The Night Mumbai Burned - Will Pike p2

Summary

What I Survived – “The Night Mumbai Burned: Will Pike Part 2”
Host: Jack Laurence
Guest: Will Pike
Date: May 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this gripping installment, Jack Laurence continues the remarkable true account of Will Pike, who survived the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks while staying at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Through vivid first-person recollection, Will brings listeners inside his mindset during the siege, sharing the moments of deadly suspense, harrowing decisions, and his near-fatal escape. The episode also explores Will’s physical and psychological aftermath, giving a raw, honest look at trauma, survival instinct, and what it means to rebuild when life changes forever.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Movie Tropes vs. Real Survival

[03:02–06:43]

• The episode opens with a cinematic analogy, comparing Hollywood action heroes to real-life scenarios:

  "Somewhere ordinary. And then the ordinary is shattered. Gunfire in the lobby. Explosions in the car park. ... Maybe he's just an ordinary man ... every man who turns out when it matters most to be anything but ordinary." (Narrator, 03:02)

• Will reflects on the influence of action movies on his thought process during the crisis:

  "What would MacGyver do? What would Bruce Willis do? ... You start like, checking the panels in the wall ... No, this is sealed. This is sealed shut." (Will, 06:48)

2. First Reactions: Calling for Help

[07:44–09:50]

• With no clear escape, Will calls his father in England:

  "I remember calling him. It's like, could be in a spot of bother here, Father." (Will, 07:54) "Thank God my dad hadn’t watched Taken, because the last thing I would have wanted was him thinking that he could rescue me." (Will, 08:12)

• His father's advice is simple but life-saving: stay put.

3. Tension in the Bathroom: The Ringing Phone

[09:51–13:19]

• Will and his partner hide in the bathroom, following what they know from movies (getting in the bath to protect from explosions).
• The phone rings; Will answers—against his instincts:

  "It was super creepy ... I answered it. I just kind of needed to know. ... She called me Mr. Doyle, because that was her name ... I was like, what have I done?" (Will, 09:51–10:39)

• Paranoia sets in, fearing the call revealed their location to the attackers.

4. The Knife-Edge Moments: Preparing to Fight for Their Lives

[11:36–13:19]

• Will and his partner hear gunshots on their floor, convinced attackers are executing guests room by room.
• Prepares for close combat:

  "I had a cutlery fork... my girlfriend’s crouched down, I'm holding a fork." (Will, 11:57) "They were going to come in, think we're in the bath ... I was going to come in from behind door and stab them in the neck with the fork. I am not a fighter. I have barely punched a person in the face." (Will, 12:35)

• The attackers never enter the room. Relief but ongoing terror.

5. Emotional State Through the Ordeal

[16:11–17:41]

• Surprisingly, Will and his partner remain composed:

  "Never did we lose it. Never did one of us sort of freak out, get hysterical ... we were just kind of quite matter of fact, I think." (Will, 16:11)

• Will attributes not developing PTSD to not witnessing direct violence:

  "I have nothing etched visually onto my lobe ... by sustaining the injury like that just jolted. It superseded the terrorist attack in a way." (Will, 16:53)

6. A New Threat: The Fire

[17:41–19:41]

• The hotel starts burning; smoke and heat force Will and his partner to consider escaping via the window.
• With no emergency services outside, they attempt to improvise an escape:

  "Found a pair of scissors ... cut the curtains, found sheets, split the sheets, got whatever we could to essentially make a rope." (Will, 19:41)

7. The Escape: A Fall and a Miracle

[20:36–26:03]

• Will describes the high-stakes attempt to escape:

  "Picked up this table, threw it at the window to break it, and it just bounced off." (Will, 19:51)

• Times window smashing with explosions:

  "Again, the whole ... that scene in Shawshank where he’s breaking out of the prison felt just like that." (Will, 20:36)

• Attempts to abseil but the makeshift rope fails:

  "Within ... five seconds ... I felt one of the knots slip ... my brain is going, nope, this is not the one ... I blacked out. ... I saw myself fall, like the camera—I became the static camera." (Will, 21:30–22:35)

• By falling, Will inadvertently signals help to his partner, who is also rescued.

8. Injury, Hospital, and Return Home

[26:03–33:44]

• Will sustains severe injuries: spinal, pelvic, and arm injuries, but survives in part due to luck and happenstance.

• A British-trained Indian doctor saves his life:

  "They stabilized my spine, they patched on my elbow, which doesn't extend beyond that point ... Fundamentally, the thing I'm most grateful for was I did not land on my head." (Will, 26:24)

• The bureaucratic nightmare of being repatriated:

  "The British Consulate were pathetically useless ... Our insurance company didn’t want to pay for repatriation because as far as they were concerned, this wasn’t an insurance issue. This was force majeure, an act of God." (Will, 27:53–28:42)

• The exhausting, dangerous journey home on a regular passenger plane:

  "I'm on a hospital trolley ... The seats are pushed down ... They put my hospital bed on top of the seats. ... The whole flight back was completely insane ..." (Will, 29:53–31:06) "The air hostesses were all around ... Everyone’s just holding this thing steady." (Will, 32:37)

9. Realizations and Aftermath

[34:05–34:25]

• Will learns of his new reality from his brother:

  "My brother overheard doctors saying how I’m never going to walk again. I didn't even know that at this point." (Will, 34:05)

• On the hardest part of recovery:

  "So much of it is, this is how you don't kill yourself." (Will, 34:15)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Hollywood’s blueprint for survival:
  “We've watched this so many times in so many variations that it's become a kind of muscle memory, almost a blueprint for survival that lives somewhere in the back of all our minds ... we'd know what to do. Wouldn't we, Will?”
  —Narrator (05:15)

• On the bathroom phone call:
  "Honestly, I was just like, well, I’ve just signed off death warrant. Because they didn’t know we were there and now they know we’re here."
  —Will (10:38)

• On preparing for the worst:
  "They were going to come in, think we’re in the bath ... I was going to come in from behind door and stab them in the neck with the fork ... I am not a fighter. I have barely punched a person in the face."
  —Will (12:38)

• On luck and trauma’s aftermath:
  "The thing I’m most grateful for was I did not land on my head. Yeah, because that is what would have redefined who I am."
  —Will (26:39)

• On the infamous plane journey:
  "They put my hospital bed on top of the seats. I’m now this far away from the overhead locker. I’m so elevated. ... I’m laughing because I’m high on morphine. I’m about to go home."
  —Will (31:06)

• On survival and depression:
  "So much of it is, this is how you don’t kill yourself."
  —Will (34:15)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:02 — Introduction: Hollywood vs real-life crises
• 06:43 — “Chapter 4. A ringing phone has to be answered”
• 07:54 — Will’s first phone call home
• 09:51 — The bathroom phone call: suspense and paranoia
• 11:57 — Prepping for close confrontation with attacker
• 16:11 — Will discusses unusual calm, trauma, and emotional aftermath
• 17:41 — Fire forces a change in escape strategy
• 19:41 — Attempting rope escape from window
• 21:30 — The rope gives way, Will falls
• 26:03 — Surviving with severe injuries, hospital in India
• 27:53 — Insurance and consulate obstacles to returning home
• 29:53 — The perilous passenger flight home
• 34:05 — Discovery of paralysis/coming to terms
• 34:15 — Reflections on survival and mental health

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Tone and Style

The episode blends vivid, cinematic narration with Will’s candid, dry-humored storytelling. The suspense is palpable, but the tone is never melodramatic—often undercut by Will’s British understatement, dark wit, and honest reflection.

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Summary

This episode immerses listeners in a unique blend of tense, real-life survival and the dissonance between Hollywood fantasy and hard reality. Will Pike’s account of the Mumbai attacks is frank, insightful, and deeply human—as unsettling as it is inspiring, showing both the randomness of fate and the resilience that survival can demand.

Transcript

[Will]

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[Narrator]

We've all seen this movie. The setting changes, but the story never does. A hotel, an airport, a skyscraper, a shopping mall. Somewhere busy, somewhere public. Somewhere ordinary. And then the ordinary is shattered. Gunfire in the lobby. Explosions in the car park. Screaming in the corridors. And somewhere in that building cut off from the exits is our hero. Maybe he's a cop, off duty, of course, because it's always more dramatic that way. Maybe he's ex military, Special Forces. A man who spent decades doing things in places like the government will never officially confirm. Maybe he's just an ordinary man. A cook, a janitor at the wrong place at the wrong time. And every man who turns out when it matters most to be anything but ordinary. He takes stock of the situation. Tears a strip of his shirt and ties it around a wound he barely seems to notice. Looks at the ceiling and sees the air duct. Looks at the window and calculates the drop. Looks at the fire hose on the wall and sees a rope. Looks at everything around him and sees not a room, but a series of solutions. He moves quietly through the air duct, carefully along the window ledge, down the fire escape, across the roof, through a ventilation shaft that somehow leads exactly where he needs to go. He's outnumbered, outgunned and operating alone in a building full of people that want him dead. And yet, at no point, not for a single frame, do we genuinely believe he's not going to make it. Because, of course, he always makes it. That's the contract Hollywood makes with its audience before the opening credits have finished rolling. You may not know how he gets out. You may not know who he saves along the way or what he has to sacrifice to do it, but you know he gets out. And you know that when the dust settles and the building stops burning he will be standing in the car park, bleeding just enough to look heroic, squinting into the light. We've watched this so many times in so many variations that it's become a kind of muscle memory, almost a blueprint for survival that lives somewhere in the back of all our minds. Not a plan, exactly. More of a feeling. A vague, unexamined confidence that if we were ever really in that situation, really in it, no script, no stunt coordinator, no second take, we'd know what to do. We'd figure it out. Wouldn't we, Will? Pike was in his hotel room in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai with his partner. Outside their door Somewhere in the floors below, there were men with AK47s and grenades who had already killed dozens of people and had no intention of stopping. This wasn't a movie. This was real life. The smoke rising up the stairwell was real. The sounds of explosions were real. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, the human mind starts searching, thinking. And thoughts can surface. Thoughts like, what would Bruce Willis do?

[Musician/Singer]

Moon in the sky. I'm looking at the moon in the sky. This shouldn't come as a surprise, but I can't sleep. War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind I don't know who's the winner tonight but it ain't me.

[Narrator]

Chapter 4. A ringing phone has to be answered.

[Will]

We. We were remarkably calm. Like, you kind of start playing through the scenarios, like, what would MacGyver do? What would Bruce Willis do? How have I been taught to manage this situation? Based upon my upgrade, I'll bring you on action movies and you start like, checking the panels in the wall. Like, no, this is sealed. This is sealed shut.

[Narrator]

We're not going through. Out through an air conditioned duct.

[Will]

We're not doing that. We're not doing that one. We're not doing that movie. It's like, oh, what? Yeah, okay, right. Well, all we can do is really stay put. We don't know the layout of the hotel. We don't know how many gunmen there are. We can't just sneak out the back. The. The room is three floors up, about 60ft. It's got a bay window that's sealed shut. It's literally sealed shut. It's double glazed, bolted shut. There's no ducts, there's no obvious help outside.

[Narrator]

So with no clear way out and no real understanding of what on earth was actually going on, Will did what most of us would do in that situation. He called home.

[Will]

I remember getting onto the phone to my dad and I remember calling him. It's like, could be in a spot of bother here, Father.

[Narrator]

Another movie comes to mind. Liam Neeson, Is dad going to come and help?

