Claire Nelson was forced to drink her own urine to fight dehydration as she lay in agony for three days after falling seven metres from a boulder in California’s Joshua tree National Park before she was rescued on Friday last week.

She is now recovering in hospital in Palm Springs, reports the NZ Herald.

While the 35-year-old freelance writer and copyeditor is grateful to be alive and for the “amazing skilled physicians and nurses” treating her, “the payment side of things, however, is a whole other story”, she said in a tweet posted this morning.

“Having insurance is more of a polite buffer than total cover. There are no set costs for treatments. No general quotation. Nobody can tell me what the price of my CT Scan is, for instance. For that reason it becomes a scary healing process.”

Nelson, who is originally from Auckland, said she wished she could dedicate all her focus and energy to healing and learning to walk again but was spending about 60 per cent of her time on “in-bed phone calls and stomach-knotting worries about insurance and bills”.

Surgeons had put pins in her pelvis to reconnect the broken pieces so they could fuse together again.

However, Nelson still faces a long road ahead in her recovery.

Although she can stand on one foot for about a minute at a time with the help of a walker it will likely be months before she can use her left leg.

A GoFundMe page set up to raise money for Nelson’s treatment and rehabilitation has amassed $US21,940 ($A29,000) towards its US$30,000 ($A40,000) goal.

Nelson’s mother Maggie Hickton, who lives in New Zealand, has travelled to the US to be at her daughter’s bedside.

Hickton previously told the Herald on Sunday Nelson’s harrowing tale of survival had stunned rescuers and medical staff.

“She’s actually in good spirits but she’s still in shock,” Hickton said last week.

Nelson was trapped for three days under the hot sun and in her Instagram post said she was just trying to stay alive long enough to be found.

“I couldn’t get a signal on my phone. And nobody knew I was there,” she said.

“All I could do was lie where I’d fallen, scream for help, and try to protect myself as best I could from the desert heat.”

As she lay in agony and alone with a broken pelvis, she was forced to drink her own urine to fight dehydration, terrified she’d be attacked by snakes.

She had almost given up hope when she heard a rescue helicopter buzzing overhead, with searchers calling her name over a megaphone. She successfully signalled to the crew by waving a T-shirt and hat tied to a stick.
This is an edited version of a story originally published in the NZ Herald and is republished with permission.