Get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” Sir Raymond Priestly, Antarctic Explorer and Geologist.

For the first two weeks in April, I sat in a classroom in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I was part of a group of 65 Young Global Leaders from around the world. The 10 days were a mind-blowing experience, with the pinnacle for me being Dutch Leonard’s classes on “Leading Through Crisis”. For an entire afternoon, we discussed leadership failures and successes against a backdrop of extremes. We started with the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, through the 2010 Chilean mining rescue, the BP oil spill in The Gulf of Mexico and we spent an entire morning on the Shackleton expedition of 1914 – 1916.

Check out an article about Mark during his Harvard stay in the Boston Globe.

First, I had an overwhelming desire to cheer out loud when I read Sir Raymond Priestly’s quote. Then I realised for the first time that my specialist subject is actually a formal academic area of study. What I have experienced in the aftermath of blindness and paralysis and by racing in the world’s most extreme environments, was what Dutch Leonard was teaching us about.

For me, the most interesting strand of our discussions was a debate about the effectiveness of hierarchical command structures compared with flatter collaborative approaches. Dutch’s conclusion is that in most situations, with predictable problems, a hierarchical command structure is very, very effective. But, in unpredictable circumstances, this kind of structure can be inadequate. It often fails. Leading through a crisis, any crisis – man-made or natural disaster, requires decisions to be made in a world of imperfect knowledge and uncertain results. It requires the strengths we saw in Shackleton’s crew – the ability to try something, fail and immediately try something else.

Since I got back from Harvard, I’ve been considering how this applies to spinal cord injuries. It seems to me that the formal medical structure is the best at keeping people who break their necks or their backs alive, for stabilising the bones in their backs, for teaching those people how to inhabit the world again. They can predict with amazing accuracy the physical and mental progression of a young man or woman suddenly paralysed and needing to get out of bed, into a wheelchair and back to living life. They are also good at helping people who aren’t completely paralysed to make the most of the function they have left.

The formal medical structure is vital. Without it I would be dead. Without it I wouldn’t be back at work, back living a life. Without my wheelchair, I couldn’t get around. This work is nothing short of a miracle. The formal medical structure has made standard, that miracle of surviving spinal cord injury and re-integrating into society.

But the amazing success of the formal medical structure is also its failing. Its success with the now predictable problem of keeping people alive, getting them into their wheelchairs and back to living is also its greatest failing, when it comes to solving the un-predictable problem of a cure for the paralysed. The structure itself constrains intellectual collaboration and translation of breakthrough science into clinical studies and then into actual therapies.

I finally found the words in Harvard to explain what I was seeing in my research and my life. We need hierarchy and structure for life’s predictable problems. But we need the glorious chaos of global collaborations and a fanatical, fantastical desire to solve the things the human brain can’t yet comprehend. In my case, it is the regeneration or rehabilitation of the damaged spinal cord. Finding a cure for spinal cord injury is not a predictable problem. It is a human crisis and it requires collaboration across geographical, organisational and intellectual boundaries.

It was a privilege to learn what I learnt at Harvard. I now need to take it and do something with it. We are in the midst of a crisis and in the spirit of Shackleton, we must find a way to move forward, despite the excruciatingly slow progress and seemingly unbeatable odds. It is time for collaboration to sprout out of and around the formal medical hierarchies. We’re on a mission now.

Exploring the frontiers of recovery from Spinal Cord Injury

In 2010 a fall from a second story window nearly killed me. I broke my back and the damage to my spinal cord left me paralysed from the waist down. From the moment I hit the ground, I joined a global community of people that according to the experts, have no hope of recovery from complete spinal cord injury. But what if the experts are wrong?

Only 60 years ago, patients with a spinal cord injury had an 80% chance of being dead within a year. The 20% who survived were likely to be institutionalised. But in 1940s in England, Doctor Guttman wasn’t prepared to accept the status quo, and he founded the first spinal unit in the world at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. His work transformed spinal cord injury from a death sentence to a manageable injury with near normal life expectancy.

So why not a dramatic change in prognosis now from ‘no chance of further recovery’ to ‘some functional recovery’ in the next 60 years? The answer I suspect lies somewhere in the misplaced fear of offering false hope.

As I lay in the spinal unit that Guttman created navigating the psychological chasm between acceptance and hope, I was presented with an expert view from one of the senior medical team that hoping for recovery was proven to be psycologically damaging.

I simply don’t agree with that analysis. I understand that hoping for a cure without first facing up to the reality of paralysis might lead to an avoidance of learning the physical and psychological skills to live life as a wheelchair user. I have accepted the wheelchair. It is almost impossible not to.

Yet acceptance without hope runs contarary to my experience of dealing with blindness 12 years earlier, and subsequently racing to the South Pole. And I believe it stifles our ambition to progress. So, I also hope for another life. A life where there is a cure for spinal cord injuries. And in the spirit of Guttman, I am challenging today’s conventional wisdom in an effort to turn that hope into a reality for me, the global community of spinal cord injured people with no hope, and the ones who will join us in the future.

To this end, I am exploring the possibilities of recovery using my own body as a research subject, as I train for 2 to 3 hours daily. There are a growing number of therapies, technologies and products that sit outside the traditional acute and rehabilitation system and I am using many of them to test their effects. I am following an aggressive physical therapy programme, cycling on a functional stimulation bike and walking in an Ekso Bionics robotic suit.

Also, with the help of many thousands of supporters, I have been in a position to fly to different countries to test some of what is available around the world. But others are not in a position to do so and almost none of the advanced therapies and technologies that I use daily are available in mainstream medical facilities. So, I am making my body available for research and capturing the data with the aim of mainstreaming what is currently on the fringes.

The cure for spinal cord injury simply requires enough of the right people having the will to make it happen. Even if I do not walk again I believe others will, if enough of us explore the gap between reality and fantasy in pursuit of a cure. It is time to disregard the impossible. If not us, who? If not now, when?

This blog also appears in the US based Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-pollock/spinal-cord-injury-recovery_b_2875485.html

A year in robotic legs – starting the analysis

This time last year I took my first few faltering steps in a revolutionary new set of robotic legs from ekso bionics.

I wrote a blog the day after that first experience and said: “I was scared. Not of the walking or chances of falling. Rather I was scared that my blindness would stop me from being part of something that I believe is one of my best chances of walking again.”

Twleve months on, the blindness and paralysis remain but the fear has gone. Today, I completed 2196 steps in 60 minutes. And the encouraging thing is that I’m disappointed that I didn’t make it to 2,200 steps. I’m not scared anymore, just keen to continue exploring the boundaries of what is possible.

My South Pole team-mate, Simon, is now my lead trainer and we are setting and beating our goals. I’m walking faster and further in less and less time. It feels easier and I hope it looks more like normal walking.

You be the judge – here’s the most recent video of me walking.

We’re making progress and as part of my training we’re recording everything that I do during each session. The machine captures data – the number of steps, walk time, stand time, the temperature of motors at my hips and knees – which is transfered back to the factory in San Francisco in real time via a wireless connection. The physio from ekso bionics europe travels to visit us to carry out a series of standard tests each month.

All of this is designed to improve the system and understand the impact that walking has on the body and mind of a paralysed person. From a personal perspective I’ve noticed two big positives with ekso. I just feel better every time i walk and that psychological lift is positive in itself. Physically there is a clear impact. After each session the small spasms that I get in my legs disappear and the dull pain in my back lifts.

In short, I feel both mentally and physically better after walking every time. I now need a few scientists to tell me what is happening inside my body. Anyone interested?!

A healthy disregard for the impossible

It’s 4 am. I’ve been woken by words and images turning like a storm in my mind. Despite emerging from different sources they all map the same path; they all eventually point to the same place: ”…don’t respect the gap between reality and fantasy…”, “…the wound is where the light enters you…”, …optimism is our most powerful weapon…”, “…we all have the innate ability to invent and solve problems…”

I have been ignited by the past few days and I now want to tie down these thoughts and put them on this page for you. This is because none of this, none of this would have happened without you. None of this would have happened without your ambition for me and my paralysed body.

I was invited to speak at a gathering in London of the world’s greatest innovators in science, music, art, medicine, design, social justice. I was invited because I could talk about how paralysis has affected me and how now I can walk in Ekso Bionics robotic legs. The same robotic legs that you helped me to get.

For 18 months I was in hospital with a broken back, and a broken life. As the 12-week marker passed and the feeling and movement in my legs didn’t return, recovery became impossible. But, there were people out in the world that were ambitious for me. They did not care about the conventional wisdom. They were not respecting the gap between reality and fantasy. Those friends launched the Run In The Dark - (www.runinthedark.org) raising funds and hope.

That gathering in London was 48 hours in the creators’ corridors; Wired 2012. I heard people discuss real life solutions to challenges that were insurmountable when they first looked at them. Creative people dismantling the impossible in design, science, music and art. Scientists and inventors who are redefining human capabilities and artificial intelligence. Social activists and neuroscientists who are fighting to preserve human dignity around the world. They all had a healthy disregard for the impossible. All of them. And this is why I am awake at 4 am.

And now, as the first individual in the world to have access to an Ekso on a daily basis, I’m starting to explore the impact that walking has on my health and on my paralysed body. I will be tracking the research and sharing that so maybe what I learn will improve the health of other spinal cord injured people.

So that I can get to the gym and walk and train every day, Run in the Dark is back. Dynamite Piers White in the Mark Pollock Trust has gathered an incredible group of people in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, London and New York. They are all making it happen this year. Formal members of the committees. Informal members of the team. People whoare selling, promoting and entering the events. And people who will be marshaling, organizing and running logistics on the night.

To register or to volunteer to help with the run on the 14th of November 2012, please go to - www.runinthedark.org.

For all of you who are with me making an ambition a reality please know that you kept me going through the dark days when I thought I couldn’t, and that you are now helping me to dismantle impossible. I can never thank you enough.

