大象传媒

The chain of events which lead to Jordy being incapable of fear began in the late ‘90s. Jordy was an up-and-coming presenter and warm-up man - working for GMTV and Fox Kids - when his body started to change abruptly.

He gained a lot of weight very quickly but only to his face, chest and stomach, and began sweating profusely and constantly.

“When my daughter was born I couldn’t hold her - my body would produce overwhelming amounts of perspiration, we’d both be soaked with sweat” he said.

The TV work stopped coming and Jordy was advised to try dieting and exercise, all the time getting more and more ill. In 2005, a new GP recognised something was very wrong and diagnosed Jordy with Cushing’s Syndrome, an extremely rare disease caused by the overproduction of cortisol.

A string of operations followed: his pituitary gland was removed, then his adrenals. Neither worked, and one procedure resulted in cranial fluid leaking out of his nose, then later a coma and a brush with death.

“They said I died on the operating table for eight to nine seconds.” Finally, a successful operation removed all his adrenal glands: “the left-side of my body was cut open, one of my ribs removed and they went in through my lungs and cut off the remaining piece of adrenal.”

Cushing's disease went into retreat. Jordy began to lose weight and his health returned to normal - but something else was wrong.

Jordy zip-lining

In 2012 he, his wife and his two daughters took a trip to Disneyland, where Jordy discovered on a rollercoaster that he felt…nothing at all. Not only that, he hadn’t been able to feel excited for the trip.

“The kids were all jumping around, but to me, it felt like a normal day. It was just like, I was going to go to work. There was just no change in my emotion. It was flatlined.”

When he returned home, Jordy began testing the theory with daring stunts for charity - the first was to zip-wire from the top of the Tyne Bridge (84-feet above the water) across to the Gateshead side.

As he sat connected to the zip-line with his legs dangling from the bridge into thin air, he felt no reaction.

Two months later, Jordy boarded a small plane filled with other parachutists ready to tandem skydive from 17,000 feet.

As the doors opened, he sat on the ledge, before dropping out of the plane feeling entirely calm.

But how do you make the medical community believe you are fearless?

Jordy joined forces with Dr Garfinkel, a specialist in fear and emotions at the University of Sussex, for 大象传媒 documentary The World’s Most Extraordinary People.

Dr Garfinkel monitored Jordy's responses throughout the investigation with electrodes and heart monitors, sending Jordy down a 400-foot tower - there was zero medical response.

Now Jordy says he’s sick of people questioning him: “I don’t know how many times I can prove it. I’ve been asked to cross roads with cars coming towards me to see who stops first - me or the cars.”

Jordy thinks it’s negatively affected his career as a TV and radio presenter. “I think that's my downfall now, because I don't have that fear sometimes, I don't put my brain into gear. If you don't have a bit of nerves you lose that edge.”

Jordy also discovered that losing your fear means losing the instincts that keep you safe day to day. “I'm literally exhausted from doing it. When I'm driving in the car with my kids, I physically think all the time, ‘slow down now, you're not going to get across that roundabout, slow down now, cause you’re coming up to a red light’ and it wears you out.”

But he wouldn’t go back. Jordy says before the operations that took his fear, it was a huge part of his life. “I suffered greatly from fear. I grew up in children's homes. There was lots of bullying. I got a bit of an obsession with not wanting to die, even as an adult I would lie awake, afraid of dying”.

He told Nicky Campbell “I wouldn't want to be like you anymore. Because I would have to go back to those old feelings of fear again, which did control my life.”