A coveted pair of Japanese fishing gloves nearly cost Martynka Wawrzyniak her life during a visit to the Catskills to climb frozen waterfalls.
The Brooklynite was waiting her activate a really small ledge in Stony Clove Notch when she dropped certainly one of her latest, specially insulated Showa gloves.
“I used to be very sad to see it go down the cliff, and I reached to attempt to reserve it and fell down the whole cliff,” Wawrzyniak told The Post. “It was pretty dramatic because I did a bunch of 360 flips within the air, the wrong way up, hitting various body parts, attempting to arrest myself, but every little thing was covered in ice.”
Wawrzyniak, who’s in her 40s, landed in a tree that she clung to for a couple of half hour until her mountain climbing companions rescued her. She was dismayed to later learn that she had broken her talus bone in her ankle, her fibula in her lower leg and her calcaneus, also generally known as the heel bone.
What followed was a two-hour surgery at NYU Langone Health to rebuild her left leg, weeks of learning the way to walk again and months of physical therapy to get her stronger than ever before.
Wawrzyniak had only been mountaineering for a couple of month before her February 2022 accident, though she had been mountain climbing for about five years.
She’s also a book editor, a mixed-media artist and, now, a “tree hugger for all times.”
Wawrzyniak estimated she fell some 200 feet into the tree that separated her from Route 214 by 50 to 70 feet.
“It was quite a lot of blood in every single place, however it was just from my hands hitting the tree, because I had no gloves on and I smashed into the tree,” Wawrzyniak said. “I used to be very dizzy, and I knew that if I didn’t hold onto the tree, I would actually pass out.”
After she was helped down, Wawrzyniak tried to power through the day. She used mountain climbing poles as crutches, considering she had simply sprained her ankle.
A fateful trip to urgent care brought her to NYU Langone, where she had 4 screws placed in her ankle joint to carry the bones together so that they could heal. She likes to be lively, so she didn’t wait long after surgery to do a floor ab workout.
“I’d go for walks within the park on my crutches, round and round in circles till my arms almost fell off,” Wawrzyniak said. “I’d hang board. I’d do pullups.”
Steadily, she grasped the way to walk again, albeit like a “zombie.” By May, for her birthday, she was capable of slowly traverse the beach with friends. By September, she was bouldering.
Despite all that progress, she was still limping a yr after her fall — and it was cramping her style. She was told that folks with talus injuries may limp perpetually.
“I said, ‘Oh, that’s form of not ok. I’m not going to limp. So what can we do about this? Because I would like to not limp anymore,’” Wawrzyniak recalled. “‘It’s hurting my whole body, and I would like to climb, and I would like to run, and I would like to do all these items.’”
She saw NYU Langone sports medicine specialist Dr. Lauren E. Borowski, who noted that Wawrzyniak had an advanced fracture and had shattered her bones into pieces.
“She could have died, and I feel she has done quite a lot of work to get back to where she’s at now,” Borowski told The Post. “That’s no small feat, to get back to running as much as she is and getting back to climbing and being as lively as she is.”
Wawrzyniak credits her progress to Sarah Plumer-Holzman, a senior physical therapist at NYU Langone’s Harkness Center for Dance Injuries and a fellow climber.
Plumer-Holzman focused on Wawrzyniak’s left ankle, hip, foot and gait to get her moving properly again.
“She needed to learn the way to get her foot to completely loosen up on the bottom,” Plumer-Holzman explained. “As soon as she got right into a squat or simply a step onto that foot, her foot just desired to roll to the skin, and her toes desired to scrunch.”
She prescribed a series of exercises, including raising the calf and standing on a balancing disc, that Wawrzyniak still does at home.
She said she’s gotten even stronger at climbing, finding immense success on the gym nearly three years after her harrowing fall. Even when she’s not “brave enough” to ice climb this season, she’s “pretty joyful” with what she’s achieved along with her bionic ankle.
“After I had broken my leg and I assumed I used to be never going to walk again, it will really help me out to consider that should you do these items, you’ll recuperate one millimeter at a time,” Wawrzyniak reflected. “, one tiny, tiny little movement at a time.”
