INSIDE EDITION spoke with the brave woman who broke her ankle on a mountain hike, but kept her spirits up by recording a video diary while her boyfriend went for help.
"This is kinda really scary."
That may be the understatement of the year by Lexi DeForest when she was alone at night in the middle of the wilderness with a severely broken ankle.
What had begun as a hike through the beautiful Wyoming mountains with a friend turned into a nightmare for DeForest when she attempted a leap over a six-foot trench. She slipped and landed on the boulders below, breaking her ankle so severely that her foot was twisted around the wrong way.
"The bone isn't really attached. It's truly something," said DeForst in a video diary.
INSIDE EDITION's Paul Boyd asked DeForest, "You must have been in shock when you saw your foot dangling off the end of your leg."
"I actually didn't believe it. I asked Eric if it was real," she said.
Her hiking companion, fellow Colorado State University student, Eric Henry, went for help and that's when DeForest, alone and terrified, began recording her remarkable video diary.
Amazingly, DeForest's diary displayed both courage and humor.
"I've made a lot of good decisions in my life. One of them probably wasn't jumping over that trench," she said in the video.
At one point she even broke into song, and there were messages to loved ones.
"A shout out to my fam. I love you guys. A shout-out to Eric, thanks for taking me on this adventure. I'm not being rude at all, this is one of the coolest views I've ever seen," she remarked in the video.
Good to his word, Henry returned with help.
She was taken down the mountain and to a hospital, where her leg was pinned together in five places. That was the end of her extraordinary video diary and also, the start of a love story.
DeForest told INSIDE EDITION, "That's pretty much when our relationship started. I saw how amazing he'd been to take care of me, to run down the mountain to find somebody to take care of me. He was my hero, and you can't help falling in love with that."