[Will]

Thank God my dad hadn't watched Taken, because the last thing I would have wanted was him thinking that he could rescue me, so to speak, on the phone. And he was like, look, okay, let me see if I can find out what's going on. Called me back, said, yes, there is a terrorist attack taking place. Essentially, you need to stay put. Like, I'll see what else I can do. You know, he's in advertising. He's not an espionage. Yeah, that's what we did, like. And essentially for five or six hours, what played out was like a kind of theatrical sound escape where you're in, like, the eye of the storm and it's just going around you. And where we were was quite calm. But you've got explosions, you've got gunfire, you've got just a whole melee of kind of like just thunder. But for us, it was just very simple state of being. Like, we stay put, like there's. There's nothing we can do. I mean, I remember we got into the bathtub because of the explosions, because that's what you do in the films, right? You get into the bath. We got in the bath, like, during the explosions, because that, you know that potentially that's going to protect us if the ceiling falls in. I don't know how, but maybe it would. And then there was a point where we're in the bathroom and there's a telephone in the bathroom, because that's what posh hotels do. And it started ringing.

[Narrator]

It's creepy.

[Will]

It was super creepy. Like, we are in the bar, there's a sort of lull in the bottom, bombings, the explosions, gunfire. And the phone starts ringing and you're like, what? And we're in the bath, my partner's in the bathroom there, and the phone is there and it's just like, what's going on? And it stopped ringing. And then it started ringing again. And I answered it. I don't know why I did. I just. I kind of needed to know. And I answered it. And there was a female voice and she sort of asserted that she was hotel staff on reception. And I kind of remember saying that everything was kind of in hand and been taken and they had control of the situation. And she referenced me by my partner's name. She called me Mr. Doyle, because that was her name. She built the room. So I was like, she must know. She must be on the system. She must. She must work there. And then the phone call was over quite quickly and I hung up and I was like, what have I done? And honestly, I was just like, well, I've just signed off death warrant. Because they didn't know we were there and now they know we're here. And it was just like, what have I done? The next sequence of events was really kind of the climax in terms of the peril, which was in this sort of quietish kind of moment, we thought we could detect what essentially was a single gunshot going off on our level. And then you got a bit quiet and then you'd hear another gunshot. And it would be a bit louder. It was just a single shot in your life going into rooms and they're executing people and you're like, oh, no. And they know we're here. I was like, this, this is the scenario. This is the one we need to be ready for now. And so basically, like, I had a cutlery fork. Like the way you come into the room, the bathroom straight away on the left. So we were in the bathroom. The door opens that way. We were behind the door. My girlfriend's crouched down, I'm holding a fork.

[Narrator]

We've.

[Will]

We've pulled the curtain across the bath so it looks like we're in the bathroom hiding. And they were going to come in, think we're in the bath, lean forward or to go there. And I was going to come in from behind door and stab them in the neck with the fork. I am not a fighter. I have barely punched a person in the face.

[Narrator]

Now you're about to disarm a terrorist with a fork.

[Will]

Do you know what I'm saying? That was the plan, and I'm so glad that that scenario didn't manifest.

[Narrator]

Yeah, they never came through the door.

[Will]

It never came through the door. We must have been waiting. Just waiting.

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[Will]

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[Will]

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[Narrator]

Chapter 5. She thought I was dead. The way Will describes it, you can almost picture yourself in that room behind that door, hearing the gunshots and just waiting and waiting for someone to walk in. Preparing yourself for the real possibility that you're about to have to fight quite literally for your life. At this point, I don't know about you, but I feel like you would be just standing there in immense terror. But Will says, oddly, they didn't seem to be frightened.

[Will]

It was like the whole thing was. We were quite pragmatic, I think. Never did we lose it. Never did one of us sort of freak out, get hysterical, start blubbering, like, start paralyzing, like, what's gonna. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That never happened because I just don't think the situation allowed it to happen. Well, maybe it did, and we just didn't have the propensity for it. I don't know. But there was ample opportunity to start panicking, to be fair. And we didn't. We just. We just. We were just kind of quite matter of fact, I think, like, oh, okay, this. And. And. Yeah, the. The. Just. Just so lucky that that never happened, that no one did burst through the door. No one tried to shooters. And actually, in hindsight, and the reason why I think, personally, I don't have any personal PTSD trauma attached to this entire thing is because we didn't see anyone get killed. I didn't see any terrorists with a gun, personally. So I have nothing etched visually onto my lobe. I just think, you know, it was this experience. And then the other thing as well is that by sustaining the injury like that just jolted. It superseded the terrorist attack in a way.

