ISTANBUL (AP) — An American researcher who spent 11 days caught in a Turkish cave after falling in poor health mentioned Thursday that he thought he would die there earlier than a fancy worldwide rescue operation obtained him out.

Mark Dickey, 40, appeared relaxed as he spoke to reporters at a hospital in Mersin, southern Turkey, the place he's recovering from his ordeal.

Asked if he ever gave up hope whereas trapped 1,000 meters (greater than 3,000 toes) underground, Dickey replied, “No. But there’s a distinction between precisely recognizing your present threat in opposition to giving up.

“You don’t let things become hopeless, but you recognize the fact that ‘I’m going to die.’”

Dickey fell in poor health on Sept. 2 with abdomen bleeding whereas mapping the Morca collapse southern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. He vomited blood and had misplaced massive quantities of it and different fluids by the point rescuers introduced him to the floor on Tuesday.

What brought about his situation, which rendered him too frail to climb out of the cave on his personal, remained unclear.

Dressed in a blue T-shirt and with an IV line plug connected to his hand, the skilled caver from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, thanked the Turkish authorities for performing “quickly, decisively” to get the medical provides wanted to maintain him down into the cave.

He additionally praised the worldwide effort to save lots of him. Teams from Turkey and a number of other European nations mounted a difficult operation that concerned pulling him up the cave’s steep vertical sections and navigating by means of mud and chilly water within the horizontal ones.

Rescuers needed to widen among the cave’s slender passages, set up ropes to tug him up shafts on a stretcher and arrange non permanent camps alongside the best way earlier than the operation may start. Medical personnel handled and monitored Dickey as groups comprised of a health care provider and three to 4 different rescuers took turns staying by his aspect always.

“This honestly was an amazing rescue,” Dickey, who is also an skilled underground rescuer, mentioned. “This was an amazing example of international collaboration, of what we can do together as a country, as a world.”

Commenting on the “insane” public deal with his rescue, he added: “I really am blessed to be alive. It’s been a tough time. While I was trapped underground – I was trapped for 11 days – I learned that I had a nation watching, hoping, praying that I would survive: Turkey.”

Dickey will proceed his restoration at Mersin City Hospital. Laughing and joking throughout his transient media convention on Thursday, he mentioned he would “definitely” proceed to discover caves.

“There’s risk in all life and in this case, the medical emergency that occurred was completely unpredicted and unknown, and it was a one-off,” he mentioned, including that he “would love to” return to Morca cave, Turkey’s third deepest, to finish his job.

Around 190 individuals from Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Turkey took half within the rescue, together with docs, paramedics and skilled cavers.

The Italian National Alpine and Speleological Corps mentioned the rescue operation took greater than 100 rescuers from round 10 counties a complete of 60 hours and that Dickey was within the cave for roughly 500 hours.

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