CJ McCauley reclined in an RV captain's chair, his 2-year old son Jayden sound asleep beside him, the Thursday clock approaching noon.

"This is pretty much killing me," said 28-year-old McCauley, who less than five months ago came within 30 minutes of dying.

He wore a size 8 hightop on his right foot, where he once wore a 9 1/2. A foam block protected his bandaged left foot - where earlier this week surgeons in Denver wrapped a piece of his stomach muscle around the part of him where a heel used to be.

"It looks almost like a rotten piece of steak wrapped around my ankle," he said.

He came back home to Casper on Wednesday after the eighth and hopefully final surgery that stemmed from a family elk hunting trip that went horribly awry.

CJ McCauley and his wife, Amy, have rehashed every detail from those three November days. How the Ford F350 got stuck in snow way off any traveled roads. How the cell phone wasn't working. How frustrated he was, and how he went against conventional wisdom, leaving the truck to search for help because he thought his wife and four sons might die if he didn't. How after he left the truck at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 27, they wondered if they'd see each other again.

"He didn't like sitting here talking about it," Amy said, so they decided to write about it. She pounded out four single-spaced pages detailing everything from frozen Pepsi bottles to how she honked the horn and shot off .45 rounds, hoping someone would hear them. She said the stories - hers, CJ's and her mother Marie Rodger's - will go in a family scrapbook so her children, none of whom were older than 9 at the time, won't forget.

"I worked on trying to get it unstuck but I wasn't having any luck and I was tired and I was upset that my shovel was missing from my pickup," CJ wrote. "We couldn't get our phones to work. I was worried because I knew nobody would find us back where we were. So I took a flashlight and nothing else. Which was a mistake but I went out anyways because I was worried and frustrated."

He reached the main road, still couldn't get a phone signal, tried to follow his footsteps back to the truck but got turned around in the dark. He eventually covered himself in a blanket of snow, about four miles away from the family's pickup.

At about 6 a.m. Nov. 28, Amy successfully text messaged her brother Alan, telling him the family was stranded somewhere off Hazelton Road. He called back immediately and told her rescue crews were on the way before the phone signal died. She found a signal much later that night and gave her brother better directions to relay to the search teams.

The middle kids, Kody and Tanner, played with Matchbox cars in the back seat of the truck throughout the day. Jayden cried, and Austin, 9, prayed with his mom. Around 1 a.m. Nov. 29, search and rescue located the family.

When Washakie and Big Horn County Search and Rescue teams located CJ about five hours later, Amy heard the call go over the radio that they had "found the victim." His body temperature was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, three below fatal levels, but he responded to the search crew.

He doesn't remember what he told the rescue crew when they asked if he'd had any alcohol or drugs in the past 24 hours: "No, tomorrow. No, tomorrow."

The frostbite he accumulated during a 44-hour eternity lost in the freezing snow in the Big Horn Mountains cost him his right index finger, the tip of his right middle finger, his left heel, all of his toes and 40 pounds. It also cost his soon-to-be-seven-member family's lone source of income and his Casper apartment.

Until they move back to their home in Worland later this month, right about when insurance from a previous construction job expires, the McCauleys will call the RV parked in Rodgers' driveway home.

It's cramped, and stuffy, and there's not much to do for CJ - who'd been a commercial truck driver before the accident - except play Medal of Honor on the PlayStation 2. He hopes the latest surgery has killed the ceaseless, shooting pains in his left foot that Vicodin and Black Velvet could not. Then he'll reapply for his CDL and get back on what's left of his feet again.

But times are tough now. With hospital bills mounting, and both their families' finances shot, the McCauleys were evicted from their $875-a-month apartment. Amy's brother pays their phone bills, and both sides helped with car payments and medical bills, but even the most necessary pills are hard to come by.

A doctor gave CJ a prescription for 30 antibiotic Levaquin tablets. Even with insurance, they cost the McCauleys $5 a pill. Amy only had $25 at the drug store, so he's only got five pills.

"It's been stressful," she said, but knows it could've been much worse.

"We'll be fine," said Amy, who is one-and-a-half months pregnant. "We're all together."

Plus, "you can always hang up on bill collectors," she said.