[Narrator]

Will and his partner had escaped a bullet for now. And in fact, there was even a lull in the gunfire and explosions. But they now had another problem. The hotel was on fire.

[Will]

I don't know. There'd been a lull. I think I've been back onto the phone to my dad. He told us the main issue for you guys now is the fire. Like, the building's on fire. The old partner building's on fire. You're gonna have to start factoring this in, you can't just sit tight because there wasn't any emergency services around. There was no. There was no police force, there was no fire engines, There was no army. There's no one kind of like out the window taken on this situation. So it was like, right, what does escape look like then? Can't go out the front door because there's a fire and terrorists with guns. So it's really the window and that's it.

[Narrator]

The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel had been built in 1903, over a century of timber and history of grandeur. And it was now ablaze, not in one place, but in multiple places simultaneously. The explosions that had rattled the building throughout the night had seeded fires across different floors in the lobby, the elevators, the restaurant. The iconic dome that had sat atop the Heritage wing for over 100 years was now burning. The building that had survived a century of monsoons and history of everything, really was being consumed from within. Their only option to get out, as Will says, was the window. However, this wasn't a simple case of just opening it up and hopping out to safety. The window was bolted shut, double glazed and several stories up.

[Will]

So we started looking around our room, like, cut down the curtains. We found a pair of scissors in, like the little haberdashery drawer, cut the curtains, found sheets, split the sheets, got whatever we could to essentially make a rope. Tied it all together, did a tug of war in the room, test the strength of the rope, tied it to this little marble table, this little writing table in the window bay. Really heavy, but also too big to actually get out the window. But picked up this table, threw it at the window to break it, and it just bounced off. I didn't even break the wind. I was like, oh, this is going to be harder than I anticipated. Also timed the smashing of the window with whatever else explosions were going on in the hotel.

[Narrator]

Mask of the sound again.

[Will]

Again, the whole. In terms of movies, you know, that scene in the Shawshank where he's breaking out of the prison felt just like that. Smash. The window shatters. I go to clear the glass, cut my arm, throw this rope out, get some fresh air, breathe, you know, look around, there's no one. No help. Sit on the windowsill. No, can't do that. What if there's snipers? Can't dilly dally, really. Just, we've got to act like, okay, rope is over the eaves of the windowsill. Can't see the bottom because of these little eaves. Can't abseil down the side of the building utilizing the rope in conjunction with, with the topography of the building. Because it just was just hanging. There was no way to get it alongside the building itself, which would have been the preferable option. And I just told my girlfriend I loved her and I climbed out and I sort of made my way down that little window ledge, window sill bit. And then there's just a point where you just have to go over the edge, right? And, and that's it. I did it. And I'm kind of now fully on this rope. And within, I don't know, five seconds, less than that, 10 seconds, I felt one of the knots slip. I'm not a, I'm not a rock climber, but I've done a bit of rock climbing. I know how important knots are. Turns out I wasn't very good at them. And as the knot is slipping, like my brain is going, nope, this is not the one. And it just, it did the calculations, like, this isn't going to end well, bro. And I was like, okay. And it just said, I'm going to take it from here. And I just, I, I, I blacked out. I blacked out and I, and, and again, like the movies, like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, I saw myself full, like the camera, I became the static camera. And I just saw myself full out of body experience type thing. And yeah, my partner thought I was dead.

[Narrator]

Chapter 6, An act of God I

[Will]

think my brain thought I was dead. I think I probably was very close to being dead.

[Narrator]

And if you don't obviously don't remember hitting the ground. You don't remember any of that.

