This does not make the decision any less remarkable. Ralston did not know, when he made it, what the doctors would later tell him about the arm’s condition. He made the decision on the basis of the information available to him, which was: he was going to die if he stayed, and the option that gave him a chance to survive required losing the arm. The medical confirmation of the arm’s non-viability arrived afterward, as verification, not as information that guided the choice.
His mother spoke to the press in the days after the rescue and described him as being in high spirits and looking forward to returning to the outdoors. The characterization of someone who had just undergone what Ralston had undergone as being in high spirits and eager to return to the mountains might seem improbable. But it was consistent with what Ralston himself would later describe: the specific relief, even euphoria, of someone who had accepted death and then found himself alive.
He was, by any reasonable measure, going to be all right.
## The Media Response: A Story the World Wanted to Hear
The story of Aron Ralston’s entrapment and survival reached the national media within days of his rescue and rapidly became one of the more widely reported news stories of the summer of 2003. The combination of elements — the dramatic setting, the extreme choice, the lone mountaineer in the desert, the outcome that seemed both impossible and true — was exactly the kind of story that news organizations in the pre-social-media era pursued with urgency.