When a quiet day out on a remote Outback lake went terribly wrong, a young man was left clutching his lifeless leg, calling out to mates for help.
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Louis Orr, a city slicker-turned cattle ringer, was enjoying a day off from his job at a station in the remote Barkly Region in the Northern Territory when it took a life-threatening turn.
The 21-year-old and his mates had set off water skiing at the station's local watering hole - a popular spot for workers wanting to cool off from the Territory's extreme heat.
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But on his fifth run for the day, Mr Orr came off second best, falling into the water.
When he swam back to his mates and tried pulling himself up onto the jet ski, he realised he couldn't move his left leg.
"I knew something was wrong as soon as I picked my leg up out of the water - it was completely poking out, flopping around and I had no feeling in my ankle," he said.
"I didn't know how bad it was, but it wasn't good."
Minutes after the accident, the adrenaline evaporated, and the pain kicked in.
Clutching his unresponsive leg, Mr Orr was bundled into the back of a vehicle and raced to the station's clinic - a small shed with limited medical supplies.
Hundreds of kilometres via dirt road from the nearest hospital, the only help was the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS).
"Sitting in the clinic, my leg was still very unstable - moving in and out of place," Mr Orr said.
"As much pain as I was in, I just thought it was broken or dislocated. I never imagined that it was a life-threatening situation."
After being alerted of the emergency, an RFDS team with a specialist from the Medical Retrieval Consultation Centre was dispatched from Alice Springs.
"We headed to the airstrip and were greeted by a smiling flight nurse, doctor and pilot," Mr Orr said.
"I was quickly put on a stretcher with a splint that went around both my legs - I'd never seen anything like it. As soon as I was in it, my pain went from an 'eight' to a 'five'.
"The RFDS was really reassuring - they were friendly, calming and I never felt I was in any danger."
RFDS Flight Nurse Chantelle King who was part of the aeromedical retrieval team tasked to airlift the young man, said when the plane landed, the team met Mr Orr in the back of a four-wheel drive, "clearly in excruciating pain".
"He had a known injury to the limb, but at that point we didn't actually know whether there was more going on - so the doctor and I worked quickly to get him out of the vehicle, immobilise his leg and package him up safely to get him to a hospital as soon as we could," the flight nurse said.
Mr Orr was airlifted to the nearest major hospital, Alice Springs, where scans confirmed the worst.
With a broken tibia, a severed nerve, three ruptured ligaments in his knee, and no blood flow to his lower leg due to a crushed artery, emergency surgery at Royal Darwin Hospital was needed for a chance to save his leg.
The RFDS airlifted the ringer from Alice Springs to Darwin, where on arrival, he had one of the hardest conversations of his life.
"In the pre-op room my surgeon told me, 'Look I've seen plenty of people your age lose their leg from conditions like this and gone on to live long lives.'
"I'm just lying there thinking, 'Wait, I'm actually going to lose my leg here?' That's when I started to break down a bit."
More than 2,000 kilometres away, the young man's parents Mel and Stuart Orr were holidaying in Queensland when they received the late-night call - a phone call his mother described as a "parent's worst nightmare".
"You get a phone call in the middle of the night, and you try to visualise life for your son without a limb," she said.
"You can imagine how hard that is - we couldn't think straight, we didn't know what to do, or how to react.
"You don't realise how much shock you go into in a situation like that."
Remarkably, in a gruelling eight hours in the operating theatre, Mr Orr's leg could be saved, thanks to making it to adequate medical care just in time.
"I've (lived) in big cities my entire life where everything is at your fingertips," his mother said.
"Never in a million years did I think I'd come into contact with the RFDS, and yet suddenly it's for our son in the most unimaginable situation, where time was so critical.
"We're so grateful to the RFDS for their assistance.
"Every second, every minute, every hour. We were literally counting on our fingers how long Louis had."
After two more operations and six weeks in hospital before flying to NSW to be surrounded by family as he is preparing for more reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, the young man is still relying on a wheelchair, crutches and a post-op knee brace.
The journey ahead is long, yet, he still considers himself lucky.
"Isolation is obviously one of the hardest things of being on a cattle station - where I'm based we have to drive at least 200 kilometres to get phone service let alone a chicken burger," he said.
"There's no way I would've been driving 11 hours on rough roads to Darwin - the only place in the NT where they could treat me.
"If it wasn't for the RFDS and their quick response, I wouldn't have my leg today, and it possibly could've been a more life-threatening situation."
