From near-fatal injuries to flying again, Rob Heron shares his road to recovery
I will share a few life-threatening scenarios that have shifted my reality from the freedom of flight to bedridden recoveries.
These hurdles and speed bumps have diverted paths to arrive where we are.
Early Lessons and Injuries
As a seasoned parachutist, I have, and continue to, recover from a few sudden stops and hurdles.
My first decade of parachuting was marked by the usual sores and bruises of skydiving, conditioning the body and soul to multiple disciplines of flight.
I finished that decade with a broken neck from being thrown around (along with the batteries) in a Pilatus Porter because of a reckless pilot (RIP Marco Carrera, unrelated C.o.D.). I learned to cope and manage, to continue progressing and coaching with this untreated, painful scenario.
After many more years, seasons, and migratory movements around the globe, after evolving in multiple parachuting activities during their infancies, I found myself exploring and pushing the envelope, introducing the ways to those who followed the paths above.
Katabatic Winds and Hard Lessons
After filming a stunt athlete into new territory, my adventurous exploration led me into my first hard-learned lesson on the katabatic winds of the Alps.
Awakening in a tumble heading cliffside, wrapped in the canopy, I failed to launch in that descending airmass.
I found myself using the life-saving birthday present of my first mobile device to contact REGA and get stabilized and heli-rescued.
Grateful for the Swiss surgeons and interns who helped put Humpty-Dumpty together again. During scanning of the body, relief arrived from acknowledgment of the previous broken neck, along with thirteen new breaks. The pain was real and justifiable.
Recovery and Reflection
Acceptance of the journey of recovery. Accept the time and respect it.
I pushed back fast (now I see, too fast). As recovery continues on other levels, the drive to progress was, and is, somehow always there—to experience, to grow.
Our activities give us high goals; our achievements are usually selfish, and our actions have a massive effect on our loved ones who become our caregivers.
A difficult, harsh reality: needing care and being the burden. Life becomes painful for all involved, physically and psychologically.
Being and seeing those heavy burdens placed on our loved ones is a void of vulnerabilities. The fortune of love not leaving and supporting the healing process through recovery is priceless. The miracle is that we can recover. The gift is the patience from our supporting caregivers, enduring time while our vessel is in the body shop.
As my grandfather said: “If ya don’t use it, you’ll lose it.”
On Fear, Aging, and Flight
The unexpected finds us. How we respond defines us, injury or not. Aging gets us all, as many cliché quotes remind us: “None of us are getting out alive.” Listen, question, wonder, better yet, reverse that. Wonder, question, listen. So naturally, I would recommend practicing these activities with a fully competent moving vessel, adequate to adapt and respond with range to the moment. Piloting.
However, after injury or simply time away, that distance created in reaction time due to lack of practice—being uncurrent—feels more like a passenger flight.
A pilot takes that moment and connects adequate responses to the physics in play. A passenger in flight tends to react to what happened.
As Jonathan Livingston Seagull discovered and shared, the perfect time is being there.
The Urge to Return
So yes, we may desire and have the urge to get back at it, sure. But testing the range of play in the game exposes the lagged reaction time.
Missing perfect speed sets flight off-level, disturbing the unity of the happenings.
Tune your machine. Measure and progress. Guide your time, it passes regardless. Valued precision creates quality. Skimming the limits may reward with endorphins; however, accomplishments of performance are a more worthy reward.
Take the time to be on time.
Currency is golden, but it creates risks in itself. More exposure to the practice develops an acutely tuned sharpness in response, whilst within an inner calm.
As Midas reminds: not all that is golden is good. A constant becomes usual; normalization therefore leads to complacency.
The Price of Currency
Currency in practice is the fuel of our sports. Progressing on developed skills and sharing that competence in air sports raises us to other unseen, unimagined, or even mitigated dangers. Is it not all risk? Risk to live or to lose. Risks arrive in many forms and surprises.
Well, in my twentieth year of sport skydiving I received a fatal shock to body and soul. My one and only skydiving accident was a fatal mid-air collision involving wingsuits and crossing paths at unforgiving speeds. The conditioning of the sport allowed me to exercise calmness amongst the chaos, deploying my pilot chute into the loss of consciousness.
