“South Pole Simon” O’Donnell, my trainer and one of my team mates from the South Pole Race 2009, trained with me at Project Walk in California. Now he is training me back home and helping me to push the boundaries of what my paralysed limbs can or can’t do.

Before the South Pole Race we had training videos of sprinting whilst dragging tires behind us and doing hand stand press ups. The sort of stuff that we could brag about. But now it’s about learning how to crawl and I’d imagine the video doesn’t look so good.

My hope is that this type of aggressive physical therapy programme will produce some improvement in my paralysed legs. At best the prize for the current indignity could be walking. And at worst, it will keep me fit and ready for any medical interventions that appear in the years ahead.

Today, I tested a device called a Brainport. It allows blind people to perceive objects using a camera mounted on glasses which sends the image to an electrode held on the tongue. The tongue receives the pixels of the image as current which the brain sends to the visual cortex to decipher.

Still at the research stage of the development, today I took part in a trial of the device which is about to be put forward for FDA approval and hopefully commercial availability. It wasn’t like normal seeing, but it was similar to the alternative sense of vision that I get from touching things.

The difference is I could see a letter on a card that I couldn’t feel with my hands. I’m in the U.S. at the moment taking part in an intensive physical therapy program at Project Walk in southern California to try and regain feeling and movement in my paralysed legs.

This program and the Brainport use the principles known as neuroplasticity – that the brain and the nervous system is plastic, that it can adapt and re-learn new ways to behave after such catastrophic injurie. Five weeks in america and I’m leaving with hope for both my vision and chances of getting out of my wheelchair eventually. Exciting!

The theory is that if i want to get any feeling or movement back in my legs then I better try and use them. The video captures my first walking simulation held up in a harness, on a tredmill and with three trainers.

I can’t walk or stand and the video shouldn’t be misunderstood. I am exercising with massive amounts of assistance not walking on my own. However, this is the start of a long experiment to promote changes in my nervous system that will allow me to walk at best and keep fit at worst.

Either result isn’t bad!

Apart from the usual blog articles, Simone and I are experimenting with video and audio during the next month at Project Walk. The following link  is our first video taken on an Iphone and uploaded directly to YouTube. I’ll try to get some audio podcasts up here also when I work out how to use AudioBoo on my Ipad.

I haven’t written a blog since the 14th of October because I didn’t know what to say. I thought things were getting better. I thought the infections were behind me and I could just get on with rehab.

But as the tide of positivity was rising, I was hit with another infection. And then another. And another. IV drips, fluids, antibiotics, fevers, vomiting and a couple of weeks in bed each time. I had lost three stone and with it the will to go on. It was too exhausting to experience, never mind to write about.

Often I couldn’t even bring myself to explain to my family what was going on. Shortly before I was due for some rehab leave I had a couple of procedures to try and sort out the cause of the repeat infections, which were followed by sudden chest pain. I was diagnosed with a swollen heart lining and blood clots on my lungs. This was subsequently corrected – a misdiagnosis. Oh, and nearly forgot about the painful lump that appeared just under a scar on the back of my head where I fractured my skull in the fall.

The last six months have been truly torturous and until now I have been unable or unwilling to look to the future. I spent twelve years filling my life with experiences that would sweep the blindness to the side. And I know if I don’t do the same with this paralysis then it will dominate me.

It is time to give myself a reason to push on. A dream, a goal and a plan. It took a decade to find something to finally deal with the demons of
blindness. 43 days in Antarctica and a race to the South Pole did it for me that time.

This day two years ago I remember sitting in our tent on the Polar plateau in blizzard conditions. Simone had downloaded a poem onto my iPod: ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. Different lines meant different things to me on the way to the South Pole. Now I am drawing from it again as I look to the future.

I’m not sure what my next South Pole will be to beat my paralysis, but the search has started and a life of sitting in my house with periodic visits from a carer is not an option.

(Go to this link for the poem on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpcNFll5yOM)

If By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

As usual, Simone was due to arrive at 8:30 a.m. to make me breakfast and to
bring it to me in bed. The routine for months now has been for Simone or my
family to arrive and find me sick, flat on my back in the bed and drowsy or
distressed. For nearly three months I didn’t, couldn’t, even sit up enough
to feed myself. But as Simone was preparing for the usual breakfast routine
on Monday, I was getting ready to change it.

An hour before her arrival I managed to find a banana from my stash on the
sliding table beside my bed. I then had the daily wash in bed with much less
help from a nurse as I began to do more and more for myself. And finally, I
put in a forty minute effort to dress myself in bed after the nurse set my
kit beside me. I was ready.

