In a later update posted to Facebook, Dickey shared a photo of himself grinning, saying he was receiving treatment in an intensive care unit.
“It has been a scary experience and the closest to death I’ve been yet,” he said. “I truly appreciate all the people involved in both saving my life and helping me escape from so deep inside a Cave.”
Dickey's parents, Andy and Debbie, said they were filled with "incredible joy" and thanked everyone for the outpouring of support.
"It is, we know, an event that all involved in the extensive rescue effort worked so significantly hard for," they said. "Mark is strong and we believe in his strength, but fully knew that he was in dire need of tremendous and immediate support. We are so very thankful and grateful that the support he needed was given to him and that the first medical rescue team to arrive reached him when they did."
The association said that as the operation began, Dickey, also known for his work training others how to rescue people from caves, was medically stable.
Recep Şalci, the head of Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, said some parts of the cave system were blasted with explosives ahead of the rescue mission to make it easier to move Dickey toward the surface.
"There are some very tight passages," he said in an interview Friday. "It's a very challenging rescue operation."
Dickey's ordeal began Sept. 2 at Morca, which exists beneath the Taurus Mountains and is the third-deepest cave in Turkey. Dickey said he began suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding and was unable to get himself to the surface.
He was initially moved a few hundred feet upward, to the 3,400-foot level, where the Turkish Caving Federation has a camp, the group said.
That's where he remained for about a week, awaiting rescue. In a statement, the federation called it "one of the largest cave rescues in the world.”
