Recovery Journey from Severe Spinal Injury

So it's like the most severe

spinal cord injury you can have.

When they told me I was paralyzed,

I told them that I wasn't paralyzed.

So my son was in Canada

and he was playing a hockey game in a hockey tournament.

He caught an edge and he flew

like face first into the boards.

There happened to be a firefighter that was there

that was able to intubate him

because he did not breathe for like eight minutes.

Saturday morning, probably at like 3 a.m.,

his accident was at 10 o'clock at night,

a neurosurgeon went in and they fused his C1 and C2,

which is at the top of your spinal cord.

So it would be like right next to your brain stem.

He had no feeling and he was considered a complete severe injury.

So they said there was no hope of recovery.

So like I had asked the doctors, you know,

the chances like 1 in 10.

They said absolutely not.

And at this point, he is vent dependent,

feeding tube dependent.

We're told he is never going to eat

or drink or be able to breathe independently.

I had a friend and she's like, hey,

I know of this thing that's supposed

to help spinal cord injuries and it helps reduce the swelling.

And I'm like, OK.

Well, maybe we can try that because

at this point, we didn't have any options.

When you have an injury this severe,

you're basically like, people are sending me Neuralink

things to like put a brain chip in.

We decided to try it topically.

We bought like a little rollerball one and

I would just rub it on his skin

because it kind of looks like a lotion ball.

Nobody thought anything of it.

I was just rubbing this DMSO on his body.

We started that on day four or five and

by day seven,

I would poke his feet or his legs

and he would open his eyes because

they have him on like propothol,

um, fentanyl, whatever kinds of drugs they put you on.

It's a lot of drugs.

So he's pretty out of it.

I mean, he was in ICU for 21 days there

and I think he thought it was three days.

So, but I would start poking him

and he would wake up or he would respond

to me poking his legs and arms.

It was probably a complete injury for.

probably 21 to 24 days.

It wasn't until we made it to the step-down ICU

that he became an incomplete injury,

and then there was a PT working with him,

and she felt his hip flexor fire.

And they're like, oh my gosh,

he went from an Asia A to an Asia C,

which usually is not supposed to happen.

You're either a severe spinal cord injury with no sensation,

nothing, like an Asia A.

You don't go from an A to a C.

From there, he was Asia C,

and I'm still rubbing this stuff on him every chance I get.

I mean, I would rub that thing

on him probably 10 times a day.

What's interesting is I was able to rub

it on his left side of his body

more than his right side.

His left side is definitely stronger.

On the right is the way his ventilator was

for probably the first six months.

So when he was hooked up to the ventilator,

I couldn't actually get the DMSO on the right side.

we're still using it.

The right side is slowly coming back.

His hand grip on this side was like one pound

probably four months ago and now it's up to 20 pounds.

He literally has every single like fine motor skill.

It's a matter of us now strengthening them.

He is 16 months out from his injury and

he hasn't used his wheelchair in three weeks now.

In October, I think the end of he

took his first steps and it was with

like a big Argyle walker and

then like in November, we moved to a platform walker.

January or February,

we moved to like a normal walker and

then just in May, we moved to the arm crutches

and now in therapy, he's working on walking without the arm crutches.

We were like ventilator dependent, medication dependent.

My son's off of most of his medications

before he was probably on like 50 or 60 medications

and now we're down to just the baclofen.

My son is one of the only people I've met

that does not have the nerve pain with his condition

so he is off of all nerve pain meds.

There's no money to be made off of it

if you have a bunch of walking quadriplegics

that are self-sufficient running around.