What It's Like to Fall 14K Feet and Live

In June 2013, Emma Carey and her lifelong best friend, Jemma Mrdak, were 20-year-olds traveling through Europe after graduating from their Australian high school. Part of the experience was tandem skydiving in Switzerland, jumping out of a helicopter 14,000 feet up with skydiving instructors strapped to their backs. Jemma's experience was terrifying but unremarkable—until she got safely down and saw her best friend crumpled on the ground a half-mile away, desperately crying out for her. Somehow, Emma's parachute got tangled up with her emergency parachute, and she and her instructor hurtled to a cow pasture below. Both, remarkably, lived, though with grave injuries, as ESPN recounts in an extensive story about Emma's experience.

Emma was told she was unlikely to ever walk again, but she proved doctors wrong after a lot of hard work—through which she also managed to keep her good humor. Telling a story about the farmer who just happened to have moved the cows from the pasture the morning she landed there, she finds it hilarious to describe what he told her: that the cows were so aggressive they may have stampeded her had he not. "I remember how it felt to land on the ground," she says. "How dramatic it all was. And then I picture laying there realizing I'm paralyzed, and then I see a cow walking toward me and stepping on me. What a way to go—the girl who got trod on by a cow." As for how she survived that landing, the lush green field probably provided some cushion, and the huge amount of fabric being dragged through the air probably slowed her to somewhere between 30mph and 60mph.

She's written a book about the experience, talked about it at many events, delivered a TED Talk, and even sells a necklace featuring a motto that came to her one day amid her recovery: "If you can, you must." To mark the 10-year anniversary of her fall, she and Jemma went back to Europe to retrace their steps on that fateful trip. But, she tells ESPN, she's not sure she wants to be telling the story forever. What's next for her? Read the full profile here. (More Longform stories.)