Mountain Climber Thought She Would Never Walk Again After Falling Off Frozen Waterfalls: How She Recovered

A mountain climber nearly died while attempting to climb a frozen waterfall in New York. And it was all because of a pair of Japanese fishing gloves.

Climber Martynka Wawrzyniak is reflecting on the events that led to her near death. She said that she had accidentally dropped her glove down the cliff. All it took was a split moment for the climber herself to go off the edge.

"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 told The New Post. "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 fell and landed in a tree. The impact had snapped her fibula in her leg, her heel bone, and a bone in her ankle. It took a two-hour surgery to reconstruct the bones in her leg. But the real work would be after the surgery, learning to walk again. She would need months of physical therapy, and at one point she questioned if she would ever walk again.

Wawrzyniak, who is in her 40s, landed in a tree that she clung to for about a half hour until her hiking companions rescued her. She was dismayed to later learn that she had broken her talus bone in her ankle, her fibula in her lower leg and her calcaneus, also known as the heel bone.

What followed was a two-hour surgery at NYU Langone Health to rebuild her left leg, weeks of learning how to walk again, and months of physical therapy to get her stronger than ever before. She fell an estimated 200 feet into the tree. "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 said. "I was very dizzy, and I knew that if I didn't hold onto the tree, I might actually pass out."

Climber Makes Recovery

At first, Wawrzyniak assumed that she had just sprained her ankle. However, the truth for the climber was much worse. Following her surgery, Wawrzyniak began the long road to recovery.

"I would go for walks in the park on my crutches, round and round in circles. Till my arms almost fell off," Wawrzyniak said. "I would hang board. I would do pullups."

However, she wasn't sure if she would ever fully recover. A year after her fall, the climber still had a limp. "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.'"

The climber worked with Sarah Plumer-Holzman, a senior physical therapist, to push her body to recover and work again. "She needed to learn how to get her foot to fully relax on the ground," Plumer-Holzman explained. "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."

If you look at the climber now then you'll realize how far she's come. "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 said. "You know, one tiny, tiny little movement at a time."