Jim Ewing

So the day of my accident was December 26th, 2014.

And I was rock climbing in the Cayman Islands with my daughter and some other friends from Maine who just happened to be there coincidentally.

And it was, I don't know, kind of an ordinary day.

It was a climbing area that I hadn't been to before at a cliff called Dixon's Wall.

We were kind of in a hurry, and I wasn't really paying great attention to how things all got set up.

And...

on this one last climb I was actually standing on a ledge almost completely what we call a no hands rest and I don't know I just lost my focus and I stepped off the ledge and just started falling.

So I fell about 60 feet to the ground.

Originally I thought

I sort of felt like I hadn't hit the ground all that hard.

I would just lay there on the ground until I could catch my breath.

I made eye contact with another climber, and I noticed my wrist was at a funny angle, and I said to him, just so you know, I think my wrist is broken.

And he said something along the lines of, well...

I hate to tell you this, but your ankle is looking pretty broken, too.

Separated my ribs from my sternum.

Just a huge laundry list of injuries that you might expect from falling that kind of distance.

The CT showed that the main fracture was still there, but also most of the bone was dead.

It's a condition called avascular necrosis.

And that occurs when the blood supply to a bone is cut off or damaged, and then the bone slowly dies.

I was in a lot of pain, a lot of painkillers.