I hope that this site will be of use to some of my follow spinal injury sufferers, especially people who have recently been hit with this huge shock. General Information and links to sites on a ranges of topics are provided. I am also happy to respond to specific e-mailed queries on dealing with trauma or any related topics.

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Spinal injury is usually instant and shocking, but you still only have one life

Spinal injury, the stuff of nightmares, how could it have happened to you? Well all I can suggest is pure bad luck. Don't take it personally and think about just the facts (bad and good) of where you are now, the past you can't change and the future we just don't know......

We're here for a good time, not for a long time!

The Shock......

On March 14th 2000 at 10:30am, I was skiing down the North-East side of Kitzsteinhorn Glacier in Austria, at 8,500 feet the air was clear and very cold, the sky was the kind of dark blue that you only really get at altitude. I was an experienced skier, skiing for 18 years without so much as a twisted knee, ran five miles every lunchtime and cycled from home in Portmarnock to work in Dublin City Centre and back for a couple of days each week during the summer. I was, as they say, "as fit as a fiddle".

At 10:32am, I was lying on my back, looking up at that dark blue sky with no clear memory of having had a fall except for a sense that my skis had fallen through a crust of ice into deep snow, but hey, no problem, occasional heavy falls are part and parcel of skiing! However when I tried to get up, my body wouldn't move, in fact, where was my body? I no longer had any "sense" of having a body apart from arms and shoulders. Something had gone very badly wrong.

"Luckily, two Austrians (as I found out) were skiing about 300 meters further up the run. They skied down to me when it was obvious that I was going nowhere. They had mobile phones and called for help. They knew things were serious and requested a helicopter evacuation rather than the normal paramedic on a snowmobile. I thought I was going to die. I knew I'd injured my back and I felt that there was something wrong with my breathing and I also felt some pressure building up inside me. What was happening was that I was bleeding internally, from the shards of bone damaging (luckily relatively minor) blood vessels, still, not good. Then some of my friends arrived having come back across the mountain to see where I had disappeared to. I'm sure they were horrified at the scene but they were great and managed to calm me a lot.

The helicopter arrived, I was in hospital within an hour and a quarter, underwent a five-hour operation and received 15 units of blood in the course of tidying up bone fragments and blood vessels. I was very lucky to survive. And that was it. It sounds so simple. But did I really feel lucky, to have survived?

The Reality....

"The first few weeks were horrendous,". "It's the opposite of a bad dream. When you have a bad dream, it's often about something terrible that's happened, either to you, or to somebody close to you. When you wake up, you say thank God that was just a bad dream. "Instead, I was having dreams about being on holidays in Spain, with my wife Catherine and the kids (Ian & Megan) and waking up in intensive care."

I really could not believe it. How could this have happened. I�m sure this is a common reaction when people suffer spinal injury as a result of a trauma. Whether it's a car or motorbike crash, an accident on holidays or something as simple as falling off a wall, the common factor is being as 'right as rain' one second and very seriously injured the next. The physical and mental shock is huge. What the hell does T4 to T7 complete mean? When you end up in a ward in the Mater, 'screwed' into a Stryker bed and getting turned upside down (to prevent and relieve pressure sores), you really feel that this is the end. Friends and family come to visit and have a story and a joke but you can see the pain in their eyes as they look at you and your broken body, the pain for them is huge as well. Things only started to look better after I was moved out to the NRH in Rochestown Avenue.

When I got to the hospital, I looked around that intensive care ward and I saw so many people who were in the same position or worse off than me, I just couldn't believe it. Some of them were not coping too well, but some of them were, including young people with complete and nearly complete quad injuries. After a period of darkness I said to myself:- 'If they can deal with it, I am going to try to deal with it as well'.

Looking Ahead....

At some stage, I decided that rationally there is nothing to be gained by falling into the 'black dog' of depression. My father died suddenly, in June 1986, and I went into a very deep depression, so I recognised the danger that was lurking. If you let yourself think negatively for too long you can really start heading in that direction. The mind is very powerful in both a positive and potentially negative way.

I see the actual injury as just extremely bad luck. I don't see anything deeper in it because I've seen wonderful people with similar injuries, and worse, much worse. Like one young man, who was paralysed from the neck down. A very, very nice guy in a situation that made absolutely no sense - and yet the good humour and determination from him and his family was astonishing. Trying to rationalise it is like trying to rationalise a three year old getting knocked down by an Ice Cream van. It just doesn't make any sense at all. If there is a God of sentient beings in this vast universe, I think his (or her) interest would be in how we respond to all of the good and bad events that we encounter in the course of our lives, rather than in actively "tweaking" the knobs, the Universe is a little too big and our puny planet a little too small to expect that, regardless of what the "men in frocks" might say!

I have grown to believe very strongly that what really matters, what really defines all of us, is not what actually happens to us in life, but how we respond to it. That's easier to say than to do of course, but what is the alternative?

Yes, you can get into heavy drinking or some other sort of addiction, and playing the 'what ifs' over and over in your mind, it makes perfect sense to do it, all of us do something like that for a while, a few months, a year, we all know of friends with Spinal Injuries who view life in a certain way on an ongoing basis. But that is ultimately totally useless, it achieves nothing. If you go down that route, you're devaluing yourself and you're devaluing the friends you have and the people that care about you.

The life you have is the life you have today, now, when you wake up each day. Yes of course not in the situation you would have chosen, not in a million years, but you can only play the ball where it lies. That's where you, and equally importantly, your family and friends have to get to. You can just start from now and have as much fun and achievement as you can manage in your specific situation or you stay in the corner an say 'woe is me, what did I do to deserve this?'. Both responses are totally justified and of course we all start 'in the corner' first, for at least some period of time.

Whatever you believe or don't believe everyone can agree on the certain fact that we're all heading to the same earthly destination (whether final or a temporary transit point) no matter how good or bad our 'bag of bones' are at the moment. One important insight that can result from a spinal injury is an awareness of what is really important and what is just froth and rubbish.

There is life after Spinal Injury and that life can be good if you can forget about worrying about the small stuff and think about long term goals based on what you can still achieve. Whether that means work, education or sport there are resources around the NRH to help to get you started, as well as Spinal Injuries Ireland out in the Car Park, who have been through this experience themselves and will be able to help you out once you are ready to move forward.

.............And don't forget, as a very good biker friend (luckily still walking) of mine says:- we're here for a good time, not for a long time!

The Spinal Injuries Action Association is based at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, Rochestown Road, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Ph: +353 1 2854777 or 2013717.

Holidays and House Swaps
Follow this link for information on disabled travel and house swaps.

Medical research into Spinal Injury
Follow this link for bookmarks/links on medical research on spinal injury. The fundamental message is that nobody knows if and when a method can be found to re-attatch and ennervate the spinal cord. However the general consensus is that it is a matter of when rather than if. Large sums of money are being spent with particular interest in stem cell research and electrically stimulated acupunture or 'bridging' approaches.

A site to really trust is the Christopher Reeve Paralysis foundation (CPRF). It is an excellent source of information (and hope) and their e-letter is also highly recommended. Christopher Reeve passed away October 10, 2004, with his family at his side. His great courage since his terrible accident in 1995 will always serve as an example to people everywhere about what can be achieved by people with even very severe spinal injuries.

Another recommended site is the Andy Lee website www.spinal-injury.net . It is run by Andy for exchange of information (and 'war' stories) from other spinal injury people around the world.