“It felt like everything stopped,” he said by phone from his home in California after two weeks in a New Zealand hospital bed. “I didn’t know if I was dying or what was happening. I couldn’t feel anything in my body.”

The helicopter ride to the hospital was, he said, the “loneliest two hours of my life.” Mitrani was by himself. He thought he felt a vibration in his body but was convinced that he was paralyzed. With his coaches driving to Christchurch, he spent the initial hours at the hospital with no one to interpret what the doctors were telling him.

“I knew I needed surgery,” he said. “They said there was a chance I’d be paralyzed.”

When he came out of surgery, the vibration remained. Mitrani was assured that it had gone well and he would walk again, but he refused to sleep for two days.

“I was too scared to let go,” he said. “I was convinced that I would wake up paralyzed.”

Mitrani has no idea what is ahead of him. He is not sure what to make of the life that he has left behind. Alone in the helicopter, he said, he discovered one thing that was true.

“We think so many things are so important that are not,” he said. “Your family and friends are what matters. I wanted to live even if I was paralyzed. For me to lose a life for that isn’t worth it.”

Mitrani recently bought a home in California and will be spending a lot of time there over the coming year. It will be eight months to a year before he can do even modest physical therapy. He has been told to expect a full recovery, but whether that means a return to snowboarding, competitively or otherwise, remains to be seen.

“I’ve never been still for this long,” he said. “I’ll be doing a lot of thinking.”

He sounded relieved.