I wanted to be sitting up, dressed and ready to get up when Simone arrived.
And I was. Sitting propped up on the hospital bed smiling like a fool. As I
write this it seems, yet again, farcical to get excited about getting washed
and dressed. But I was excited, very excited. I suspect it is because this
represents a glimmer of independence and I know this is the Holy Grail for
me. It was when I went blind and it will be now that I am paralyzed.

The smile as I sat up in bed was only a by-product of my morning plans.
During my early morning thinking time I reviewed my timetable for the day: –
physiotherapy 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., patient education from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. It
seemed a waste of time to lie in bed all morning again. I decided to get up
and try to get a slot on one of the passive leg-bikes in the gym (a bike
that pedals for you to keep your joints and circulation moving.) A voluntary
extra session has not been part of my thinking under any circumstances up
until now. But a combination of the infection abating, a return of my
appetite and an unexpected bit of rehab progress over the weekend when I
transferred myself from wheelchair to bed for the first time all conspired
to produce a rush of confidence and resulting motivation. I also have to add
that meeting another patient, a young guy called Jamie whose grit and great
spirit never fails to inspire me, at the gym sneaking in extra sessions
tipped me to do it.

Simone positioned my wheelchair beside the bed and I slid across a thin
wooden board between the bed and chair. It was early and I knew that even if
other patients were booked to use the leg-bikes there was a strong
possibility that at least one person would be sick and not make it or simply
decide it was too early to get out of bed. I was in luck, all the bikes were
free and as I sat in my wheelchair the physiotherapist strapped my feet to
the pedals and turned it on. I did forty minutes of involuntary movement as
the machine cycled my legs for me. I don’t feel them moving as I sit there,
but it helps move blood through the limbs and maybe, who knows, it might
remind my spine and brain that I still have legs! I had a tough
physiotherapy session at the planned time later that day and went to bed
tired and sore. But this is where I want to be. This is where I am
concentrating my effort now – getting fit and strong and putting myself in
the best possible position to gain or train function and feeling back below
my belly button.
]]> http://markpollock.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/up-dressed-and-smiling-again/feed/ 44 markpollock http://markpollock.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/emerging-from-hell/ http://markpollock.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/emerging-from-hell/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:54:05 +0000 Mark Pollock http://markpollock.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/emerging-from-hell/ ]]> I woke at 4 a.m. Silence has replaced the menagerie of beeps and alarms and
groans of my open-plan home for the last couple of months. I am spending my
first night in the rehab ward and the initial difference from the acute ward
is the sound. For the moment I am in a single room, away from the din of the
6 bed bay of before. In a matter of days, alongside my physical relocation,
my mind has moved to a significantly more positive place.

I wrote the above paragraph only hours after I posted my last blog, which
detailed how my fight was waning. But, after my short reprieve from
infections (enough of a reprieve for me to insist I be moved from the
acute ward), on day 1 in rehab I was exhausted… another infection was
brewing.

2 miserable weeks have now passed since the initial high of my arrival in
rehab. Again, I couldn’t eat or drink much for the duration of the new
infection. In fact, I have lost over 2 stone since I arrived here, perhaps 3
stone since the accident. Ironically, this weight loss is close to the
weight I lost in 2 months racing across Antarctica and bang on the weight I
aimed for in order to row lightweight. My weak body suffered more blood
draws, temperatures now record for me of 41 degrees (105.8 degrees in old
money), intravenous antibiotics and vomiting. My consultant asked a patient
who had suffered a series of infections like me to come and console me, to
tell me of his experience. He told me how terrible he had felt for months
and how the third infection had nearly killed his spirit altogether. Perhaps
not quite the story I needed to hear. I thought I couldn’t cope with another
set back, but in this situation there is little, in fact no, choice.
So, I am again recovering, this time slowly. The exhaustion is lifting and I
am getting back in the wheelchair. Today I even managed to make my first
hydrotherapy session in the hospital pool. Stretching, floating and even
some swimming with a physiotherapist. The session only lasted 30 minutes but
the weightlessness was liberating. I will be pushing for more hydro!

When you are going through hell, keep going, said Winston
Churchill. Someone texted me this quote during my last infection. I have
hated my hell of the last 3 months, but I am starting to think I will fight
my way out regardless of these set backs.
]]> http://markpollock.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/emerging-from-hell/feed/ 11 markpollock