EMT Student Gets Second Chance After Near-Fatal Skydiving Accident

What would you do if you escaped death and lived to fight another day?

That’s the question Tyler Farnham faced after a near-fatal skydiving accident in 2009. Working as a lifeguard captain with Florida’s Brevard County Ocean Rescue and in the midst of EMT school, Farnham went skydiving that April when everything went horribly wrong.

“I experienced a high-speed parachute malfunction,” Farnham recalls. “Instead of making a safe, soft landing doing a jump I’d done many times before, I spiraled to the ground and hit hard. I broke both my legs and my right arm in two places. I also shattered my jaw, broke nine teeth, and fractured my skull.”

What went wrong in the jump? “Having experienced a malfunction at a low altitude, I waited too long to fix it, thinking I could pull off a landing,” Farnham says. “By the time I realized I would not be able to land safely, I was too low to deploy my reserve parachute. I then lost consciousness as I plummeted to the ground.”

In a desperate bid to save Farnham’s life, doctors placed him in a medically induced coma. “I woke up after five days on my 26th birthday,” says Farnham. “I was told I might never walk again.”

But Farnham did walk again and resumed his much-beloved hobby of surfing as well. But his recovery came at a price: It took months of strenuous and often painful physical therapy to reclaim his life. (His mouth had to be wired shut for two months to allow his jaw to heal.)

Along the way Farnham became addicted to the opioids that eased his pain. He eventually fought his way out of this addiction but remains haunted by the possibility of relapse, which he guards against until this day.               

“Once I got off those opioids, I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got a life ahead of me right now. I can walk. I can run. I can swim. I can surf and skydive. I’ve been given a second chance—I need to go ahead and pursue a life that may not be so normal to justify it.”

What would you do if you escaped death and lived to fight another day? In Farnham’s case he decided to pursue his dream and become a full-time lifeguard in Australia. He also put together an inspirational book, Reaching Cloud 9: Surviving a Near-Death Skydive (available on Amazon.com), based on the notes he took during his recovery. Farnham began writing it in his hospital bed using a pen and his left hand (since his right arm had been broken) before recovering sufficiently to type on a computer.

Since then Farnham has overcome further challenges. While spending his “second life” life guarding and surfing around the Pacific Rim, he got a tiny infected reef cut on his foot in January 2020.

“I did what I usually would do and treated it with amoxicillin,” he says. “But it didn’t work. Two days later I ended up with a blue swollen foot and ankle and had to call for an ambulance.”

It turned out Farnham’s foot was infected with staphylococcus and cellulitis. By the time the infected tissue was cut out, “About a third of my foot was gone,” he says. Skin grafts taken from his thigh and stapled to his foot did the trick. After this wound healed, “I used the same tactics I had employed after my skydiving accident to resume surfing.”

Today Farnham lives on the Indonesian island of Sumba with his dog. He surfs daily, provides motivational talks to audiences worldwide via the Internet, and has even found time to write a second book: Journals From Cloud 9, which is also available on Amazon.

“I’m just so thankful every day for the help that was given to me,” Farnham says. “I think back on the countless rescues I did as a lifeguard and how many thanks I received from those I saved, and I feel that same way toward those who saved me. And I am living proof that you can come back from terrible near-death situations that you always fear could finish you—but they won’t if you don’t let them. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned along the way that I am sharing with other people now.”

To learn more about Farnham’s experiences, go to www.tylerfarnham.com.

James Careless is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to EMS World.