Close Call For Mid-Air Seizure Victim
A man in Australia was lucky to be sky diving with just the right person when his body went into an epileptic seizure.
It’s not every day that you see someone have a seizure, but when it happens, mid-air is one of the last places you would want to be.
Christopher Jones, who has epilepsy, jumped from a plane at 12,000 feet over Western Australia and began convulsing at about 9,000 feet during his accelerated free fall training. The moment, captured on video, has gone viral, and now the instructor is being thanked for saving Jones’s life.
The footage, shot with a helmet-mounted camera, captured the quick-thinking instructor going after Jones during free fall. Instructor Sheldon McFarlane flew over to Jones, grabbed him briefly and pulled his ripcord to allow his parachute to deploy.
Jones’ doctor had originally cleared him to jump from high altitudes because he had not had any seizures for four years. Jones knew he could not become a pilot because of his epilepsy, but he thought his condition had improved enough to pursue skydiving so he went ahead and made the jump.
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The Epilepsy Association of Western Australia says stressful situations can be a trigger for seizures.
Jones had regained consciousnesses by the time they both landed but the parachute was also equipped with an automatic activation device that would have deployed anyway in the event that McFarlane couldn’t reach him in time.
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(Video Courtesy of You Tube)
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