A coveted pair of Japanese fishing gloves almost value Martynka Wawrzyniak her life throughout a visit to the Catskills to climb frozen waterfalls.
The Brooklynite was ready her activate a really small ledge in Stony Clove Notch when she dropped one in all her new, specifically insulated Showa gloves.
“I was very sad to see it go down the cliff, and I reached to try and save it and fell down the entire cliff,” Wawrzyniak instructed The Submit. “It was pretty dramatic because I did a bunch of 360 flips in the air, upside down, hitting various body parts, trying to arrest myself, but everything was covered in ice.”
Wawrzyniak, who’s in her 40s, landed in a tree that she clung to for a couple of half hour till her climbing companions rescued her. She was dismayed to later study that she had damaged her talus bone in her ankle, her fibula in her decrease leg and her calcaneus, often known as the heel bone.
What adopted was a two-hour surgical procedure at NYU Langone Well being to rebuild her left leg, weeks of studying easy methods to stroll once more and months of bodily remedy to get her stronger than ever earlier than.
Wawrzyniak had solely been mountain climbing for a couple of month earlier than her February 2022 accident, although she had been mountain climbing for about 5 years.
She’s additionally a ebook editor, a mixed-media artist and, now, a “tree hugger for life.”
Wawrzyniak estimated she fell some 200 toes into the tree that separated her from Route 214 by 50 to 70 toes.
“It was a lot of blood everywhere, but it was just from my hands hitting the tree, because I had no gloves on and I smashed into the tree,” Wawrzyniak mentioned. “I was very dizzy, and I knew that if I didn’t hold onto the tree, I might actually pass out.”
After she was helped down, Wawrzyniak tried to energy via the day. She used climbing poles as crutches, pondering she had merely sprained her ankle.
A fateful journey to pressing care introduced her to NYU Langone, the place she had 4 screws positioned in her ankle joint to carry the bones collectively so they might heal. She likes to be lively, so she didn’t wait lengthy after surgical procedure to do a ground ab exercise.
“I would go for walks in the park on my crutches, round and round in circles till my arms almost fell off,” Wawrzyniak mentioned. “I would hang board. I would do pullups.”
Progressively, she grasped easy methods to stroll once more, albeit like a “zombie.” By Could, for her birthday, she was capable of slowly traverse the seaside with pals. By September, she was bouldering.
Regardless of all that progress, she was nonetheless limping a yr after her fall — and it was cramping her model. She was instructed that individuals with talus accidents could limp endlessly.
“I said, ‘Oh, that’s kind of not good enough. I am not going to limp. So what can we do about this? Because I need to not limp anymore,’” Wawrzyniak recalled. “‘It’s hurting my whole body, and I need to climb, and I need to run, and I need to do all these things.’”
She noticed NYU Langone sports activities drugs specialist Dr. Lauren E. Borowski, who famous that Wawrzyniak had a sophisticated fracture and had shattered her bones into items.
“She could have died, and I think she has done a lot of work to get back to where she’s at now,” Borowski instructed The Submit. “That’s no small feat, to get back to running as much as she is and getting back to climbing and being as active as she is.”
Wawrzyniak credit her progress to Sarah Plumer-Holzman, a senior bodily therapist at NYU Langone’s Harkness Middle for Dance Accidents and a fellow climber.
Plumer-Holzman targeted on Wawrzyniak’s left ankle, hip, foot and gait to get her shifting correctly once more.
“She needed to learn how to get her foot to fully relax on the ground,” Plumer-Holzman defined. “As soon as she got into a squat or just a step onto that foot, her foot just wanted to roll to the outside, and her toes wanted to scrunch.”
She prescribed a collection of workouts, together with elevating the calf and standing on a balancing disc, that Wawrzyniak nonetheless does at dwelling.
She mentioned she’s gotten even stronger at climbing, discovering immense success on the health club almost three years after her harrowing fall. Even when she’s not “brave enough” to ice climb this season, she’s “pretty happy” with what she’s achieved together with her bionic ankle.
“When I had broken my leg and I thought I was never going to walk again, it would really help me out to believe that if you do these things, you will get better one millimeter at a time,” Wawrzyniak mirrored. “You know, one tiny, tiny little movement at a time.”
