A Tale of Tragedy Struggle and Survival

I want to wow you with a story, a true story of human tragedy, struggle and survival. This is my story, I am a 39-year-old mother of four and I live for extreme sports. I have always played competitive sports, when I was a teenager I played on a traveling soccer and fast pitch softball team, I traveled all over the United States playing and I was extremely competitive. As I grew up the sports I did got more extreme by the year. What do I mean by extreme? Bungee jumping, sky diving, base jumping, rock climbing (free climbing with no ropes) and cliff diving. My favorite of all was free climbing up the face of a cliff that is over water and to stand up there while my knees are trembling, heart racing and hands shaking ( this is what we call an adrenaline rush). Standing there looking down to the water below, I'm scared, but I jump anyway with the wind pushing my hair back and the feeling in the pit of my stomach attacks me as I hit the water. The free fall itself is enough to set you into a higher state of bliss. I was constantly seeking out my next adrenaline rush.

Back six years ago when I was 33, I went for one of these outings with my friend and sixteen year old son. We went to our favorite place in Soddy Daisy, TN to a spot called Blue Hole. The hike to get to the bubbling crystal clear blue pool that is located on the Ocoee River, is a grueling and strenuous 3 mile hike through very thick brush. After you have hiked the 3 miles the trail opens up and gives way to the splendor of this river.

The cliff face is a 80 foot climb on wet slippery rocks, but well worth it when you get to the top to take the leap off. I had made this jump many times this particular day without any difficulty. However, before we were going to leave for the day, I decided to take one last jump. My sixteen year old son was climbing ahead of me and a rock slipped out from under his foot and came crashing down to hit me in the face, which caused me to loose my balance. I struggled to keep a hold of the cliff face as the bystanders below stared helplessly as I fought to stay on the cliff. When I could no longer hold on and felt myself slip off the cliff, all I could think about was that my son was about to see me die.

People say that when things like this happen your life will flash before your eyes, well I am here to tell you that this is not true. I had no rewind of my life, no faces of my loved ones flashing through my mind, what I did have was an overwhelming feeling of dread, that soon my life would end.

It is amazing that when you experience something like this, one will learn just how hard your will to live is. While I was falling through the air, I caught a glimpse of a pine tree and reached out to grab it to maybe brake my fall a bit, only to find myself slamming into it's thick hard branches, the pain was overwhelming; as I continued to fall I hit 3 more branches on the way down each intensified my pain even more. After I cleared the pine tree I came crashing to the ground below, where the upper half of my body landed in about 3 to 4 feet of water and the lower half slammed into the rocks.

Soon after hitting the ground I lost consciousness and did not wake up until 3 days later, to find myself at Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, TN. I woke up to find myself in traction and that I had suffered a severely dislocated right shoulder with all the ligaments torn, three compression fractures of the thoracic spine ( T3, T4 and T5), two herniated disks at the lumbar sacral region of my spine ( L4 and L5), one central disk bulge at (S1) and a severely crushed sciatic nerve on the left side. The smallest of my injuries was a small stick from one of the branches I slammed into got impaled into my right shin, the stick went in and came out, I am left with a very interesting scare on that leg.

I spent four weeks in traction to stabilize the compression fractures, had several surgical procedures on the lumbar sacral region on my back and went through intensive physical therapy for over 1 year to get me back on my feet and fully able to walk again. I have a permanent gait on the left side when I walk and suffer from pain on a daily basis, but I am able to move through life with the aid of Lidoderm patches and sometimes I take pain killers to alleviate the pain when it is too much to bare.

I was able to almost fully recover from my injuries and I give thanks to God himself for his divine intervention to save my life, without God I would not be hear today. I am still very active in sports, just not to the extreme so much.

I do still rock climb every now and then, but only with the aid of ropes, I have defiantly learned my lesson. Do I still cliff jump? Falling off an 80 foot cliff will put things into perspective of any sane person, so my answer to the question is no! I no longer cliff jump, although my heart desires it, I can not or rather would not risk being paralyzed for an adrenaline rush.

This article is a true story, my true story.

References for this article came from extreme.com and expn.go.com