Back in my military days I was a very proficient skydiver both on and off duty (What can I say? That adrenaline rush is addictive.) And so at some point we all hear about the freak accidents of people surviving impossibly fatal falls. Like:
1. The Army does their static line parachute training at Fort Benning, Ga. One night a suicidal trainee climbed one of the 250-foot-tall parachute training towers intent on jumping. A drill sergeant went up to talk him down, but the trainee went over and took the sergeant with him. The trainee didn't survive, but the drill sergeant, having been full trained on parachute emergency procedures (including the Parachute Landing Fall (PLF) which teaches parachutists how to distribute the force of a hard landing over the entire body to minimize trauma) survived because he PLF'd by habit. He was severely injured, but he survived.
2. There was a flight attendant whose plane was bombed while in flight. She was the only survivor, having lived through a fall around twice as high as most skydivers make.
There were more, but you get the point.
Also, having experienced groundrush (or the sense of the ground rushing up at you) countless times, it's the reason for the adrenaline rush. Your brain really can't properly process height when you're at 13,000 feet but when you get down to about 2,000, your brain becomes acutely aware of the ground rushing up at you, and it's not a sensation I would want to have without a way to stop it.
I wouldn't consider jumping. Too much chance of failure, and you don't know misery until you survive a fall. A good friend of mine survived a fall and laid in the hospital for nearly a year while they slowly amputated parts off the man until finally he went into toxic shock and died. It was horrible to watch; I can't imagine his agony.
