A Funny Bridge Day Email I Received

[base428 1]

JASON'S NOTE: This interesting email is in response to the unknown jumper who kept a Bridge Day 2005 leg injury quiet until he was in line for his next jump. Apparently, his pain set in and an ambulance hauled him away while on top of the bridge. The only way we found out about this injury was via a phone call to Jan Care more than 5 days after the event. It's our policy to clip the badge of injured jumpers and provide them medical assistance (if we are aware of the injury). Since I can't respond to her (she blocked my email), I guess I'll respond here. Besides, it's too funny to not share.

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Hi. My friend XXXXXX is a skydiver {an obcessed one that if the house was on
fire he would save the parachute before me probably} Anyway, he goes
overboard on all this jumping nonsense and I have to correspond on my pc/email
address for him, cause he doesn't have a pc and can't read English anyway, hes
from XXXXXXX. I personally think all this is ridiculous. Being passionate
about skydiving and loving the rush is one thing, but to actually stand in line
w/ broken bones to do it again is CRAZY. That person needs to have their damn
head examined and so do you people for allowing it to go on. Sounds to me like
theres no rules there, its a free for all. And some of the crazy BS that
goes on is just plain ridiculous. I watched XXXXX's dvd he bought last year, hes
done it last year and this year, and those crazy stunts that Red Bull team
did was insane, and I can't believe it was allowed. You know all of you need to
be grateful that God allows you to live from all this in the first place,
but to try to jump w/ broken body parts and combine bungee jump maneuvers w/
BASE jumps, to me is blatantly disrespectful to God. Its like theres no regard.
People don't care if they use any common sense or not, and you people allow
it and think its cool. Okay you love skydiving get off on the rush, I get it,
but for Gods sake have SOME rules. If someone breaks something, that should
be the end of it for them that year, and there should be restrictions on how
crazy people are allowed to get w/ their stunts. And it shouldn't be
glorified in emails like its cool. Grow up! XXXXX's impressed by this crap, I'm not. I
think instead of "pleading w/ people to jump some more" some pleas should
have been made to have them put in straight jackets and taken to the mental
ward. Just checking gear isn't good enough, peoples behavior needs to be kept in
check to. Its obvious they know they can get away w/ it. What are you guys
gonna do when someone gets killed, because they were acting like an ass?I
wonder how many was also drunk during the jumping, I know everybody gets tanked
afterwards, and acts like asses. Please, don't allow anymore of this crap
where people jump w/ broken bones and have some rules about how crazy they are
allowed to get. If they break the rule ban them from the event. This will leave
an impression on others from doing the same thing, and that will save more
lives than anything else.

(c)2010 Vertical Visions. No unauthorized duplication permitted. <==For the media only

[Treejumps 0]

Great e-mail. It sounds like we are getting our message out to the world, loud and clear. "We are crazy, don't F with us"

This guy should receive the hard as nails award. He must be Austrailian.

Seriously, if a bone isn't sticking out and there is no blood, how can you tell who should and shouldn't jump?

[lifewithoutanet 0]

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This guy should receive the hard as nails award.

Whatever, dude. This chap made it to the hospital the same day of the injury. This 'one friend' of mine... Guy breaks his right ankle, left femur just above the knee and breaks the ball joint off the top of the same femur. He makes it all the way home, goes to work for a few days and doesn't bother seeing a doctor until the SIXTH day after the injury. Now THAT'S tough.

-C.

[dmcoco84 4]

What a "poop head"! If you don't like what we do, DON'T WATCH! Simple as that. I also love how she/he is getting pissy and doesn't even have all the info. Pretty pathetic.

Edited to add: That is pretty bad ass to try to jump again with a broken femur.

[nchambers42 0]

"There is a pleasure sure,
In being mad, which none but madmen know! "
--JOHN DRYDEN

Eh, liberatin'

[DexterBase 0]

Hey guys, actual feelings aside, we should watch the way we conduct ourselves here.

Making comments like "that stupid bitch" or "fucking pussy" or "stupid skydivers" or other comments like that don't make us look very intelligent to whoever happens to pass through here.

Kinda makes us sound like the crowds that bash BASE videos that get posted on various sites on the internet.

Do we care? Maybe, maybe not. But we should consider how we want this forum to be viewed by the people who come here to read useful information or even reporters coming here to do their five minutes of research before writing something in a newspaper.

How do we want to look?

Just my thoughts on the matter. I would prefer the forum to show us as fairly intelligent, accepting people. (which may or may not be true) We all use the forums, but they don't belong to any of us. We're all guests here.

