A 25-year-old Minnesota woman has a long road of recovery ahead of her after an accident involving a hammock resulted in a broken neck and paralysis.
On Labor Day weekend, Alyssa Pfannenstein was relaxing in a hammock with her boyfriend as her 4-year-old daughter played in the park.
Suddenly, one of the trees that was supporting the hammock snapped. The tree was rotten, the Pioneer Press reported.
What happened next was life-altering.
Pfannenstein broke her neck, and her daughter saw it happen. The mother is now hospitalized, and early details put out there by her friends reveal that she “shattered” her C5 vertebrae and is “currently paralyzed from the C5 vertebrae down.”
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Jacklyn Cheyenne wrote about the situation in the GoFundMe campaign she started for Pfannenstein. The GoFundMe account has raised more than $8,000. The goal set for donations is $100,000.
Pfannenstein's boyfriend Justin Janssen was interviewed by WCCO and described the incident as "surreal."
“People do [this] all the time, we’ve done it all the time, we are very adventurous. We didn’t expect something like this,” he said. “It was surreal. At the moment, there was not even time to panic because it happened so quickly.”
He said that his girlfriend’s “calmness” throughout the ordeal has given him strength.
“Her calmness calmed me and her daughter down and made us understand everything would be OK,” he said.
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Pfannenstein described the feeling of being hit by the tree as a “big boom hit[ting] [her] in the back of the head.”
According to the Pioneer Press, Pfannenstein plans to begin rehabilitation to regain mobility once "small fevers and low blood pressure resolve."
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