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Marina Kostina shouldn’t have survived.
A persuasive friend convinced the Chicago-based clinical hypnotherapist to go skydiving on Father’s Day in 2022. When she decided to make the leap from 13,500 feet, Kostina, a Moscow native, had been struggling with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the rocky aftermath of a failed marriage. She also wanted to honor her father, who had passed away five years earlier, with the daredevil feat.
Since she was a novice, Kostina, then 49, performed a tandem jump while attached to an instructor at Skydive Midwest in Sturtevant, Wisconsin.
The duo’s parachute deployed, but 20 or 30 feet from the ground, they lost control and crashed.
Kostina broke dozens of bones and had ghastly wounds to her face.
“I couldn’t move, I couldn’t walk … I was between death and life for three and a half days,” she told The Post. “I had 42 [broken bones] in my face and 10 in various places throughout my body: two vertebrae, ribs, hip and my left arm.”
She chronicles the terrible accident and her ongoing recovery in the new book, “52 Pieces: A Manual of Light to Survive the Abyss of Trauma” (Primedia eLaunch LLC).
When Kostina regained consciousness after four days, she was extremely disoriented.
“I opened my eyes and felt unexpected heaviness in my lower body,” she writes. “I tried to stretch my legs but I could not. I looked down and saw gigantic limbs that were three times bigger than their usual size … At that moment I realized that I could not move.”
Meanwhile, doctors divulged stomach-churning details of her injuries, saying her “eye ended up by [her] ear” while her bones broke like “eggshells,” she said.
After a month in the hospital — and multiple reconstructive surgeries, including a six-hour abdominal abscess procedure — Kostina was discharged. But her recovery was only just beginning.
She required several more surgeries and soon found herself battling demons – like PTSD, depression and severe anxiety — that she’d worked with patients on at Chicago’s Ravenous 4 Life healing center, which she launched in 2019.
“I experienced horrifying attacks of claustrophobia that forced me to run outside to the street,” Kostina writes. “I felt trapped in my body and needed to escape. There were times when, for hours, nothing would help me – no fan’s breeze on my face, no open windows, no wind outside.”
Kostina utilized some of the tools she learned while teaching yoga classes to quicken her healing process, including self-hypnosis meditation sessions and visual techniques.
“My eye ended up by my ear, my nose was completely smashed and moved to the side of my cheek, my lips were torn and my bones broke as if they were eggshells.”
Marina Kostina, on her extensive injuries“Find a window in your room and and imagine your desired outcome in its place,” Kostina urges readers. “Really use your imagination and project it there as you feel, touch, hear, see and smell it in your mind.”
Other skills Kostina relied upon included the “rubber suit” visualization, which can shun negative influences by conjuring images of a thick protective costume to block harmful projections or bad news from relatives, friends or doctors.
Victims of severe trauma should also relish their “hermit time” as they recover, according to Kostina, who used her newfound solitude to study Indian philosopher Osho, as well to cook, complete online courses and study two languages (Italian and French).
“Connect with a pet, learn something new, exercise your mind,” she writes. “Doing these things will help you clarify who you want to be after this is over. And it will be over. Your suffering will end and you will create a more powerful you. I promise you this.”
But despite all she learned, it was a “severely lonely” journey, she said.
“Even though I have a great support system in my life – great family, great friends – nobody understands what you’re going through. Thank God I am in this profession, where I could reach out to my colleagues.”
In November, Kostina is set to have her 11th surgery since the accident. Doctors are working to refine and beautify her nose, which was “completely destroyed” in the crash and refashioned using fragments from her head, rib and ear.
She hopes her survival story inspires others.
““To show people that in one year — the longest year of my life — I could overcome that, they can overcome anything,” she said. “If I can do it, you can do it — and here are the tools for you.”
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