Free Falling, compare and contrast

Could you imagine falling out of a plane, and having no way of slowing yourself down? This is something a family friend of my parents named Jeff Schmidt, had happen to him. He attended The United States Military Academy at West Point, for schooling and as a result you owe service to the army for the schooling. One of his training missions consisted of skydiving out of airplanes to get experience. Sky diving was something he had completed numerous other times, but in this one instance everything went wrong. He was planning on it being just another day when his whole life would be impacted.

He was in the plane and it was his time to jump, he jumped and was now free falling, when it came time to open the parachute the unthinkable occurred, it was twisted up and didn’t open the way it was designed to. I couldn’t imagine the thoughts racing through his head at the time, and how he could manage to stay calm. He was twisting around and dropping at an increasing rate, and ultimately smacked the ground. As a result of the fall he broke his legs and everything from the waist up. Amazingly after all of this he is still able to walk today. He told me about a man who came running over; panicked and yelling “where is the dead man.” This event is something that changed his life forever, he wasn’t able to keep being a part of the army, and went into his career in law.
I first met Jeff as I played football with his son in elementary school, and he was the coach. I would end up playing with his son in football until high school. As a result we became close family friends, and all of us went hunting and fishing all the time together. He was and still is a very intelligent and motivational man, with all of his experiences and ways of motivating others. Due to the sky diving accident he had to have many operations and surgeries to get rid of the many injuries incurred from the event.

As he is growing older, more and more problems are coming out, and mostly due to the fall. He suffers from a lot of arthritis as you may expect, and has pain at all times. He can separate his shoulder just by raising his arms, and has learned to tolerate a lot of pain. He is unable to hunt any more due to the gun kicking back on his arm, and risking hurting his shoulder. Another thing that bothers his everyday life is a problem he has developed with his throat. From impact of the fall his throat almost feels like it is collapsing on him. He usually cannot talk for longer than a sentence or two before he has to clear his throat, because it feels like he is about to choke he says. The worst part about that is that the doctors don’t have a way to reverse it or prevent it from getting worse. He was a very successful lawyer and even his career has been affected. From the throat problem, it caused him to need to leave his career on disability. He was unable to speak for an extended period of time in a courtroom, which is vital for a lawyer to be able to perform, causing him to leave his life career on disability. The good thing about Jeff is that he still has his joking personality and seems to always be happy when you are around him.

It is always sad to see people grow older and suffer from different age related problems. To add to the problems everyone gets with old age, Jeff has to deal with the effects of his skydiving accident that occurred more than 30 years back. It was undeniably a life changing event that he was blessed to survive, but along with that there are many consequences that have changed him physically as a person. As you may expect, in order to get into the Military program at West Point, you cannot just rely on your brains, but you must be a very athletic and healthy person, and as a result from the fall it has dramatically affected his previously active lifestyle. This is the type of event that occurs in one person’s life that they feel for the rest of their life.