Click here to read piece by Markham Nolan in Metro UK

Click here to read about Mark’s appearance at Wired 2012, with another article on the same appearance appearing on The Next Web

Your Ambition Creates The Future

750 people gathered in Queens University. Half of them were there to receive their degrees and half were there in proud support. Queens asked me to speak to the graduating class of the School of Biomedical Sciences, Nursing and Midwifery prior to the conferment of their degrees, after which I would receive a Queens honorary doctorate.

 

Graduation day was the 4^th of July 2012; the week saw the 2^nd anniversary of a fall that broke my back. I was reflecting on the early days in intensive care and, more particularly, on the people, including some of you who read this blog, who were ambitious about my prospects of recovery. For the students in The Great Hall in Queens, I suppose, I wanted to plead for ambition for them, for their subject and for the people whose lives they will save and whose dignity they will restore in the future. Who knows, some of them might just be part of the pioneering science of cure discovery? And so I finished my speech with: “Be brave, be different and be ambitious”.

 

In the 1940s, Papa Guttmann, a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi Europe was ambitious for the prospects of people with spinal cord injury. He found himself working in a small hospital in England….. A spinal cord injury was a terminal disease. Victims lay in bed for a few months, developed pressure sores and died through infection. Guttmann’s pioneering work resulted in the establishment of the first spinal unit in the world at that hospital in Stoke Mandeville, the hospital where 60 years later I had my spine patched with metal rods and screws. And in 1948, driven by a belief that physical exercise would benefit people with spinal cord injuries, he started what we now know as the Paralympic Games.

 

Now, life expectancy is at comparable rates with the average population. At the London 2012 Paralympic Games the athletes are branded Superhuman. It is now over half a century from a spinal cord injury being terminal to being manageable. Now I see new pockets of ambition around the world. For example, the people in Ekso Bionics. Only last week I walked 8,000 steps over 4 days in the Ekso Bionics’ robotic legs. To see me walking in Ekso, go to www.markpollock.tv

 

The Paralympians from around the world are rewriting the record books, as Guttmann rewrote the rules. And so too can we. Be brave, be different and always, always be ambitious.

 

Any thoughts on ambition? Any resources for us on rewriting the rules? Ted Talks, your own work or your own story – I would love to hear from you.

A Growing Desire For Adventure

No traffic, no meetings and no rush. It is a place where the wild rainy weather we are having is described as a ‘soft day’. There is time out here. Time to think. And it seems, time to get excited about life’s incredible possibilities.

Since my accident, and the paralysis, I’ve been busy trying to accept the day to day realities of life in a wheelchair. The effect on me personally is, in a sense, easy to imagine. But this injury has also hit Simone in a way that I suspect I don’t truly understand yet. I am not sure if I can acknowledge the pain my accident has given my family and friends. It has taken such a long time to deal with the initial phase of this life expedition.

I just read Jessica Salter’s article int oday’s Daily Telegraph Magazine. ; I first met Jessica in 2008 when I was in London at the launch of the South Pole Race. At the time she worked in The Telegraph Online, which covered our part in the race. Recently I spoke to Jessica at length about the accident and ensuing difficult times. Reading her article has fanned the flames of my desire to get back into the adventure arena. It has made me conscious of the importance of actively deciding how we fill our lives. (The article)

The article reminds me of how important the South Pole experience was. Of putting myself in an environment where I risked failure, where I had to push beyond my expectations of what is possible in order to succeed.

Ross Whitaker has just released our documentary about The South Pole Race, called “Blind Man Walking”, which is available on Amazon

And my point? Since this accident, I have had no desire for adventure. I suspect my mind has been cluttered with the drive to survive. But, in the last few weeks it has been full of memories. I’ve been in deserts, inside the Arctic Circle, and on angry seas. A collection of memories that I didn’t see with my eyes, but experienced through adventure. I’m feeling that I need to step outside the routine of my life to focus on the simple day to day of an expedition.

I have lots of work to do to simply survive this. I have lots of work to do to try to walk again. But the perspective that expeditions bring to life might just be what I need.

Let me know if you have any adventures planned? Or better still if you are in the middle of one now.

External Robotics & Internal Biology

I stood, I walked and I did it in a robotic exoskeleton. This is no miracle and it is not the end of the story. But it is the first iteration of a device that some day very soon might offer an alternative to a wheelchair. My experience is that Ekso can’t go up stairs and it isn’t for outside use yet. But it is close and it looks like there are enough people prepared to challenge conventional wisdom to make it happen.

Now, I’m in Carlsbad just north of San Diego. I’m back at project Walk (www.projectwalk.org), one year after my first visit, to continue my ongoing exercise based recovery experiment. In short, I am using patterns of exercise to try to stimulate my nervous system to open different pathways around my damaged spinal cord. The ultimate aim is that I will reconnect my brain and paralysed muscles. And, on first assessment I’m stronger than the last time I was here in Project Walk.  

There is no doubt that this has been an inspiring week for me and there is hope in the future that I might walk again. But life isn’t about the future. It is about experiencing life as it happens. As the days roll by in America and my mind races with what might be in the future, I’m in danger of missing the experience of life outside spinal cord injury. So, time to relax Californian style as the weekend hits.

If you’ve any thoughts about balancing acceptance of now whilst keeping hope alive for a better future please leave a comment!