[Will]

I do not remember hitting the ground. Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord. Because honestly, I think there's something really scary about that, like falling like that. I mean, it's almost like now where I've got nephews who are like 8 and 6 and they are like the exact replica of me and my brother. And they're out climbing trees and I'm watching them climb trees and I'm like, Be careful because like, oh man, it could just all change in a slip. And I'm so glad that I, I lived a very ignorant childhood, ignorant of the risks because that kind of fear can drive you crazy, man, that peril. But I'm on the ground. I'm out for the count, partner. Can, can't even really see me at. Apparently someone appeared across the way from another window. Who was there? Like, had we hadn't seen this person before. They're looking down, they're like, no, your partner's dead, he's dead. So she's like, ah. And then this sort of chain of events starts unfolding which couldn't have predicted, fundamentally saved my life, which is that someone had seen me fall from the ground. He finds me, he gets me into this ambulance. They see my partner up, up in the, up on the window. They then flagged down a fire engine with the Cherry Pickering and managed to get her out. So this is like, if I hadn't fallen, would they have seen me? Would they have got it out? How far away was this person? What if we just waited 30 seconds, five minutes? Like would, would help have emerged? Who knows? Yeah, who knows? Either way, I end up getting to Bombay General Hospital. The whole place is, the whole city is a war zone. Like I'm come, I'm having flashes of consciousness now. I'm like coming around, I'm seeing like a wrist is popping out there, my elbows popping out. And every time I'm coming around I'm just like screaming my girlfriend's name because I have no idea what's happened to her. At some point I'm in a hospital corridor and I kind of come round and she's at the end of my bed and I'm like, okay, she's safe.

[Narrator]

Will would be unconscious for a couple of days, severely injured, but alive. A doctor, Samir Dalvi, who had trained as a spinal injury surgeon in the very hospital in the UK where Will would end up, was one of the only surgeons to brave the journey in to help those who were injured. And a team of them got to work saving his life.

[Will]

They stabilized my spine, they patched on my elbow, which doesn't extend beyond that point, like my wrist. My pelvis had splayed my punching lung. Good thing is I didn't land on my head. Fundamentally the thing I'm most grateful for was I did not land on my head. Yeah, because that is what would have redefined who I am. Now I'm also very lucky that I landed on my ass because the level of spinal injury I have is at waist level, which is very different to having a high up neck injury. Both spinal injuries, two completely different lived experiences. And I remember coming around the hospital bed in India just being in, you know, pain like plaster casts, foreign languages, fear, trepidation, like exhaustion, lots of morphine.

[Narrator]

Will's in extreme pain, but again, he's alive. The full extent of his injuries at this point are still not fully known to him, but there would be an extremely long road to recovery as well as A life changing realization to come. But for now, he just needed to survive the journey back home, which by anyone's standards was utterly ludicrous. So how long were you in hospital in India before?

[Will]

So about 10 days. Week. 10 days? Ish. I couldn't, I couldn't be repatriated. The lung was holding things up. They needed to make sure that that wasn't collapsed for, for flying purposes. The spine was stabilized for all intent purposes. The arms were an absolute problem because they were so damaged and they were like, look, we're not going to deal with these here. We're just going to, you know, plaster them up so that they can be fixed later on. There was a lot of trepidation. There was still. Apparently one of the terrorists was still on the loose. The, the British Consulate were pathetically useless. British Red Cross didn't know what they were doing. Our insurance company didn't want to pay for repatriation because as far as they was concerned, this wasn't an insurance issue. This was force majeure, an act of God.

[Narrator]

They call it. An act of God.

[Will]

Yeah. Which is ironic if you think about it.

[Narrator]

Yeah.

[Will]

You know, everyone's acting on behalf of a God, so they might have been right about that. But my partner was quite savvy and she said that the reason why I was sustained the injury wasn't because of the terrorist. I was, because of a fire or a fall. So there was a gray area which he was managing to exploit and we were able to sort of swindle a, a flight home. On a passenger plane?

[Narrator]

No, not on a medical plane. How the hell, how the hell do you do that?

