Josh Wood, The Walking Quadriplegic
By Jeannette Leigh (www.whatshealthy.com.au)
Kay Ledson and Josh Wood, a mother and son, are living proof that with love and commitment you can overcome even complete quadriplegia.
Josh is a handsome 29 year old man. The warmth of his smile averts your eyes from the body he has ornamented in tattoos.
His achievements go beyond science and they challenge so called evidence based medicine. Kay and Josh tapped into the profound and the laws of nature to defy the conventional wisdom of the medical profession.
In a nutshell, Josh has been an extreme sportsman since he was two years old when he began skiing. It was his calling in life, his passion and karma. Now I don.t know about you, but extreme sports would not be what I would want as the career of choice for my child. I tend towards the overprotective mother model. I thought taking the school bus was a bit edgy for my girl however Kay just wanted to raise a happy well adjusted man so she encouraged him to follow his dreams.
In June 2000, at the age of 18, with years of motor cross, BMX, skateboarding and snowboarding, and around 18 broken bones behind him, Josh attempted to jump his snowboard across one of the main roads at the Mount Buller ski resort in Victoria. He landed short of the mark on the back of his neck and destroyed C6, C7 and T1. He was paralysed from the neck down; a quadriplegic.
He was told unequivocally by the doctors who patched him up that he would never get out of bed again. (I sighted a letter written by a spinal neurosurgeon in 2007 saying that the amount of functioning neurones through the damaged part of his spinal cord was down to around 5%, and that they knew of no way to reverse it.)
When I had dinner with Josh and his mother Kay last week, he stood up and walked around the table to greet me. When I left he hugged me.
Josh describes the accident
“I was conscious and felt the whole thing. I knew I had broken my neck and told my friends not to touch me. Being in shock, I went in and out of conscious. I even joked with them for a while and then I became lethargic and less coherent. Then the convulsions started.
“It felt as if my whole body was detached from my head. I had broken three vertebrae and my head was twisted. I was in a bad state.
“The medics arrived and stabilised me, injecting me with steroids to stop the swelling and
reduce the damage. I was taken to the onsite medical centre and then flown to the Austin Hospital in Melbourne.
“After the third day they performed surgery. They cut from the front of my neck and removed
all the bone that I had destroyed in the accident. The surgeons needed to find as many fragments as they could so they didn.t penetrate my spinal cord and main arteries. Then they took bone from my hip and moulded it to rebuild my vertebrae, joining them with a titanium plate.
“My first realisation of how bad things were was when I woke up in the early morning after the surgery. I wanted to get out of bed so I called for the nurse. I was right next to the nurses. station because I was on medical alert. She came over and asked what the problem was. I said I need to get out of this bed and I wanted to know why my arms were strapped down.
“She told me I wasn.t strapped down, I was paralysed. Then the doctor came in. He had a bad
attitude. I asked what was going on. I said I had to get back to Mount Buller to make sure my friends were not too worried about me. The doctor.s response was, „I have seen your history. Finally you have done the damage you were always out to do and have broken your neck.
You will never walk again..”
“I demanded to have my mum brought in. She arrived at about 4am. I told her that there is no
way I want to live like this after what he told me; he shattered me. Three days before I was on top of the world, snowboarding and having the time of my life. Now I I was being told I would never walk again. I asked mum to help me kill myself.
“Mum said no. She said if I was meant to die I would have done so on the mountain after the accident. The best thing we can do is try to move forward and I will help you in any way possible. You have to try and stay positive.
“There was no other choice. At the time, if I could have killed myself I would have done it in a heartbeat. That was a knee jerk reaction to the doctors words, but from then on I never had
a “why me” moment.
Now here is a really extraordinary bit that sets the tone for a remarkable journey.
Kay says,
“Josh.s father and I arrived at the hospital about 6.30pm, ignorant of the extent of Josh.s
injury. We were taken to a private waiting room and at 9pm we were led into the intensive care unit. Josh was conscious with several doctors attending him. We thought the medical team were being very thorough as we had no idea what the situation was. Josh was taken for MRIs and we returned to the waiting room.
