The Person Behind The Site
About Mike
Living with a high cervical spinal cord injury for over 25 years — and still going deeper into the science every day.
Living with a high cervical spinal cord injury for over 25 years — and still going deeper into the science every day.
Hi, I'm Mike.
I've been living with a high cervical spinal cord injury for over 25 years. Over that time, SCI stopped being something I simply lived with and became something I had to truly understand — the biology, the secondary complications, the emerging therapies, and the hard gap between what the science says and what actually reaches people.
That relentless need to understand eventually became Beyond Paralysis.
On the night of 30 November 1999, I was driving to pick up my girlfriend along a dark country road — trees lining both sides, no streetlights, a storm raging hard enough to push the car across the lanes. Visibility was poor. The wind was loud.
What happened next was a precise, terrible coincidence. At the exact moment I passed beneath it, an enormous tree — torn loose by the storm — came down directly onto the car. Not lying in the road. Not a hazard I could have seen or avoided. It fell as I drove under it, in complete darkness. There was no warning. No time. Just the night, the wind, and then impact.
The car was crushed under the full weight of the tree: bonnet forced upward, driver's door blown open from the force. And I was pinned inside.
It took emergency crews several hours to reach me. They had to saw through sections of the tree, then lift it, then cut the top of the car away entirely before they could safely extract me. I was still conscious inside for most of it.
Physically, the damage from the crash itself was — by some measure — minor. No major external injuries, no broken bones beyond what had happened to my spine. But those vertebrae — C3, C4, and C5 — were destroyed. The forces that passed through my neck in that fraction of a second had torn apart the very architecture of my cervical spinal cord, as visible in the MRI above.
I spent the next ten weeks in intensive care.
After intensive care I was transferred to Hexham Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Unit in Northumberland — a specialist centre that has since closed — where I spent the next two years in rehabilitation.
The injury to my C3–C5 levels meant the early prognosis was deeply uncertain. The spinal cord is not a simple on/off switch; it is a complex, layered structure, and the extent of what survives often only becomes clear over months of intensive therapy. What gradually emerged for me was a mixed picture: some function from C4 returning, some partial C5 preserved — enough to regain limited but meaningful movement in my arms and shoulders, though not enough to restore independence in the way I had known it.
Two years of rehabilitation. Thousands of hours of physiotherapy, occupational therapy, learning entirely new ways to exist in a body that had fundamentally changed. I left Hexham and went home — a different version of myself, but still myself.
"The injury is only the beginning of the story. What comes after — the adaptation, the learning, the refusal to stop asking questions — that's the part nobody tells you about."
Over 25 years I gradually became someone who follows the science very closely — not because I studied medicine, but because living with SCI demands it. The secondary complications, the things general medicine misses, the slow accumulation of research that never quite reaches the people it most concerns. I found myself going deeper and deeper: into the biology, the emerging therapies, the honest difference between what early trials show and what clinicians are actually doing.
In 2023, after 24 years post-injury, I travelled from the UK to Bangkok to pursue epidural stimulation, stem cell injections, and intensive rehabilitation — a major decision that reflected everything I believe about why people with SCI deserve to look seriously at what is emerging, while staying honest about the science.
I created Beyond Paralysis to do two things.
First — to track and explain the latest spinal cord injury research in a way that is realistic, evidence-based, and genuinely accessible. Not press releases. Not miracle headlines. The actual science, translated.
Second — to share the kind of understanding I wish I had far earlier: the broader health effects of SCI, the secondary complications that accumulate quietly, and the real shape of where the field is heading.
I'm especially interested in neuromodulation, regenerative medicine, biomaterials, rehabilitation technology, and the combination approaches that may one day make spinal cord repair practical rather than theoretical. That interest isn't academic. It's personal.
My approach is hopeful — but never careless.
I don't oversell research. I don't turn early studies into miracle headlines. What I do believe is that the science is becoming more serious, more creative, and more ambitious — and that people living with SCI deserve clear, honest explanations of what that actually means.
So that's what I try to do here. If that sounds like your kind of place — you're in the right place.
Epidural stimulation, stem cell treatment, and intensive rehabilitation — 24 years post-injury.