Skydive accident survivor returning to scene of injury: ‘I have no idea how it’s going to make me feel’

QUEENSLAND local Emma Carey has made incredible progress since a skydiving accident almost killed her five years ago. Tomorrow, she is taking another leap of faith.

THE 25-year-old Aussie who suffered traumatic injuries following a horrific skydiving incident in Switzerland is returning to the scene of her near-death.

Queenslander Emma Carey revealed on Instagram that she has arrived in Switzerland for a second chance at a European vacation, five years after a failed skydive in 2013 left her unable to walk.

Emma Carey, moments before her tandem skydive went horribly wrong.

Carey, then 20, had organised the tandem skydive with a professional during her European holiday. The skydive took place just a few days into her three-month trip. When it was time to pull the cord to deploy the parachute, the professional reportedly waited a little too long and the parachute released at the same time as the emergency chute, causing both to become entangled.

The chutes got wrapped around the instructor’s neck, causing him to pass out while he and Carey hurtled towards the ground.

Carey slammed into the earth stomach-first — the instructor landing on her back, still unconscious — and broke her jaw, pelvis, back and spine. It was a miracle she was alive, but doctors told her she would never walk again.

Emma defied the odds and learned to walk again.

But Carey eventually defied the odds and, after spending four months in hospital, began to take her first steps. Upon returning home, she continued her recovery, despite finding that some of her friends had moved on and abandoned her, and she could no longer work.

Carey managed to keep her good humour through much of her recovery.

“I couldn’t work anymore, my relationship was gone, my family was completely different and it genuinely felt like my identity was taken from me. The life I came home to resembled absolutely nothing of the life I left,” she explained on Instagram over the weekend.

Emma Carey moved to Queensland following her return to Australia.

But now, after regaining the use of her legs, Carey is travelling back to the site of the life-changing incident, for better or for worse.

Tomorrow she will head to Lauterbrunnen (where she jumped from) and Interlaken (where she landed).

Before leaving Australia, Carey wrote “(I) haven’t been back since, so I have no idea how it’s going to make me feel.

“The thought of going back to Europe makes me feel sick. It’s like everything in my body is screaming at me to not go back there, to the place where it got so hurt. But everything else is begging me to go, to create new memories, to stop thinking about it so much and to finally enjoy a European summer for what it should have always been … fun”.

Carey still suffers lasting effects from the accident, including bladder and bowel incontinence, a condition caused by her broken spinal cord.

“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 explained in an Instagram post.

Carey added that she was at first embarrassed by the condition, but eventually decided that she would not let it change her plans, and now tells people about it “within 10 minutes” of meeting them. She even shared a picture of herself, after urinating on herself, with her followers this May.

Carey assured followers that, while travelling doesn’t come “easy” for her anymore, she was “100 per cent” excited for the next step in her journey.

“New memories here I come,” she concluded her post.