 I finally climbed into bed at 1.20 in the morning. It was July 15th, 2021, and my friends had helped me celebrate my 31st birthday in the basement apartment of my sister's home. Earlier in the day, I prepared for the unlikely event of a flood. We are about a third of a mile from the banks of the R River in Sinsig, Germany. It had been raining buckets that week, and authorities had issued a flood warning. Though not for where I was, still, I had placed sandbags on the floor outside my garden door, and piled electronics and clothing on tables and the couch, just in case water managed to seep through before my friends left. They laughed at me for doing that, but I thought, why take a chance? As I drifted off to sleep, I was awakened by the sound of rushing water, as if I were lying beside a waterfall instead of in my bedroom. When I swung my legs off the bed, I was shocked by the sensation of cold water lapping against my knees and rising fast. It has to be from a burst pipe in the bathroom, I thought. Shivering and in darkness, I grabbed my cell phone and turned on the flashlight. When I stepped from the bedroom to the hallway, I saw it wasn't a burst pipe at all. Instead, water was shooting through the gaps of the garden door that leads from my living room to a set of concrete stairs up to the backyard. The water must have breached the sandbags all around me. My things began to float by, chairs, bookshelves, pieces of my drum set. I admitted. It began to panic. The R, usually such a quiet, slow-moving river, had violently burst its banks, and now I had to get out fast. Any effects of the celebratory drinks I had earlier were now gone. Fear sobered me right up. I heard the garden door starting to crack and splinter under the pressure of the flood. The sound was like nothing else, screeching, hissing, and crashing all at once. It was relentless. Then the water was now up to my waist. In bare feet and with my boxer shorts plastered to my body, I started to wade to my only escape. The door that led upstairs to the rest of the house, all around me, things were breaking. The lamps were shattering. The cupboards were being torn apart. Finally, I made it to the door. I tried to pull it open, but the force of the water wouldn't let me. I tried several times to pry it open, even just a little bit, but the rushing water slammed it shut again. I looked around, looking for anything I could use to wedge the door open. There, in the corner, was a broom, a coat rack, and a huge, heavy sword from a medieval fair. I grabbed them all and, once again, pried open the door, throwing the broom and coat rack between the door and the frame to keep the door from shutting, and using the sword to wedge it open some more. I managed to make a gap of about a foot, just wide enough to squeeze through and make it into the hallway in the pitch black. I leaped onto the stairs leading up to the rest of the house and ran to the third floor where my sister lived. I knocked on her door, calling for her, trying to see if she was okay, until I remembered that she wasn't home that night. That's when I went downstairs to the main floor and ran outside. I stood there in the darkness, soaked in panting. What was once a lovely, cozy street was now a waterscape, with floating debris and trees instead of people and cars. The river had drowned the neighborhood and if I had woken up just a few minutes later, I would have drowned along with it. We'd been assured that something like this only happens once every 100 years. I hope so. More than 180 people died and parts of villages in the region were entirely washed away. November 14th, 2021 was a perfect day for skydiving. Sunny, with little wind. I was a novice solo jumper, having jumped only 14 times, not enough to be licensed. It scared me for sure, but a little fear always makes you a better risk-taker, right? That's what drew me to skydiving in the first place. I've always liked flirting with danger. I left my home in Virginia Beach, Virginia late in the morning and arrived at the hangar in Suffolk, Virginia 40 minutes later. At around 1.30pm, I joined 15 other skydivers for our first jump of the day. As the plane ascended, I went through the safety protocols with my coach. A ritual you go through for every jump, no matter how much experience you have. This includes pointing from the plane door to the drop zone, where you land 13,500 feet below so you can direct your jump. After the plane leveled off, we jumped. Me first, then my coach, free-falling at about 125 miles an hour, descending about 1,000 feet every five seconds. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at once. With the world opening up before me, coming into focus in mere seconds, even though it felt as if it were happening in slow motion. The wind at ease carried me for the free-fall, and at about 4,000 feet, I deployed my pilot chute. The small parachute used to extract the main one. After the main chute was released and inflated, I had about a minute to enjoy the peace and quiet as I floated gently toward the soft, grassy meadow. I felt invincible. We went up again, not long after our first-second jump. The mood on the plane was light, lots of joking and lots of laughing. My coach and I still made time to go through our prepping routine. Then we jumped. After 30 seconds in the air, at around 5,500 feet, we tracked away from each other because you needed lots of empty space to safely deploy your parachute. I looked at my altimeter and realized I was lower than I thought. The ground was coming up too fast. I knew I had to pull the pilot chute at roughly 4,000 feet as I'd done the last time when I was caught off-guard. As I cruised past that marker, I rushed to pull my chute without taking time to stabilize my body position. When I pulled it, instead of releasing into the