Memory Loss

By: Paige Costa
Posted In: First Person

I can remember my arrival: my best friend Miya was already there waiting for me, smiling like always. I had arrived with my boyfriend of the time, but the only person I needed there wasn’t, my father. He must have been running late. Didn’t he know his youngest daughter was jumping out of a plane that day?

For my 19th birthday celebration, Miya and I had planned a Rolling Stones concert and skydiving. I can remember the concert from the opening “Start Me Up” to the ending “Satisfaction,” but the dive, what you might think would be an unforgettable experience, is a bit less vivid than I hoped.

I can remember putting on the suit, incredibly unflattering, and the harness. I can remember my instructor, who everyone at the hanger calls “Obi Wan.” I was assured that if he couldn’t get me down safely, no one could.

I remember getting on the plane, shooting the camera guy a thumbs up (a corny, but common skydiving gesture), and from that point on, everything I saw and everything I felt is like trying to remember a dream.

At least I know that I’m not alone in my skydiving amnesia. According to Dennis O’Loughlin, an 11-year skydiver, “If I had to describe my first jump in one word, it would be ‘overwhelming.'” O’Loughlin, who is an instructor at Jumptown in Orange, Mass., explains that first-timers go through a kind of “sensory overload” their first time out. “For your first time, you have the image that you’re falling, but really, it’s more like flying,” O’Loughlin said.

A first-time skydiver has two choices to make: tandem or training. For a tandem jump, the diver straps an experienced, licensed instructor on their back. The instructor, of course, has the parachute on their back, and they run the show. They do give you the option of pulling the chord, an option I opted out of. The second option is training: the diver takes the Accelerated Free Fall (AFF), a 10 hour ground course, learning all the basics about skydiving, parachutes, altitude and landing safely. Then the diver is allowed to jump on their own, “hurdling toward the ground at 120 miles per hour,” as O’Loughlin said.

For his first time, he did the AFF training course; however, this is not what he would recommend for the first-time diver. “It’s great to do tandem,” O’Loughlin said. “Then the instructor handles everything and you can just enjoy the ride.” O’Loughlin has another recommendation for a new diver; “Don’t get hung up on being scared; you’re going to have the time of your life in a few seconds.”

Shane Ellison’s first time skydiving experience came about through a trade of sorts. “I had a barbeque in exchange for a free tandem jump, not a bad deal,” Ellison said. Ellison describes his first time as “100 gigs of information with three gigs of storage,” further proving the skydiver’s amnesia theory.

“But I was impressed with the performance of the King Air 90 BeechCraft,” Ellison said. After all, he was a plane lover before he was a skydiver.

After jumping for six years at Jumptown, every divers fear became Ellison’s reality. On Sept. 23, 2007, there was an accident. Although unsure exactly what happened, Ellison woke up one month later with a broken leg, pelvis, and skull, his jaw wired shut and with nine metal plates in his head. Ellison lost vision in his right eye, his sense of smell. “I couldn’t smell a lit cigar in a car with the windows up,” Ellison said. He was in a wheelchair for six months.

Ellison is lucky to even be alive, and aside from the day of the accident, has suffered no memory loss of brain damage; “The fact that I can remember who ‘Paige’ is, is pretty remarkable,” Ellison said. As a friend of Ellison’s for years before his accident, this point became the absolute end of my skydiving career. The accident, however, didn’t have that effect for him. The looming question on each of his friend’s minds: will he ever jump again? Ellison replies with an optimistic saying, “probably, someday.”

“It’s so where I belong,” Ellison said.