In June 2012, I was diagnosed with meningitis.  As a result, my spinal cord was damaged at the T4 level.  Even though it was an "incomplete" injury, I was not guaranteed to walk again.  However, the thought was that I would spend about a year in a wheelchair, and perhaps in two years, I would walk "well enough."  Officially, the cause of the spinal cord damage is unknown.  The doctors' best guess is that the virus that caused the meningitis caused the damage to the spinal cord.  However, one of the alternate theories is an auto-immune condition called transverse myelitis.  The issues I experienced are very similar to those who are diagnosed with transverse myelitis.  So, even if a virus caused the damage to the spinal cord, the issues that manifested were very similar to transverse myelitis.

With transverse myelitis, the prognosis for a near-full to full recovery is about 33%. Although I still experience some issues, after two years, I feel like I've had a near-full recovery, and I feel that I am still recovering.  For this I feel grateful.  Another reason I feel grateful is the speed at which I recovered the use of my legs.  Instead of a year in a wheelchair, I spent only four months. By six months, I was walking with the aid of a quad cane, and by 15 months, I was walking pretty much without any walking aid. It's been 27 months now, and I haven't used the cane in so long, I am considering putting away the cane for good.

I ended up writing a book about my recovery, Toe Up to 10K: A Journey of Recovery from Spinal Cord Injury.  This book won the Gold Medal in the 2015 Readers' Favorite Book Awards in the category: non-fiction inspirational and reached bestseller status on Amazon in the sub-category, spinal cord injury books. 

I maintain a blog on blogspot with the same title, and all my posts are imported to my homepage, but along with postings from my other blogs (though spinal cord recovery posts currently make up about 90% of my blog posts), so to view the posts for this blog only, click here to open it in a new window

I would never what to go through this experience again, but if there is a silver lining, it's given me the opportunity to inspire and motivate people by sharing my story of recovery, and sparked enough interest in me, when I come across them, to share stories of others who have overcome obstacles, not just spinal cord injuries. 

Here is the list of links to purchase the book:

Buy ebook here from Amazon

Buy eBook from Kobo

Buy eBook from Barnes and Noble - or you can buy the paperback, here, too.

Or, if you'd like to buy the paperback from Amazon:

Buy paperback from Amazon
Read a great review of this book at Book Viral. BookViral

cover for Toe Up to 10K

I moved the videos to the Spinal Cord Injury Page under My Interests

Meanwhile I will fill up this space with news about the book.  

Author Interviews

A Book and a Cup of Coffee

Beth's Book Reviews