airstream to inflate, the pilot chute wrapped around my right leg. The chute was pulling my right leg up as if I were a marionette, while the main parachute remained in its bag. Just get it off, I told myself calmly. I wasted about 7 seconds trying to get untangled, but was unsuccessful. With the ground rapidly getting closer below me, I prepared to crash. I didn't think it would be a catastrophic impact, maybe you'll break a leg I thought. I've always been an optimist. Then, suddenly, and thankfully, the automatic reserve parachute, a backup that releases when the main one isn't working, opened. I managed to gain some control, steering myself towards some grass, which I hoped would make first stop their landing. I had just a few seconds to feel some relief before the main parachute inexplicably released from its bag. It inflated, and the two parachutes began pulling in opposite directions, causing me to accelerate hard and fast toward the ground, not far from the drop zone. When my body smashed into the ground, I felt as if my muscles and bones were on fire. So I lay there, my face in the grass, my arms flung out to either side, and I screamed, please, somebody help. I lay with my face buried in the grass, fully conscious for about five minutes before people from the skydiving club got there. They quickly surrounded me, eager to help, but there was nothing they could do. It was too risky to move me before the paramedics arrived. So they sat there, listening to me swearing and yelling as the shock wore off and the pain really set in. When the first two paramedics arrived with an ambulance half an hour later, they tried to move me onto a board for transport. It hurt so much I screamed. Then I heard the helicopter. The air ambulance crew came equipped with painkillers, which sent me to La La Land, and I was transported to the nearest trauma center. In the end, my injuries were pretty severe. A shattered ankle, a broken shin, and a spinal injury that caused a spinal fluid leak. No one could tell me if I would walk again, but I was determined. In February 2022, just three months after the crash, I walked again for the first time. Last November, I climbed to the Mount Everest Base Camp. I lived with my husband, Tyrone, in San Luis Obispo, California, about four miles from the beach. Every few years, the humpback whales come into the bay for a few days while they're migrating. In November 2020, the whales were around, so we took out our yellow double kayak to watch the wildlife. We paddled out the length of the pier and saw a huge number of seals and dolphins, and about 20 whales feeding on silverfish. It was incredible. They breached and sprayed through their blowholes and were so graceful and majestic. Each one is huge, about 15 meters long, and sometimes they turn their side fins so it looked like they were waving at us. It was really cute. At the time, my friend Liz Cottrell was staying with us. The morning after Tyrone and I saw the whales, I asked Liz if she wanted to go out on the water to check them out. It had been such a magnificent experience, and I wanted to share it with her. No way, she said. She's scared of whales and sharks, and was terrified that kayak would overturn over in it. I told her there was nothing to worry about, promising that the craft was super stable and that we could turn back anytime. After some cajoling, I finally got her to agree to join me. We got out on the water at about 8.30 the next morning, and there were already about 15 other kayakers and paddleboarders in the bay. It was warm for November, about 18 degrees Celsius, so we wore t-shirts and leggings. For the first half hour, we didn't see anything. Then, I spotted two pairs of whales right past the pier swimming toward us. We were in awe. It's an amazing feeling to be so close to a creature that size. When whales go down after breaching, they leave what looks like an oil slick on the water. I figured if we paddled toward that spot, we'd be safe from the whales, since they'd just left. We followed them at a distance, or what I thought was a distance. I later found out that it's recommended to keep 90 meters away, or about the length of a football field. We were probably more like 18 meters away. All of a sudden, a tightly packed swarm of fish, known as a bait ball, started jumping out of the water and into our kayak. Their movement sounded like crackling glass around us. At that moment, I knew we were too close. I was terrified. Then, I felt the kayak lift out of the water, about two meters we later learned, and tip back into the ocean. I figured the whale was going to drag us down somehow, and I had no idea how deeply we sucked underwater. What I didn't realize at the time was that Liz and I were in the whale's mouth. It had engulfed my entire body, except my right arm and paddle. Liz, meanwhile, was looking up directly into the whale's jaw. It was like a big, white wall. She told me later she thought she was going to die. I was still worried about being sunk down by the vacuum, so I just kept thinking, I've got to get up. I've got to fight this. I've got to breathe. Whales have enormous mouths, but tiny throats. Anything they can't swallow, they spit out. We were wearing life jackets, and soon we both popped up out of the water about a meter apart. The entire ordeal lasted only 10 seconds, but to me felt like an eternity. Three or four people paddled over. You were in the whale's mouth, he told us. We thought you were dead. A few days later, I studied the video and saw how close I'd come to being injured or killed. I became so much more appreciative of life after that day. There's no way I'm getting that close to whales again. I'm now very aware of the power of nature and the ocean. And I believe that I would have died if it was my time to die. Lucky for me, it wasn't.