Local man recounts hiking accident and his road to recovery

By Laura Hipshire
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Arlon Quigley remembers it like it was yesterday— the day he fell 12 feet down a cliff , that is.

“It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2003,” Quigley says. That was the day he and his family decided to go on a hike in Butler, Penn., located 60 miles north of Pittsburgh where they were vacationing.

Quigley and his family members headed up the snowy cliff ; the next thing he recalls is falling down at high speed.

“I must have lost my balance,” he says. “I don’t really know what happened, but I went down 12 feet.”

He laid down at the bottom of the cliff , his head between two rocks. “Everyone told me to ‘just lay there’ and wait for the EMS,” he says. His glasses, which had flown off during the fall, were found nearby.

Wounded and weary
Soon he was taken to a local hospital and was told he had six broken ribs, a bruised spleen, and a punctured lung.

“They weren’t equipped to handle my injuries, so I was airlifted to a hospital in Pittsburgh,” he says.

Eventually, Quigley’s wife Peg drove him home, armed with a handful of prescriptions and doctor’s orders for physical therapy. Home was the retirement community of Fox Run in Novi, where the couple had moved only two months earlier, from Troy.

Welcome home
When the Quigleys finally arrived home, they were greeted with already filled pain medications and medical staff members (a visiting nurse and therapist) waiting to take care of a still injured and very sore patient. Arlon Quigley was impressed.

“If we had still been in our own house, we probably wouldn’t have had the therapist and nurse right away,” he says. “We would’ve had to drive out to the doctor’s office and wait; get the prescriptions filled; and wait a few weeks to make appointments for the therapist and nurse.”