A fall on a trail, airlifted out, lengthy recover

By Jalen Jenkins --

In the split second that she realized she was falling on a Santa Monica mountains trail, Rebekah
McNamara instantly decided to save her baby, strapped in a carrying pack on her back, and
take all of the weight on her left leg on April 24.

“My son Shane is on my back. He’s an additional 25 pounds,” Rebekah remembers. “My ankle
was already hurting. It was probably fractured. My shoes had no grip on them. That didn’t help
when it came to going downhill. It was slippery.

“It just snapped. It broke completely. The first thing I ever remember was screaming really loud.

The pain was so great. I didn’t know what to do. I was like, I just have to faint. I couldn’t breathe;
it was so painful.”

Rebekah broke her tibia and fibula and fractured her ankle. She was airlifted off the Los Leones
Trail, after her brother ran down the rest of the path to where he could pick up signal on his
phone to call 911. She submitted two hours of surgery, receiving one rod and four screws.

“The trauma nurse said I’m bionic now,” she quips.

Rebekah’s accident and her six months of arduous recovery serve as a reminder to employ safe
trekking measures in the beautiful local mountains. In Rebekah’s case, she should have done
three things:

1. Wear shoes with adequate tread, preferably hiking boots.
2. Not carry extra weight once she twisted her ankle and compromised its strength.
3. Consider fully carrying a toddler on her back.

After Rebekah had twisted her ankle, her brother Zach Scribner offered to carry the baby.

Rebekah declined because she figured a mother’s reflex would be better than an uncle’s.

Both she and Zach regret that decision now.

Her fateful fall began as a Rebekah, her husband, her three kids, her brother, her sister-in-law
and their three kids hiked to the top for a picnic. As she headed back down at 1:30 p.m.,

Rebekah twisted her ankle about 10 minutes from the trailhead.

Her brother offered to help with little Shane. Rebekah declined.

Only 20 yards later, her left foot “locked” in a twisted position, but her body continued
downward. She realized she was going to fall. Instantly, she panicked and aimed her fall so as
to not crush the toddler on her back. She took the fall on her own leg.

“It sounded like a branch broke,” she remembers. “I fell and it broke, and I started screaming. It
was like an out-of-body experience. When you’re walking in your normal day-to-day life, you feel
your body as it is. But when you fall, you feel like the normal consistency of your body just totally
leave. I don’t know how to explain it.”

Her husband, Adam, and the others were behind her. They heard the branch break but didn’t
comprehend fully what had happened.

“I said call 911, that was my leg that broke,” she told them.

The pain was excruciating and she couldn’t help but scream. She couldn’t stop screaming.

Of course, her kids went into full-on panic, hearing Mom scream.

“I stopped screaming because I realized I was traumatizing them,” she says. “I held my breath.

The black walls of fainting came in. Zach told me, ‘You have to breathe.’”

Zach ran down the mountain. It took 10 minutes but it seemed like an eternity.

He called 911. It took another half hour for the helicopter to come.

Paramedics climbed up the path and strapped her on to the rescue board, which the hovering
helicopter lifted out.

“I started to spin,” she says. She was hoisted up into the helicopter. She was conscious for the
10-minute flight to UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital.

“I was grateful to be in the helicopter,” she says. “I thought I was going to be dangling for the
whole ride.”

In the trauma room after X-rays, Rebekah was given the bad news: If she ever wanted to walk
again, she needed surgery.

“I had a lot of trauma, night terrors in the hospital,” she says.

Two days in the hospital for post-op. She was handed crutches, which she needed for the stairs
at her house.

She couldn’t teach. The codeine left her loopy.

The physical therapy took six months.

“I had to wear a thing around my neck in case I fell, I could call people,” she says.

When is she going hiking again? “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe if it’s Will Rogers where it’s
flat.”

Jalen Jenkins is in the journalism class at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica. Rebekah McNamara is one of his teachers.