Dr. Jared Bentley is used to patients saying they need to recover in time for a special event. So, when a patient told him she needed to recover from her knee replacement in three months, he thought she might be attending a wedding. Her plans, however, were a little less down to Earth.

“She said, ‘I want to go skydiving.’”

At 91-years-old, Joan Gilles wasn’t the average first-time skydiver. And Dr. Bentley, it turned out, wasn’t the average orthopedic surgeon, because his immediate reaction was to say he’d go too.

“I said, if you schedule to go skydiving, I’ll go with you,” he recalled. Three months later, they were together in a plane: a 91-year-old woman with a newly replaced knee, and her surgeon who admits he “doesn’t love heights.”

The plane itself was small enough that Dr. Bentley could have reached out and touched opposite sides. The process of jumping from the plane actually required them to first climb out onto the landing gear.

“You climbed out on the landing gear. The most surreal part was, my feet were standing on the landing gear and I’m looking down 12,000 feet,” Dr. Bentley said. Even though he’d spent the last few months preparing for the jump, he still felt anxious when the day finally came. It’s an experience that he likened to how patients feel when preparing for procedures he might consider routine.

“I was kind of drawing similarities,” he said. “I was anxious and thinking, I bet patients are like this before big surgeries all the time. They’re giving up their control to someone with more experience with trust… I’ll do five to ten surgeries in a day and I bet some of those people are at least as anxious as I was.”

As anxious as he was standing on that landing gear, he felt differently once he made the leap. In fact, he didn’t feel like he was falling at all. He felt like he was flying.

“It was amazing,” he said. “It was a huge rush.”

It’s something he says he would do again. It also illustrates something he says he tries to teach his children: that sometimes it’s good to embrace things that make you uncomfortable. Especially when it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this.

Even the fact that Joan had recovered well enough after three months to jump out of a plane at 12,000 feet is remarkable by itself.

“A lot of people are doing pretty well at three months, but she originally came in on a walker,” he said. “Just to say she could walk out to the plane, get in there, hunker up, then jump out at 91 year’s old is amazing.”