November 12, 2011 seemed like a normal day for junior Mitch Ramsey. He woke up ready for his trip to Hocking Hills and was looking forward to a day full of fun. Filled with excitement, Ramsey had no idea that within a few hours, his life would be in danger. What started as a normal day, soon became a day that changed his life.

“I shattered everything in my right wrist – everything that pretty much connects your hand to your forearm,” Ramsey said. “I have a vaulted skull fracture. It affected a lot of movement on the left side of my body. My arm had no restrictions; my leg had mainly no restrictions – the only restriction was I lost movement in the lower part of my ankle. I couldn’t lift my foot up at all.”

During what seemed like a simple, exciting field trip to Hocking Hills with his fellow geology club members, Ramsey almost lost his life. After stepping out onto a ledge to see the site “Rock House,” Ramsey attempted to climb down the cliff instead of climbing back up. At first, he said everything was fine. However, the smallest misjudgment turned into a much bigger accident.

“When I started to lower myself down – it’s when I black out, but looking at pictures I know what happened… I had to slam into the ledge, which that’s probably what broke my wrist, knocked me out. And then I tumbled off the ledge, and then I managed to hit probably the only dirt patch in the area.”

Ramsey said he fell roughly 35 feet that day, and was beyond lucky to have many doctors and emergency medical technicians already at Hocking Hills. Ramsey was life-flighted to Grant Hospital in Columbus, Ohio in under an hour. After being in a medically-induced coma for twelve days, Ramsey said he woke up in the hospital and was probably more calm than most.

“My next thought was on Thanksgiving when I woke up,” he said. “It was a massive load of confusion. I wasn’t scared and I was actually much more calm than I think most people would have been. I could immediately tell I was in a hospital and I immediately noticed the tubes coming out of my arm and the tube in my stomach. I remember scratching my neck and coming across my trachea and realizing that’s how I was breathing.”

Ramsey suffered a shattered right wrist and a skull fracture, leaving with him slight memory loss. Although he knew the basics, he said remembering the day of the accident was impossible at first.

“I couldn’t remember Hocking Hills at all,” he said. “I could not remember that day to save my life. I couldn’t remember driving, I couldn’t remember getting up… I couldn’t even remember what I was doing at school, what classes I was taking at that point. I was so out of it, I had no idea what was happening.”

Due to nurses, doctors and family telling Ramsey about his accident, he said memory slowly came back. Ramsey was at Grant Hospital for a week after waking from his coma. He said most of the week was a blur, and he barely remembers it. After being transferred to Galion Community Hospital in Galion, Ohio, Ramsey started inpatient therapy.

Ramsey said the first few days at Galion were tough, and he hit rock bottom when he realized he still needed help with the little stuff.

“I reached over to grab toilet paper and as I leaned, my coordination was so out of whack that when I leaned there was no trigger to say ‘stop leaning,’” he said. “And I kept leaning, and I kept leaning, and I fell off. So I was like ‘well this where I have to start back over at square one.’”

Due to his injuries, Ramsey said he basically had to start all over in therapy. He said it was difficult and had to learn everything from eating to walking.

“I had to do speech therapy, physical and occupational therapy,” he said. “The first week it literally felt like going back through and reliving toddler years again – just learning how to walk again, learning how to use my hands, and how to chew and swallow properly, how to try to talk again because I didn’t have a voice yet.”

Although it seemed like a lot, Ramsey said that things improved within a week. He said the progress made each day was remarkable.

“After about a week things really started to steam roll in progress,” he said. “It almost felt like day-by-day, you could just see the progress I was making and it was becoming more of a miracle.”

Ramsey was discharged from Galion Community Hospital on December 22, 2011 and began outpatient therapy from the comfort of his own home. In January of 2012, Ramsey returned to school to not only make up his work from the previous semester, but also to get back in his classes. Ramsey said the semester was hard, but not quite how he had expected.

“I was ready to come back and prove to myself and to my family and to my therapist that I’m strong enough to handle this and that I can operate on my own again and that I’m going to be okay. But, I wasn’t able to do hardly anything I used to be able to do,” he said.

When Ramsey was in the hospital, it was expected that he would make a full recovery, however it would take four to six months. Ramsey was able to recover in about two to three months. He said if it was up to the doctors and therapists, Ramsey would not have been back in school in January.

“If I had left my decisions up to my therapist, I would have never come back in the spring,” he said. “In terms of exceeding expectations, I think I wowed everyone including myself on how well I recovered and how I just did it so nonchalantly.”

Ramsey said the accident has greatly changed his outlook on life. He said he is fully recovered and feels much stronger now than ever before. He said that now, he tries to stay optimistic about life, and to get others to feel the same.

“I had always been trying to be more of an optimistic person and I feel like the accident really caused that shift permanently,” he said. “I always try to think now, ‘it could always be a little bit worse.’ I was fortunate enough to recover absolutely everything … I say I have about 98 percent of all my movement back. And just to be able to rebound, bounce back and be back to school in two months is a miracle in itself. There’s a reason I was able to come back, and I was able to come back on my own power. Am I 100 percent the guy I was before the accident? No, but physically I have never felt better. I can’t recall feeling as strong and as powerful, even before my accident.”