The Joshua 16-year-old severely injured in an Oklahoma skydiving accident is almost completely healed.
Mackenzie Wethington said doctors have cleared her for all normal activity - except contact sports - and that could resume in May.
“I’m about 95 percent better,” she said. “Physically, I can’t even feel anything happened to me. But mentally, processing is still slow. Memory, I still forget things.”
It was Jan. 25 when the Joshua High School sophomore plummeted more that 3,000 feet on her first jump from a plane.
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She suffered injuries to her back, pelvis, liver, ribs and teeth.
Wethington said she blacked out during the accident and does not remember all of what happened but knows the parachute partially opened, saving her life.
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“The parachute didn’t open half way, it malfunctioned,” she said.
The sophomore expects to return to classes half day at Joshua High School on March 31.
She has been keeping up with schoolwork at home as she recuperates.
Friday night she and her family went out for dinner at a Burleson restaurant.
Her mother, Holly Wethington, said just walking into a restaurant demonstrates Mackenzie’s remarkable recovery.
“She was determined to get out of that bed and walk again and everything she does she does at 110 percent,” Holly Wethington said.
The teen's mom said it was her daughter's request to go skydiving and she discovered it was legal for a 16-year-old in Oklahoma.
She has decided she will not jump out of an airplane, again.
But there are other activities Mackenzie Wethington does want to try that worry her mother, including free falling into a net, scuba diving and cliff diving.
“She always says, you don’t let fear control your life. So she is a very strong willed, determined, dare devil in some ways,” Holly Wethington said.
The accident has shaped a career goal for the high school student.
“I feel like this has helped me to where I can relate to the patient, so I want to be a trauma surgeon,” Mackenzie Wethington said.
