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When Emma Carey was just 20 years old, she went on a skydiving trip with a friend and became the victim of a freak accident. The ties of her parachute and emergency chute became tangled and choked the skydiving instructor to whom Carey had been strapped. The instructor fell unconscious and Carey free fell to the ground.
She broke her spine in two different places, shattered her pelvis, and crushed part of her spine.
During the time of the fall, Carey hadn't realized anything was wrong until she almost hit the ground. "We were going straight down really fast...I thought for sure a hundred per cent I was about to die. I don’t know how else to explain it, it was horrible, horrible, horrible," she explained.
Carey was rushed to the hospital immediately after the fall. Her doctors diagnosed her as being paraplegic and warned her that she would likely never be able to walk again. The rest of her life would have to be spent in a wheelchair.
For someone who had spent much of her life in swimsuits, staying active on beaches around the world, the news was devastating. But Carey refused to resign herself to her fate. Once she had completed all the necessary surgeries to repair her spinal cord and was discharged from the hospital, Carey threw herself into three months of physical therapy training. She was determined to regain sensation and mobility in her legs.
The process was a long and slow struggle, but just three months after the accident, Carey accomplished the impossible. She had regained the ability to walk on her own.
Now, three years after Carey's accident, she couldn't be in better health.
The 23-year-old documents and shares her all of the trips she takes, workouts she completes, and meals she eats. With almost 60k followers on Instagram, Carey has become a fitness and health inspiration for many people who have watched her transform from a wheelchair-bound paraplegic to a woman who's surfing on beaches and climbing rocky hills.
Even with all this success, Carey is careful not to forget how long and arduous her journey was. She writes in the caption of one of her photos: "My point is.. if you're going through a traumatic time and it feels like your world is ending, there is still so much hope for you. Your worst moment could end up becoming the beginning of the most incredible journey of your life, but only if you let it. Things don't just happen, you have to MAKE them happen, and that's what people tend to forget."
