Featured Image Credit: Instagram/zuko_carrasco
Topics: Health, World News, Sport
Jess Battison
The whole point in a ‘trust fall’ is that you trust a person to catch you.
And if it goes wrong, it typically means you’re landing on a crash mat and rolling your eyes at your mate.
But unfortunately, a ‘trust fall’ exercise led to a tragic accident for this man as he was left paralysed from the waist down.
Zuko Carrasco was leading a corporate retreat in his native Ecuador back in 2015 when things went wrong.
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Having been a professional mountain guide for a decade, the 42-year-old was doing a ‘trust fall’ exercise where one person is secured by a rope steps off a 40-foot high ledge.
They are then supposed to be ‘caught’ by a person holding the rope on the ground.
After the bunch of insurance workers had completed the team-building exercise to round off the day, it was Carrasco’s turn to come down.
He’d done the activity countless times before, but when he stepped off the platform, things felt different.
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Unfortunately, the friend he was leading the activity with wasn’t paying attention.
Carrasco plummeted down to the ground and he knew in that moment life wasn’t going to be the same again.
He told LA Times: “Instantly, I stopped feeling my legs. I couldn’t move my hands.”
Thirty four at the time, he had severely damaged his spinal cord at the bottom of his neck and had only just became a dad to his second daughter a week before.
“I was just very, very scared, thinking that I have no way of earning money to take care of my family,” Carrasco said. “I couldn’t see my role as a father in a wheelchair, you know? I kept thinking, ‘There’s no way I can live like this.’”
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The tragic day was the first time he’d done the course with his mate and he spent a lot of time feeling ‘so much anger’ for them.
“But then you realise, no, it was my fault,” he said.
He had misheard someone shouting that the belay was set and ready for him to step.
“When you don’t feel fear is when you make mistakes,” he added.
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A big part of Carrasco’s recovery was ‘acceptance and forgiveness, forgiving yourself’.
But he’s never had a real opportunity to forgive his friend as he’s ‘never talked to him about it’.
And the dad worries about him and tried to meet up with him once but he never showed.
“I still feel like I want to tell him, you know, don’t feel sorry. It was my mistake.”
Over the years, Carasco has completed a list of challenges including riding a modified handcycle up Mount Kilimanjaro.