That email was pretty damn funny though.

[BetteSimon 0]

yes maybe we shouldn't be should be taking it a little more serious.. I can see it from her site, she thinks we know that this guy has a broken leg and still allows him to jump, and that i pissing her off... It's a little sad though that she doesn't try to find out what actually happend.. But there will always be people like her out there...

[TomAiello 25]

You forgot the part where that 'one friend' broke his foot at Bridge Day, and then tried to convince the Bridge Day staff to let him go make another jump, and head to the hospital afterward. I mean, what's he going to do, break it again?

For our readers at home, the Bridge Day staff made the friend go to the hospital and not make any more jumps that day. Although he was back on the bridge by about 12:30, as a spectator.

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[dmcoco84 4]

I gotcha,

I fixed it. Now its "nicer".

[pBASEtobe 0]

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Although he was back on the bridge by about 12:30, as a spectator.

Just in time for the hail storm!

[Zennie 0]

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You know all of you need to
be grateful that God allows you to live from all this in the first place,
but to try to jump w/ broken body parts and combine bungee jump maneuvers w/
BASE jumps, to me is blatantly disrespectful to God.

What if I'm a practicing Aztec?

Am I being disrespectful to Quetzalcoatl or Huitzilopochtli?

- Z
"Always be yourself... unless you suck." - Joss Whedon

[HELLvetic 0]

Personally, I think trying to jump in pain, or with broken bones is down right stupid. I was not aware that base jumping was a pissing contest…

This gives me the image of some dude with a metallica shirt on, a mullet and driving a beat up 69' camaro… You know the kind of dude that's is prime candidate for a Darwin award …

I don't find some guy going :" HUH… HUH DUUUUUDE!!! Pass me the duct tape Bubba!!!. Gonna tape tha' suk'a up and I am gonna go make another jump!"
bad ass.

I find it stupid!

Chad is right! Lets try to act in a way that shows us in a good light and refrain from the "Bu'bba" style comments.

_________________________________________
Signature Max Size:
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[nicknitro71 0]

What's wrong with a '69 Camaro?

That was pretty funny Jason!

Memento Audere Semper

903

[nchambers42 0]

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How do we want to look?

Dangerous question.

[NickDG 23]

After she mentioned God for the third time she lost me. Personally, I think if there is a God he'd get a kick out of BASE jumping. "Look at that, the thing I made them the most afraid of they went and turned into a sport."

On another issue and with Sangiro's rules aside, if we watch what we say here we might as well shut it down. In a time when free speech is threatened from all sides the internet is almost the last bastion of it. Considering what a reporter or a passerby gets from what's written here it is just an example of two people who don’t understand an open society, the person who writes we must be careful doesn’t get it, and the person reading who gives it more weight than it deserves doesn't get it either.

I try to judge what I read here by what is being said and not by who says it. Sometimes someone with one jump, or none, will say something that makes sense and I learn from it, sometimes someone with thousands of jumps can show the depth of how much they don’t get it at all.

The fact a reporter quotes what's written here without checking into it, or even understanding it, is just an example of how low that profession has sunk. And once we sink to a level where we make allowances for that is the day the battle for truth is completely lost . . .

We all go off half cocked sometimes (I know I have) but suffering that is better than the other way. We just have to have faith that in the end, amid the tasteless, the ridiculous, and the juvenile, the truth will always win out in the long run. That position calls for thinking more of your fellow man and his intelligence and realizing it's the lesser so that usually makes the most noise.

Not showing ourselves warts and all is like the old Soviet Union withholding how many Cosmonauts they lost or how often their airline Aeroflot had major fatal accidents. What good did that do? If it's to save face it always fails as the truth never remains buried for long.

I think the biggest thing I dislike here is people who can't just make their point and then move along. Kind of like I just did . . .

NickD BASE 194

[lifewithoutanet 0]

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Just in time for the hail storm!

Whatever. You were already cold and wet, anyway.
-C.

[RhondaLea 3]

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After she mentioned God for the third time she lost me. Personally, I think if there is a God he'd get a kick out of BASE jumping. "Look at that, the thing I made them the most afraid of they went and turned into a sport."

She's talking about Jehovah; you're talking about the Allfather. Totally different gods.

Try to understand it from her point of view:

She's a normal, apparently God-fearing, woman. She finds this great guy, who is wonderful in all respects except he has this one really bad, potentially lethal habit.

How hard would it be to give up a habit? But no. Not only won't he give it up, he loves it more than he loves her, and she knows it. All in all, it's about as bad as if he had a girlfriend on the side.