“As I sat I started getting messages from the “universe”. They were coming in with the intensity of being hit by a lump of wood. At the time I didn.t understand them. They were to massage Josh.s hands and feet, that we should never give up, and that there are people around us who can help.
“At 2am we were taken to another room where we met the duty spinal specialist, the head of the spinal rehabilitation unit. He told us that Josh was a complete quadriplegic at C6, C7 and T1 and that he doubted that he would ever get out of bed again because his spinal cord was badly crushed.
“At that moment my heart broke. It felt like a lump of concrete. The pain was unbelievable yet in my mind I could see Josh standing and laughing at me saying, “I.ll be all right Kayzee”.
“I looked the doctor in the eye and said, „You don.t know my son and you don.t know me; my son will walk again.. The doctor replied that he felt sorry for Josh because if I couldn.t
accept that he would never walk again he would have a terrible life. I have never forgotten
that.”
How Josh walked out of the hospital 4 . months later
No single method was used to return function to Josh.s broken body. It took a combination of
incredible bravery, will power, visualisation, the dedication of a chiropractor, a spiritual healer, a team of family and friends who massaged Josh.s hands and feet for hours every day, a massage therapist, and a really great mother who devised devious methods to sneak all
these practitioners into the hospital at night to work on Josh.s body.
There is a whole lot more to tell about this amazing story so stay tuned for the next blog. And between you and me, I cannot help but think – karma being what it is, that perhaps this accident happened so that Josh could help others to know their own power, because he dedicates much time helping people in similar situations; but more of that later.
Taking a nose dive
Here is one more anecdote. Some years ago, I interviewed world renowned kinesiologist Charles Krebs, who also “cured” his quadriplegia after suffering a diving accident. He told me about a woman that he and a French kinesiologist assisted. Her back operation had gone wrong and she was paralysed from the chest down.
In just four hours they were able to get sensation back down to her toes and then she was able to bring her left leg to her chest, lift her right leg up and then move her legs together and apart. This meant she was going to walk again. She was told by doctors that this would never happen.
Josh Wood used his brain to re-route the electrical wiring to his body when he rendered himself a quadriplegic, i.e. totally paralysed from the neck down, in a snowboard accident.
Ah, the brain; we should make time to pay homage to and love our brain every day because it is a truly enigmatic and magnificent organ. It is our powerhouse, the conductor of all our functions, the conduit between this life and the one we don.t see, the genesis of our thoughts, feelings, inspiration and creativity. We rely on it totally and without it we would surely die.
Big brother brain is watching out for you
Practically every bit of us is connected to our encephalon (brain – see I am clever) and spinal cord via the nerves, which sends messages from HQ down the bundle of cables.
The spinal cord is thick at the brain exit and thins out as the cables branch off to different areas. The further they venture, the smaller the branches. Eventually they pare down to microscopic twigs (nerve endings) as they connect to every last muscle, ligament, bone etc.
So if your body lost contact with the rest of you, you.d be a disembodied head; sounds like
something out of a 50s horror movie.
BLOOHA HA HAAAAA (evil laughter) Sorry, I always do that when I think of a horror movie. I learnt it from Dad. I was trained in evil laughter from an early age. Have I ever told you about my dad? He is very clever; a great painter and he writes hilarious stories. One that comes to mind is about the 7 year old boy who ran so fast he passed himself and came first and second in the under 3 feet race, for boys who had less than 3 feet.
This brings me back to Josh Wood, who certainly surpassed himself in the foot connecting with brain stakes.
Firstly, his mum, Kay, after learning the extent of his injury, decided he would walk again despite the vehement protestations of his attending physicians who told them he would be unlikely to leave his bed.
From the beginning she allowed her intuition to guide Josh to the best care. She insisted that the medical team on the mountain fly him to a Melbourne hospital. They were initially reluctant because they thought he would die.
Once the doctors did their excellent job of patching Josh.s neck up and reattaching it to his head, Kay said to Josh:
“I have never lied to you before and you can believe me now when I say, I know you are going to walk. “
At that time she had no idea about what to do because there were no rules. They had to create their own such as:
1. No researching Josh.s condition on the internet so they were not limited by conventional thinking 2. Josh was not to bond with people in the spinal unit who were negative about their condition. He would only relate to positive people 3. Sneaking in a team of therapists to work on Josh daily. This included a spiritual healer, massage therapist and chiropractor Josh took a bit of convincing.
“Mum and I discussed what we would do from a natural therapy perspective; one being
spiritual healing. Her friend is a psychic, and at the time I was sceptical because she kept warning me that I would have accidents and that my relationships would not work out.
“However I changed my mind after an awful incident in the hospital. I was being taken into the shower room in a waterproof bed. I had recently had the gavage (feeding and breathing tube) removed and my throat was sore. I could hardly talk.
“After the shower the nurse returned me to my room but was called away before she got me
back into bed. I was lying there naked in a puddle of water. I tried to call but my throat was so bad no one heard me. When she found me an hour later I had gone into shock.
“They wrapped me like a mummy in heated towels and space blankets but it did not help.
Mum and her psychic friend had gone home and suddenly she insisted that Mum had to return to the hospital. They found me freezing cold and shaking.
“She put her energy into me and warmed my body up and within 15 minutes I was back to
normal. From that moment on I knew the alternative side of things was going to help me.
Smugglers ward
From the time of arrival at the hospital, prior to the operation that restructured Josh.s neck, an
unlikely crack team of therapists were smuggled in daily. They assumed the identities of team
coach, (aka chiropractor Simon Floreani), Simon.s assistant (aka friend of Josh), “sister in law” (aka Zara – spiritual guide and masseuse) and Kay.s “sister” (aka spiritual healer).
And now for something completely different
Today I am going to focus on how chiropractor Simon Floreani contributed to Josh.s healing and his impressions of what happened.
“Josh was my first experience of a significant spinal cord injury. Chiropractors are usually
not allowed in spinal units because they think we will do something silly like manipulate a broken spine. Of course there is no way we would we do that.
“Chiropractors generally see people who can walk into our practice and explain what.s going
on. It was quite an experience to have Kay sobbing at my clinic saying my child has broken his neck and has been told he will never walk again and you were the first person I could think of to help.
“A chiropractor takes a holistic view and where possible works to remove blockages to
enable the body to have the best chance of healing.
“In this case I needed to understand how much of Josh.s spinal cord was still alive and determine how to enhance that and reduce the shock and trauma so it didn.t continue to shut
down. With that in mind I employed mechanisms to keep the brain aware of its environment in a way that would not overwhelm it.
“Generally, when people are immobilised they are not touched because the body is so vulnerable. The peripheral nervous system – fingers and toes, were the place to begin because they occupy a lot of real estate on the surface of the brain. Although they were a long way away from the injury they gave a lot of nourishment and attention to the brain in a low amplitude way. I suggested that anyone visiting work on massaging Josh.s hands and feet.
“One left field experience was receiving guidance from a psychic. She described procedures
to me and when they made sense from a functional neurology perspective, I would apply them. She would explain things such as where the brain was blocked, how it was blocked, what we could do to unblock it. This involved moving joints in certain directions that fired neurological pathways.
“Often I would think, goodness, I would never have thought of that. It was all practiced
within safe realms based on my clinical knowledge and experience, and it worked.
“There is plenty of literature around now that shows that the brain does not waste real estate;
that it can reprogram itself and change. Medicine takes the attitude that we should accept the worse and everything else is a bonus. It is a crisis management focus that provides acute care medicine, where the goal is to keep the person alive and stabilise the injury. What we should be saying is expect the best and we will do our best to remove all the blocks in between.
“In Josh.s case I think that his brain has re-routed itself. Rationally speaking, someone with 5% spinal cord function who can walk sounds ridiculous. It is ostensibly tethered. There would only be a tiny wisp of electricity flowing through the area, yet from a clinical perspective Josh now has about 95% function.
“The fact that Josh walks, rides a motor bike, snowboards and drives a car, all of which are
highly coordinated functions, would not be plausible unless his body had re-routed the neurology.
“One of the most extraordinary things for me in this process was to see the power of belief, passion and vision of Kay and Josh. They set their own parameters regardless of any other authority and that became their truth. Their determination has been inspirational.
“This challenged my perceptions and the way I pursue my chiropractic practice and indeed
my daily life. I have more faith now in the fact that the body can heal itself. So often we impose our beliefs and limitations regarding how we see the world.
“Once you remove the limitations miracles can happen. Your passion and vision will determine the outcomes; not tests and procedures or comparisons to others. What you believe and conceive is what you will achieve.
“Medicine could learn from understanding the capacity of the body rather than trying to control it. It needs to recognise that the body does the healing and we are the servants of that
body,” says Simon.
Sticking it out
Josh Wood, our highly decorated man, was riding dirt bikes again within six months of the accident and snowboarding three years later. That is quite a feat me thinks. However his journey will likely never be over and it is a daily challenge for Josh to function physically as normally as possible as he has a lot of the internal medical issues associated with quadriplegia.
He currently works with Simon, two personal trainers an acupuncturist and physiotherapist because he is determined to get rid of his limp and walking stick.
For Josh Wood, visualisation and determination were the main reasons he restored his vital functions after being rendered a quadriplegic.
“From two weeks after my accident I practiced visualisation every day. I imagined what it
felt like to snowboard or ride on a motor cross bike; the feel of my body shifting its weight and going over bumps. In my mind I kept every part of me moving.
“The reality was that I was lying in bed unable to move anything. I asked for an anatomy
chart, which was positioned high enough on the opposite wall for me to see. The chart displayed nerves, muscles, blood vessels and organs. This provided the guide for me to visualise a video camera inside me. Beginning from where my cord was injured, it took a slow and painstaking journey to my toes.
“When it arrived I imagined that a spider.s web was attached from my eyelid to my big toe
and every time I blinked I exercised my big toe. I would spend hours just exercising my big toe in this way and then one day it moved.
“I thought, if I had achieved this, I would walk again. I maintained that mentality and
overrode the reality, telling my mind that I had simply broken down the communication system that made my body function. The job was to relearn everything, one movement at a time.
Room with a view
“Mum filled the hospital room with photos of me snowboarding, running, riding my bike and
partying with friends; leading my normal life. She brought all my snow board and motor bike gear in, much to the horror of the hospital staff.
My aunt brought me a stress ball the size of a tennis ball. It sat in my hand but I couldn.t touch it. I spent hours focussing on getting my fingers to hold it. Sometimes I would get frustrated but slowly I managed to encourage them to hold the ball and continued practicing till I could squeeze it.
“Once I mastered that I exercised my hands till they got stronger. Today they are quite good;
I can even thread a needle.
Josh gets stood up
“After two months I awoke one day and decided that I was going to stand. I told the physiotherapists that I wanted to stand after the session. They said it was not possible. I said,
„Let.s just see., because in my mind I could do it.
“It took a lot of arguing and they finally gave in. One held my ankles and knees, another held my hips and another stood behind me and held my shoulders. They stood me up. I fell down like a ragdoll.
“A friend came over for lunch and recommended that I use some weights to let out my anger
and frustration. Then I wheeled myself to the parallel bars on my own and visualised standing on my own two feet. I clutched the bars and pulled myself up until I was standing – I was thrilled because I was standing 100% by myself. It felt so amazing.
“I called to the physio and said, „Look at this!. „Oh, that.s good,. she said dismissively and
walked off to finish her lunch. An hour before she was trying to help me stand, now I was standing on my own and she was more interested in having lunch. This was why I turned my back on western medicine. They did a fantastic job at patching me up but that was it.