Awakening under canopy, locked in line twists with a contused heart, collapsed lungs, and a rack of broken ribs. Witnessing my comrade, his demise. (RIP KB) You can come out bitter or better. There is purpose in your pain, even when pain is the strain of recovery. You can. Balance finds truth. Statistics find themselves as part of the equations of justifications.
Fear and Preparedness
Our fear-filled backpacks, when carried by our ego, will justify comforts and avoid perceived risk-taking.
FEAR can, and should, be a measuring stick of preparedness towards the goal, not the luggage weighing down the possibilities.
Inability is a slippery slope to downward spirals. Parachuting activities are a potent fuel that empowers us through recovery to rise above again.
And rise again I did. After the continual career of providing service in sport skydiving, I took my training and parachuting to the mountains, performing single-parachute practices, predominantly wingsuit BASE, but also speed riding and paragliding.
Another Sudden Stop
I arrived at my latest sudden stop the day before Covid-19 lockdown.
This entangled the pattern of the life I had been accustomed to. One moment blissful in human-powered flight, decelerating with a massive flare—the slow-airspeed deployment surged a diving canopy in tension knots, uncontrollably passing rooftops into an innocent bystander’s yard.
Thankfully, they made a call that saved my life.
Following breaking my other side, poking holes in my wingsuit with my compounded femur fractures, I was heli-rescued, airlifted again, and reanimated en route to hospitalization.
Which, believe you me, was nothing normal—awakening to a world that seemed as shell-shocked as I.
The Work
Finding and walking (or hobbling) my own path. Reawakening the warrior within. Remembering. Relating to metaphysical psychologists, bridging sciences and spirituality.
Creating peace in the layering of specific practices, weaving beneficial habits into functional movements, exercised into regular behaviors. Connecting breath from mindful intent to physical functions. Frustration becomes fuel. The focus on the reason of limits justifies compensations and leads us to where the work is needed.
Rebuilding the body. Stabilizing the form through beneficial strengthening habits.
You can get back at it before it’s time, but performances lack and healing takes longer—this I share from personal experience. Testing the support of my new femur rod, I soon broke a fixation bolt, leading to re-breaking the femur on the rod removal chapter.
TBI (traumatic brain injury) and other debilitating conditions, unrecognizable hurdles, finding loneliness in limits of unseen suffering.
Searching inspirations, of the far and few, finding admirable characters that lead by example.
Caring advice from friends introducing knowledge of nutrition as medicine.
Not to mention the benefits of impregnating my house with a sensory deprivation tank, being in an egg-like, wombed environment to heal body and mind, and create the therapeutic environment that we can now offer as a private float spa.
www.the-herons-nest.com
Photo by Rodrigo Gaya
Giving Thanks
I am especially grateful to authors. Regardless of judgment, sharing their vulnerabilities with the world. Most helpful for me have been podcasts, books, and my dad’s one-liners, summing things up.
Not necessarily the medium, but the people—sharing interest in activities from alternative paths and expressing their words and delivering content to the world.
A few I would like to appreciate, promote, and thank from autobiographies, applicable informative literature, and giggles given en route:
Bear Grylls — Never Give Up
Dan Brodsky — Above All Else
Jeb Corliss — Memoirs from the Edge
Matt Gerdes — The Great Book of BASE
Christopher Douggs — Confessions of an Idiot
Last but beyond our realm of debauchery, the autistic artist of living and leaving life, Alexander Polli (my scandalous jumping partner). For continuously shining and driving through with reminders, keeping me on the path. (RIP)
To Conclude
Maybe this article, a bullet point, or a mere one-liner within it helps somebody.
Perhaps it motivates or gives courage to someone feeling unheard, to reach out. Being alone in search of aspiring guidance has given me the courage to become and strive towards that which I was in search of. “You are the greatest project you’ll ever work on.”
Having personally been to many depths, I can relate beyond and listen too. As being heard and having reason is nutrition in finding purpose.
I am open to suggestions or guidance in creating an extension of my career and certifications towards furthering my education and developing a title that earns credit toward helping others. From goal-setting to listening and hearing, to guide, to be the leverage of building better beneficial habits and characteristics of progress.
An act of service in helping the untying of knots. To create a profession in accountability. Join me in whichever way that brings you to look up and hunt the space slightly above your horizon.
Have fun. Spread happiness.
