Emma Carey: Moving forward after falling from the sky.

She’s the young Canberra adventure-seeker who fell to earthduring an horrendous parachuting accident. Emma Carey hasrebuilt her body, and faces life with a spirit that is unbreakable.

WORDS Emma Macdonald

IT MUST BE ONE of the most common nightmares of all. You’re falling from a great height, and twist in terror. But you wake with a jerk before the crushing moment of impact.

Nearly six years ago, then 20-yearold Canberra girl Emma Carey jumped out of a helicopter. But instead of floating gracefully into a green field in the Swiss Alps, strapped to her experienced skydiver, Emma was involved in a catastrophic parachute malfunction.

The parachute and emergency chute became entangled, yanking her head back by the ponytail and choking her instructor unconscious.

They both plummeted to the ground with Emma taking the brunt of the fall and the instructor landing on top of her. Her pelvis was shattered and her back was broken in two places. Her teeth were chipped and bleeding. She could not feel her legs.

It is, truly, a miracle she survived at all.

But perhaps even more miraculous has been the recovery process which has seen Emma not only walk again, but smile again, and rejoice in all the small joys of life. She has become an inspiration for hundreds of thousands of others who know of her story, for those who follow her on social media, and for those who are buoyed by her resilience, positivity and determination to live life to the fullest.

“If you can, you must”. This is Emma’s mantra. It relates to many things—making the effort to jog or walk or get out into nature if you have legs that will carry you there, or telling someone you love them because maybe you won’t be able to say it the next day. Emma couldn’t be bothered to jog the day before her accident. She was too scared to tell someone how she really felt. Now she knows that sometimes, you won’t get a second chance.

But in Emma’s case, the universe delivered her that second chance, and she is grasping it with everything she’s got.

SINCE HER PAINSTAKING RECOVERY, firstly in Bern and then back in Sydney, Emma has astounded her doctors, and feels in many ways that the life she is living now is more enriched than the one she had before.

“I appreciate everything. I think it has a lot to do with the nature of my accident. A lot of people who have suffered a serious injury, such as a car accident, don’t have time to process it or they black out. I was awake, I was thinking and feeling, and I was so aware that as I fell, I was just about to die. So now, when I wake up in the morning, I feel so lucky to simply have the day.”

A former St Clare’s College student who wasn’t sure where she wanted to go in life other than taking a European holiday with her bestie Jemma Mrdak and insisting the pair undertake the thrilling skydive, Emma has metamorphosed into a spokeswoman for gratitude.

“I was young and hadn’t experienced much when the accident happened. When I compare the old Emma to the new Emma, I think the old me didn’t value the important things and certainly didn’t have faith to imagine I could get through anything very hard.”

“Now I am proud of who I am.”

After her emergency evacuation from the field in which she landed, and life-saving surgery in which metal rods were inserted into her broken spine, Emma refused to accept the medical warnings she would never walk again. She began a gruelling rehabilitation regime and for four months was confined to a wheelchair. At first she couldn’t even sit up in the wheelchair without fainting. But then she stood, then she used crutches, then she walked, now she even skateboards.

“It was horrendous after it happened and I remember thinking there was simply no way I could get through it, I couldn’t imagine feeling happiness or joy. Now my life is incredible, even more so than before.”

Emma has moved forward with her life—and finds plenty of reasons to smile each day with teeth that have been repaired.

Her family moved to the Gold Coast a few years ago and it’s true to say that Emma is her happiest by the ocean, watching the sunrise (she rarely misses one) or hanging with her sister Hayley and beloved niece Layla (Laz).

On Instagram, where she has amassed more than 150,000 followers, Emma rejoices in simple things. Waking up next to Laz (who is Emma’s spitting image only in a four-year-old’s body), making a smoothie, jumping in her combi van named Ollie for a drive up the coast (if Ollie is working...). She supports herself financially by selling her artwork and bespoke jewellery (she designed a necklace which bears the words ‘If you can you must’ and it sold out within the day).

She is disarmingly honest in her social media persona, and while she has become a poster-child of sorts for life after near-death and the ability to progress a catastrophic spinal cord injury to the point of mobility, Emma has also educated new generations on the often bleak reality of disability.