“Once I left the rehab centre I returned daily to my old gym. One of my problems was that
the damage to my cord had affected my ability to sweat.
“Each day I would go into the sauna and come out bone dry. But I persevered till I started sweating again. It was a matter of finding a way to switch each of the functions back on. To this day I have to be careful not to get dehydrated because my body still has problems with temperature regulation; but I do manage to sweat.
The language of success
“The journey continues and even now I achieve things that I did not think I would ever be
able to do; I have increased my weight training, I can walk without an ankle brace and I can even piggy back my girlfriend around my apartment. You would think that after all these years those parts of me that weren.t working would be dead; but it seems that I am still able to wake up what was damaged 11 years ago.
“To this day I have never researched spinal injuries because I thought the more I knew the more barriers I would have to overcome.
“Another important element is that I have only ever seen myself as injured. My language, and that of my mother and friends, involved “injury” not quadriplegia. I therefore never adopted the various labels associated with spinal cord injury.”
The equation of the walking quad
Two fundamental questions are begging for an answer and that is how did Josh do something that we have always believed is impossible, i.e. return function to what would under regular circumstances be a paralysed body, and how come most others do not.
Is Josh Wood a freak of nature?
Does he know something we do not?
Does he have a direct line to the weather maker?
I am not sure that anyone really understands the power we have over our bodies. Some people can levitate, regenerate, live in caves on nothing but air, lift cars with bare hands, walk on hot coals or be chicken wrangling, egg juggling, long distance mowing aficionados like me (all at once of course).
What I understand from speaking to Josh Wood, his mum Kay, his spiritual healers,
masseuses, chiropractor and others involved in his healing journey, is that the bottom line is
what Josh achieved himself.
However there was a pivotal woman involved in the healing process who orchestrated his
treatments; she is a medium, spiritual healer and psychic, and yes there were spirits involved
in his healing journey. If we choose to be open to such things we may discover that we all
have that opportunity. Regardless, I think that the way we respond to challenges or crises,
large or small, depends on our own reasons for being.
. Each individual who has a healing challenge got into that situation for a totally different reason; emotionally, physically, spiritually and genetically
. Each person who has a serious challenge responds differently depending on how they feel
about themselves and life – some will become despondent and dwell with feelings of
helplessness and depression
. There are those who will accept the doctors diagnosis/prognosis and will not venture beyond
. Some will have enormous support from loved ones, and thrive on that
. Others who have no support but tremendous strength of will, may get through it regardless
After discussions with some of the people who worked on Josh, I decided not to try and describe the crystals that were used, the rebuilding of his chakras, the work of the spirits, and the parts of his body that were physically manipulated, because there is no one recipe for success and I think this goes for all kinds of illness and conditions.
The people who came together to help Josh heal himself were a unique bunch. And it is
important to note that the physic, the masseur and chiropractor had known Josh and Kay for
several years before his accident, so a trusting relationship had already developed. Kay
remembers back to the night of the accident.
“Well before we knew the extent of Josh.s injury, the physic, who is a close friend, said that everything Josh and I have done in our lives so far have set us up to achieve his recovery.”
Presenting the all walking, larking and inspiring Josh Wood…
Eleven years on Josh Wood is convinced that people with PhDs have got it wrong. He lived a totally different reality and now he works to share his knowledge with others. He has developed several inspiring presentations that spread the message about his amazing recovery and open people up to the possibilities that each of us can aspire to.
Josh along with two other young “walking” quads have just secured the licence to bring an American program called Project Walk to Melbourne. All three were told by Melbourne doctors that they would
never walk again, and all three have proved them wrong.
The Project Walk TM (not-for-profit) Melbourne facility will offer hope through a far more open-minded approach to intensive exercise-based recovery for spinal cord injured people post hospital and the rehabilitation system.
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From Jeanette Leigh.s blog on www.whatshealthy.com.au
For enquiries on Josh, contact Brian James on 0410 414 770 EM brian@brianjames.com.au