http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?S=1892565
(LOUISVILLE, May 25th, 2004) -- She spent two days screaming for help, thinking she was going to die. Now, nearly a week after her ordeal, a Kentuckiana woman shares her amazing story of survival. WAVE 3's James Zambroski reports.
Last week 21-year old Christy Etzig fell from the Salt River Bridge on Dixie Highway to an embankment nearly 50 feet below. The impact of the fall left her unable to move.
Christy says her broken body was racked with pain that became even more unbearable every time she tried to move. Dozens of cars and possibly hundreds of people were only a few hundred feet away, but no one could hear her cries for help. That was the nightmare that began unfolding for Christy in the early morning hours of May 17.
It was a nightmare that would last nearly three days as Christy lay bleeding in the mud with multiple fractures, cuts and bruises. She screamed for help whenever she heard someone, but no one came. "I'd pass out for a couple of hours, wake up, start screaming again. Pass out for a couple of hours, kept doing the same thing. I'd wipe bugs off of me, what I could reach. Grabbing sticks and trying to push them down toward my legs to get the stuff off of me."
Out out of cigarettes and needing a cold soda, Christy left her boyfriend's apartment on foot around 1:30 a.m. While walking across the bridge, she felt increasingly crowded by oncoming traffic. "A car came past me and it felt like it was really close, like it was going to hit me, so I kept getting closer to the edge. A semi truck come and I thought it was going to hit me, and that's when I dove over and jumped off."
It turned out to be a tragic miscalculation. "When I jumped, there was no sidewalk. I thought I was only going to fall, like, that much. There wasn't nothing there. I'd never been on that bridge before and walked. I've always been in a car."
Christy says she does not remember falling, but she does "remember hitting the ground, I remember the impact. I remember opening my eyes and being on concrete, but I don't remember the fall."
Then there was intense pain and a feeling of suffocation. "I couldn't move, but all the strength I had and oh, there was so much pain, but I had to flip over to get my jacket off because I couldn't breathe because I was so hot."
And there was nature's torment as well. "There was ants and spiders and snakes and everything, just crawling all around me."
During her ordeal, Christy found herself questioning God. "That's all I kept asking: 'God, what did I do to deserve this?'"
Finally, Christy was discovered by a fisherman, but it would take rescuers more than an hour to get her to an ambulance. That's when she realized "I'm saved, I'm going to get to see my family again. The first thing I thought of was my daughter. I'm going to see that precious little face one more time."
Christy will be undergoing surgery later this week to reconstruct her fractured pelvis. She told us she doesn't plan to take any more long walks in the dark.