Her posts on the day-to-day impediments of living as a walking paraplegic who endures both bladder and bowel incontinence have gone someway to destigmatising the issue.

She made headlines around the country after posting a selfie in urine-stained cut-offs.

“This is what I look like every. single. day. Multiple times a day. I think because I can walk, people tend to think I have completely recovered from my spinal cord injury but the truth is I still have many lasting effects, one of them being that I am completely incontinent with both my bladder and bowels,” she wrote.

“My bladder can only hold 100mls before it leaks. That’s less than half a cup of liquid, so as you can probably imagine this means I am peeing myself literally non-stop.”

Emptying her bowels each day requires rubber gloves and an enema.

She spends more than $1000 a month purchasing catheters and pads. She is so used to accidents as to not blink an eyelid. It’s just pee, after all.

This is her reality and it is there for all of us to absorb.

When I compare the old Emma to the new Emma, I think the old me didn’t value the important things.

EMMA DESCRIBES HER MINDSET as having altered completely after the accident.

“Before the accident my life was seemingly perfect but I never felt it. After the accident my life is incredible. Despite everything.”

She has even reconciled herself to not regretting that day in 2013 when she leapt from the helicopter. It gave her a chance to start living with more purpose, greater vigour, and the most grateful eyes.

Last year she made a decision to go back up in a helicopter to visit the spot of her accident. It is not unusual for people to attempt this sort of closure, but for Emma it was a chance to replace traumatic memories with peaceful ones.

“I actually felt very calm, and I thought I would be terrified. I managed to make good memories in a place that was always supposed to support good memories. It was a huge thing.”

Much harder was the day in 2017 when she was painting a wall mural on Bondi Beach and cut her foot. For you or I, such a cut would be felt, disinfected and healed quickly. For someone in Emma’s position, the small laceration became a massive ulcerated problem in her heel. At one point, Emma was told that the leg she had worked so hard to rehabilitate may need to be amputated.

“It put me right back to where I started, not being able to walk or function. I was at a really low point and found it hard to stay positive, for sure.”

She was once again confined to her wheelchair and found it hard to miss standing in the sand and surf that centres her most days.

Emma credits her wound care nurse Amy with slowly and surely restoring the missing flesh on her heel. Her followers were obsessed and revolted in equal measure by her “Heal the heel campaign”. Finally, after almost a year, the gaping hole filled and Emma could commit to keeping her leg.

The outpouring of love and support she has received on Instagram was, at times, overwhelming.

Indeed, Emma has one of the most authentic relationships with the social media platform. “It has honestly been very therapeutic for me and I am so thankful for an audience that keeps me writing. I love sharing what I am going through and I know it has been helpful for others in similar situations as me to relate to my situation. I am pretty real, I just say whatever I am thinking, and I post what I want to post, or then I don’t post at all.”

In terms of her injury, she has reached the limits of treatment. No medical intervention can buy feeling below the waist and Emma is at the very limits of her recovery. Her calf muscles will never operate properly, so it is a matter of strengthening all the other muscles that do work.

“I feel like I am living in a very old person’s body, and being slow and in pain is my new normal. There’s no point thinking about what could have been.”

“Maybe in 10 years we might see some breakthroughs in the area of stem cell research or something, but right now, I am focussed on working with what I have got.”

It will surprise few that Emma is committing her thoughts and words to a book, which has multiple publishers interested. There have also been murmurings of a film, although Emma wants any potential screenplay to be based on her faithful and authentic recollections of events. So the book must be completed first. In any event, she is in no particular rush.

“I have started it, but it is pretty exhausting to actually get it all down and go there in my head. Sometimes I can’t be bothered because it takes an enormous amount of energy, and sometimes I wonder how good it is for my mental health to keep reliving the fall. I read that Turia Pitt does a lot of speaking but she won’t talk about the actual fire. Maybe I need to find a way to talk about the accident without actually talking about how it felt to fall from the sky.”

“I know it has made me who I am today, but I want to move on from the accident. There is so much more positive stuff to focus on.” •