After years of doing quite strenuous, dynamic suspensions in hip harnesses, I was getting quite cocky… even starting to think that my lower limbs were impervious to nerve damage. Of course, once I started thinking that, the leash of reality came and yanked me back!

This injury happened when I was doing a self-suspension at home, with my partner Stefanos spotting me. I’d gone through quite a variety of different ties over the course of close to 2 hours (including floorwork). At the time, I had been doing a lot of self tying, as I was practicing for one of my first formal self-suspension performances. I was often self-suspending 3-4 times a week for up to a couple hours at a time. There is a lot of evidence that nerve damage is cumulative (it builds up over time, so what seemed like a one-shot fluke injury may instead have simply been the “straw that broke the camel’s back), and I think that was likely a factor in this incident.

I was up in a version of a swiss seat harness—one that I've probably done on myself over 100 times. I tie it in one wrap with a doubled piece of 8mm nylon. I was probably up in it for 15 minutes or so, moving around a lot. I tried to go into this position: