Chances are the name Arunima Sinha won’t mean much to you, but she has made quite a few achievements since she was born on this planet 33 years ago.
Not only is Sinha a seven time national Indian volleyball player in her home country of India, she is also the world’s first female amputee to climb Mount Everest, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Elbrus, Mount Kosciuszko, Mount Aconcagua, Mount Denali and Mount Vinson.
In case you have lost count, that’s seven, yes SEVEN, mountains for a young woman who suffered a life changing moment after being pushed off a train by robbers in 2011 while she was trying to resist them.
Flung to the ground from the moving carriage, Sinha suffered multiple fractures of the spinal cord and agonising pain as rods were skewered into her left leg.
After numerous operations she took on the challenge to climb all the continent’s highest peaks, a conquest she completed on 1 January 2019 when Sinha reached the summit of Mount Vinson in Antarctica.
Born in Akbarpur, Ambedkar Nagar, Sinha had a love of playing football, but her passion was on the volleyball court.
Her sights on joining the paramilitary forces were looking promising after she received a letter from the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) asking Sinha if she would board a train to Delhi to attend a meeting.
But she never met the team, on the journey thugs tried to steal her handbag, Sinha fought back. In the brawl she was thrown out the carriage onto the track where she lay motionless, unable to move after suffering life changing injuries.
A train from the opposite direction was travelling too fast to stop, its wheels ran over her leg and Sinha was rushed to hospital where doctors had no choice but to perform an amputation to save her life.
Lying in her hospital bed in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Sinha vowed to climb Mount Everest, she was determined not to allow her new formed disability to take over her life.
After being discharged she signed up to a basic mountaineering course from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, Uttarkashi.
Learning the skills Sinha went on to climb Mount Everest with a prosthetic leg on 21 May 2013 reaching the summit at 10.55am becoming the first female amputee to scale the world’s highest mountain after 52 gruelling days.
[ Mount Everest is over 60 million years old and a massive 8848 metres tall ]
