Shayna Richardson was a woman who liked jumping out of airplanes. She began skydiving when she turned 21. She was making her 10th dive and going solo for the first time when her brand new parachute decided to call it quits. Her main chute and her reserve failed to open properly and she free fell thousands of feet.
Her entire fall was captured on tape by a camera in her instructor’s helmet. Her landing wasn’t the most graceful or the most comfortable one; she landed face first in a parking lot. It is estimated that she was going 50 mph at impact. At that point, she thought she was going to die.
"I had accepted — I don't know how your brain can process that so quickly in the 3,000 feet that I fell. I had rationalized with myself that this was it, I was gonna die, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. So I just needed to have one last talk with God before I did." She says.
She doesn’t actually remember hitting the ground. Her instructor met her promptly and tended to her while the ambulance arrived. He received 15 plates in her face for fractures after four operations. She also received some unexpected news.
Apparently, she was 2 weeks pregnant and the fetus had survived both the free falls and the multiple surgeries. On that fateful day, the prospect of being a mother made her feel like the luckiest person.