130 kilometres southwest of Calgary, when his ATV hit a rock and rolled, pinning his right leg. He tried to escape but couldn't.
There was no snow where he lay, so he used a roll of surveyor's tape to collect early morning frost, which he licked for the moisture. He tried eating the rotting meat in his trap, but it made him vomit.
Throughout the four-day, three-night ordeal, he kept wolves and coyotes away by blowing on an emergency whistle, he told the Reuters news agency.
"I thought of my family and God and that was it," he told Reuters from his hospital bed.
Friends began looking for him, and EMS staff launched their own search when he failed to show up for a shift on Jan. 12.
He was dehydrated, frostbitten, starving and "hypothermic to the core" when two hikers found him that day and called 911. Hildebrand told them how to make a splint for his leg before they moved him.
He was taken to Crowsnest Medical Centre and transferred to Lethbridge Hospital, where he has already undergone one surgery.
"We're going to go down and see him," Linderman said Monday. "After he was pulled out, he was smiling and laughing.
"He's about the only guy who could've survived that. He told me, 'If I didn't have a quad on me, I could've survived a month.' "