Then he goes off on vacation without her--out-of-country, no less--and he comes home with a broken leg.

Worse yet, he tells her that instead of going to the hospital to have his leg treated, he first tried to engage one more time in this bad habit that he loves more than he loves her.

In spite of that, she apparently tolerates quite a bit, because it was only when she received the final BD email that she lost it.

Given the circumstances, you can hardly blame her. Although I don't agree with her general assessment, I have to agree that it takes more balls than brains to do what he did.

rl

Edited to add: I can't actually tell from her email if her guy was the guy with the femur. It may be that she's just anticipating that it could happen to him. Even so, for someone trying to live a normal life, the idea of it is probably very trying.

If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you came from. Gullah Proverb

[TomAiello 25]

I've broken bones and not known until a day or more later.

It's likely that he didn't know his femur was broken. Remember that this wasn't a compound fracture. It's more likely he banged in, got up and thought "hmmm, that kind of hurts, let's try to walk this off." Only when he got back up to the top did he realize that the injury was probably out of the "walk it off" category.

This actually happens a surprising amount. When I was trained as an EMT we were taught to always backboard everyone involved in a motor vehicle accident--even people who were up and walking around when we arrived on scene. In an accident, the body automatically releases a lot of natural painkillers (including both adrenaline and endorphins), and muscles tense up to protect the injured bone. It's entirely possible for an accident victim to suffer a fracture of the spine (or femur) without realizing it.


I'd prefer if we could keep the discussions about theology in Speaker's Corner.

Thanks!

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[460 0]

ouch my shattered femur left me helpless. still hurts today, 8 years later.

Looks like a death sandwich without the bread - Steve Deadman Morrell, BASE 174

[Jasmin 0]

I'm sorry RhondaLea, but I'm going to have to take the other side on this one, I think you can "blame her".

I've been in this situation, a God-fearing woman who's man put BASE before just about everything. If you can't accept that BASE jumping is part of who they are, you shouldn't be with them.

More to the point, this reeks of trying to blame someone/anyone else for an individual's own actions and stupidity.

This jumper knew he was hurt, but chose to push on. It is not the organiser's fault that he didn't ask for assistance and didn't display any outward symptoms, until he was back up at the exit point. When he did, they made him get treatment.

At the end of the day, you make something idiot proof and they just create a better idiot.
If anyone should be accepting responsibility for this guy, it should be the jumper himself.

xj

"I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with the earth...but then I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with a car either, and that's having tried both."

[yuri_base 1]

There are more than 6,000,000,000 Gods on Earth alone. Mine smiles when I jump.

Yuri

Android+Wear/iOS/Windows apps:
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iOS only: L/D Magic
Windows only: WS Studio

[RhondaLea 3]

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I'm sorry RhondaLea, but I'm going to have to take the other side on this one, I think you can "blame her".

I've been in this situation, a God-fearing woman who's man put BASE before just about everything. If you can't accept that BASE jumping is part of who they are, you shouldn't be with them.

Totally agreed, Jasmin, as to that last line. I was talking about her feelings, though, not about the relationship ethics issue. (Or about the responsibility issue--I agree with you as to that, as well.)

I was just trying to understand it from the perspective of a woman who has finally reached her limit and gone straight over the edge.

rl

If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you came from. Gullah Proverb

[DrThrill 0]

Well Chris,

Helpless . . . . what is helpless? I've been on both sides of that break bro, I happened to break my fibula (non-weight bearing) on base jump #1 (I probably should have had more than 10 skydives kiddies). Just like Tom describes, adrenaline and denial kept me walking and partying for 4 days before I "realized" what I had done. however, later in my illustrious carreer (and it continues to shine brightly in mine eyes) I had an accident from which I cannot pass a day withourt remembering for the constant pain. A number of days I will never forget, but which I don't entireley remember either . . . yet I can't attempt to forget . . . . sure I've made mistakes, who hasn't?, but I have no regrets, inspite of daily pain . . . y tu ?


wdc

"If you are not a part of the Solution, you are a part of the Precipitate"

[skypuppy 1]

I don't know, he didn't actually jump again, did he? They took him to hospital from the top of the bridge. I'd give him an honorable mention, maybe, for effort, but not the top award.

If some old guy can do it then obviously it can't be very extreme. Otherwise he'd already be dead.
Bruce McConkey 'I thought we were gonna die, and I couldn't think of anyone

[Jasmin 0]

Yeah, fair point.

Although I think he's the one "going over the edge"

xj

"I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with the earth...but then I wouldn't recommend picking a fight with a car either, and that's having tried both."