The “Bachelor in Paradise” alum wrote a long post on his blog bout his trip to Zermatt, Switzerland, home of the famed Matterhorn, and how his accident turned into “perhaps the most impactful moment of my whole year.”

Dean prefaced the main gist of his story by explaining how he arrived in Zermatt (by train via Geneva) and that this was the “first time I traveled with all my ski gear; skis, poles, boots, etc.” He wrote, “My goal for this season was to elevate my skiing as much as I could.”

Everything changed on Dean’s last run of the day, when he “decided to cut hard left and dart through some trees I hadn’t been through yet.” About halfway through the run, Dean took a breather and sat down because he felt himself “get a little bit gassed.” Not long after getting back up and heading down the rest of the mountain, “things went horribly awry.”

Dean explained, “Given the conditions, it was hard to see all the obstacles that lay ahead. Sure enough, while I was blowing down the mountain hooting and hollering, an obstacle came out of nowhere and placed itself right under my skis. 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.”

Meanwhile, the other ski “grabbed ahold of something while I was launched through the air and torqued my leg in a way it’s never been before.”

From that moment, Dean “could hear and feel something bad happen to my right hip but I had no idea exactly what happened.”

He tried breathing deeply and slowly to ease the pain, and he turned down help at first from fellow skiers because, “at the time, I truly believed I didn’t need any.”

He stood up to get down the mountain, but that’s when he realized “I did something worse than I ever could have imagined.”

The ski patrol arrived with a stretcher about 45 minutes later and checked him over. He described, “My knee checked out, it seemed my ankle was fine, but once they applied pressure to the outside of my right leg I screamed in agony.”

Dean was airlifted by Swiss Mountain Rescue, and “there’s no question that I owe them my life,” he wrote.

Upon arriving at the hospital, Dean immediately had X-rays on his leg and went right into surgery. He was given general anesthesia for the procedure, which frightened him because it was just the second time he’s ever had to go under for an operation.

He shared, “I woke up several hours later in the post op room with a bandage on my right hip, a hose lodged inside me being used to drain blood from my hip, and a generally confused understanding of what was going on. Not too long after waking up I was wheeled to my shared room where I would spend the next five days resting and recovering.”

Despite the grisly injury, Dean said, “spending five days stuck in a hospital bed really isn’t all that bad” thanks to “unlimited entertainment at your phone and fingertips.”

His surgery and hospital stay derailed his New Year’s Eve plans to visit Berlin, but Dean’s girlfriend Caelynn Miller-Keyes flew to Switzerland and joined him on the rest of a readjusted trip, which took them to Zurich, Frankfurt, Brussels, and London.

Dean’s main takeaway from this experience was “a strong reminder that I am not invincible.”