It’s Not Because I want to Die
Debbie Purdy
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 Wading through Honey
Chapter 7 ‘Your Grass Is White’
Chapter 8 In Sickness and in Health
Chapter 10 The View from 4 Feet
Chapter 12 Let’s Talk about Death
Chapter 15 A Negotiated Settlement
Chapter 16 A Short Stay in Switzerland
Chapter 19 Some Real-Life, Grown-Up Decisions
Chapter 23 My Own Little Bit of History
Chapter 24 Listening to All Sides
‘Jump!’ the instructor yelled.
I obeyed instinctively, then immediately regretted it. What the hell was I doing jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane 3,000 feet in the air?
‘One thousand and one.’ Training kicked in and I adopted the spread-eagle position, face down. Why am I doing this? What was I thinking?
‘One thousand and two,’ I counted aloud, as we’d been taught, then squinted upwards. Was there any way back into the plane? Surely there had to be. I was still attached by a static line that would pull my chute open. Could I climb up it?
‘One thousand and three.’ The Doc Martens I was wearing were too wide and my feet were shaking, hitting each side so rapidly I thought they might come loose and fall off. I can’t believe I’m doing this, I thought. This is so stupid.
Terror was making me alert to every tiny sensation and I could feel the blood pumping hard through my veins.
‘One thousand and four. Check, shit, malfunction. If your parachute hasn’t deployed by the time you’ve finished counting, you’re in trouble and it’s time to open your secondary chute. Just then, though, I felt a gentle lift and I was pulled upright as my main chute opened. The static line detached and I felt intense relief as I looked up at the billowing white canopy. I’ve never felt so grateful to see anything!
The relief was short-lived because I then looked down and saw that there was nothing between me and the ground. I was falling more slowly, but I was still very definitely falling.
It was deathly quiet up there, and very peaceful. I’d been told to scope out a big yellow cross on the ground and aim for that using the toggles on either side of my chute to change direction, but I couldn’t even see the damn cross. Where the hell was it? I spotted a parachute in front of me and thought I would just aim for that in the hope that it was aiming for the cross. All the guys who were jumping with me that day had seemed cool, calm and confident, so I figured that whoever I was following was going the right way.
I played with the toggles but wasn’t sure how much effect I was having. I kept aiming for the guy ahead and praying that he wasn’t headed for a tree. I still couldn’t see the cross, but by that stage I didn’t care if I was miles away so long as I hit the ground with both feet and didn’t end up hanging from an electricity cable or the upper branches of a tree.
Suddenly the ground was right there and I closed my eyes and went into autopilot, rolling on impact as we’d been taught. When I opened my eyes, I looked down my body to make sure nothing was broken or bleeding and realised my arm was lying on a yellow cross. I’d landed right on top of the target. The guy I had been following was a few hundred yards further on. There was no blood. I was alive and intact.
The instructor who filled out my logbook later wrote, ‘GATW,’ meaning ‘Good all the way.’ I didn’t mention that it was a matter of luck rather than careful control. I felt fantastic. Sheer terror turned to sheer exhilaration and I asked, ‘When can I have another go?’
That was in 1981 and I was 17 years old.
In 1995, fourteen years later, a doctor said to me, ‘When I first saw you, I thought you had MS,’ and inside my head I started to count, one thousand and one.
He organised an MRI scan and a lumbar puncture. One thousand and two.
It was MS and I was in freefall, scared and lonely. One