Dean Unglert’s recent ski vacation in Switzerland didn’t go as planned when he accidentally hit a rock and suffered a devastating injury that required him to be helicoptered off the mountain.
In a new blog post, the “Bachelor in Paradise” alum, 28, looks back at the harrowing experience and explains how it came to happen, recalling taking “a spill that put me in the hospital for the next five days and leaves me on the mend for roughly the next 12 months.”
On the last run of his first day of skiing, Unglert was zooming through the snow when “an obstacle came out of nowhere and placed itself right under my skis,” he wrote. “I skied hard into a rock that had hidden itself with a fresh dusting of snow. The second I hit the rock my left ski flew off and I immediately knew this wasn’t going to end well. My right ski, still attached to my foot, grabbed ahold of something while I was launched through the air and torqued my leg in a way it’s never been before. In the middle of my tumble I could hear and feel something bad happen to my right hip but I had no idea exactly what happened.”
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He initially turned down other skiers’ offers of assistance, thinking he’d be okay. “It took all of about 20 minutes of me laying there to realize I actually needed help,” he continued. “At first I was determined to get out of there on my own. I thought I had the ability to do it but the longer I laid there the more the pain started to creep in.”
Eventually the ski patrol was called in. When one of the patrolmen applied pressure to his right leg, Unglert “screamed in agony.”
Explaining that “there is no way really to immobilize a hip while you’re stuck on a mountain,” Unglert needed to be removed from the mountain via helicopter.
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Revealing he’ll soon be travelling back to his home in Los Angeles to meet with an orthopedic surgeon and start physical therapy, Unglert says, “hoping to make a full recovery but have no idea what to expect.”
He added: “I’ve never had metal screws holding parts of my body together like this… This whole experience is a strong reminder that I am not invincible… I am capable of seriously hurting myself and causing permanent damage, or worse.”
Unglert’s ultimate goal, he divulged, is to heal up and attempt “the exact same run that I crashed on to kind of, like, conquer the thing that I messed myself up on.”