[Will]

How do you do that, bro? Honestly? Firstly, they wanted to do a stopover. You're like, no, direct flight. Okay. Got me on this passenger plane, by the way. They had to have a doctor sent over from the UK with a nurse to help repatriate me. You have to have someone on board who'll do that. The whole, the whole flight back was completely insane from the moment we set up from the hospital. Firstly, the, the, the, the ambulance I was in, I don't know why I remember this, but the, the mattress, the little bed or the gurney, The Troy that they put me on is the ambulance was like an inch of padding. So I'm in a spinal injury. I'm kind of lying on this thin

[Narrator]

and we're going over bumps and all

[Will]

bumpy roads and I'm like, this is agony. This is agony. And then at some point the convoy of cars stopped and everyone got really tense. And what happened was a journalist had been following us and they thought it was a terrorist. So this journalist got in the way of the convoy and, and segued himself into the middle. And everyone's like, who is this guy? So everyone's really tense. No one told me what was going on, but I could just sense that everyone was really on edge. My dad told me later that that's what happened. Get to the airport. I'm on a hospital trolley. I'm loaded into the back of the plane. It's a passenger plane. I'm at the back of the plane. The seats are pushed down, right? So they got two rows of seats. They push the seats down to create like this kind of flat surface. They then put my hospital bed on top of the seats. I'm now this far away from the overhead locker. I'm so elevated. I'm like on some scaffolding and I'm laughing because I'm high on morphine. I'm about to go home. I'm looking at other passengers getting on the plane and these Indians, they're looking at me and I'm like,

[Narrator]

there's this

[Will]

little curtain around me. It's completely hilarious until it's not. And I'll tell you when it not stopped becoming hilarious was two hours into the flight. My morphine had worn off. I'm coming round and I can't exaggerate this enough. We were in the worst turbulence I had ever experienced. Like, not, not a little bit of rocking, not a little bit turbulence. Fasten your seat belts. No, no, no, no, no. This was. The plane is dropping like it's flat, it's dropping and I'm come around and I'm just like, well, I'm gonna die because I'm, I'm in this hospital, I'm on this bed, I'm precariously raised. I've got this cage sticking out of my stomach that's holding my pelvis together. And, and it's. This cage is, by the way, this. I don't know who made it, but they did not get na at craft design technology. Like the, the little scaffolds that stick out, they're like razor sharp. So I'm like, if I fall, I'm falling off and I'm getting impaled. And so my dad wakes up, my partner wakes up. The doctor that's been tasked with repatriating us, he's conked out because he's self medicating on morphine. The air hostesses, yeah, 100. The air hostesses. Were all around like five of them. Everyone's just holding this thing steady, like.

[Narrator]

And I'm like, I mean, that's just mental. I mean, you should never have been on a passenger plane. I mean, I know medevaced in some sort. I mean, what, what you said the British government were useless. I mean, did they just.

[Will]

Useless? My dad, I remember seeing the, the consulate, she just had these hollow, glazed over eyes, like she just knew nothing and was there just for the press up, you know what I mean? Like, and you're like, aren't you here to help us? Aren't I now, as a British victim of terrorism overseas in an event that was targeting Western, like, destabilization, am I not a person of importance? How many fatally injured British people there are all kind of mortally injured. But, like, I've survived. Can we not take care of me?

[Narrator]

Despite the terrifying plane journey, Will would eventually make it home. Home safe and sound back to the uk. The fact that he's still alive is nothing short of a miracle. However, the next stage of his survival is yet to come because at this point, he's still unaware of the full extent of what he's now facing.

[Will]

My brother overheard doctors saying how I'm never going to walk again. I didn't even know that at this point.

[Narrator]

And he has to come to terms eventually with his new reality.

[Will]

You're coming to terms with those things and the mechanics involved to enable you to preserve your life. And you know, so much of it is, this is how you don't kill yourself.

[Narrator]

Next time on what I Survived.

[Musician/Singer]

Moon in the sky. I'm looking at the moon in the sky. This shouldn't come as a surprise, but I can't. I can't sleep. War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind. I don't know who's the winner tonight, but it ain't me.

[Will]

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

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[Will]

Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

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[Brooke Devard]

let's talk groceries specifically, your groceries.

[Will]

With Instacart, you want your groceries just

[Brooke Devard]

the way you like them, right? Well, the Instacart app lets you do just that. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences up front, helping guide their choices. Instacart get groceries just how you like.