How we rewired my husband's brain to help stop his terrible pain after opioids made it WORSE: KARA STANLEY'S moving account of how alternative treatment finally helped her paralysed partner By Kara Stanely Published: 01:49, 7 May 2024 | Updated: 01:59, 7 May 2024 e-mail View comments A single moment was all it took for our world to be seismically changed for ever. In 2008, my husband, Simon — a relentlessly, even irritatingly, healthy 38-year-old musician and part-time construction worker — fell backwards off an unsecured second-storey scaffold on to a stone floor, suffering catastrophic injuries to his brain and spinal cord. Rushed to hospital by air ambulance, the head neurosurgeon later told us that when Simon had arrived in his operating room he was ‘half way through death’s door’.
Placed in a medically induced coma, his parents and sister joined me in rotating four-hour shifts at his bedside. After three weeks, Simon defied expectations by waking from his comatose state. Doctors had removed the bone on the left-hand side of his skull to make room for the swelling in his brain and, while we waited for the swelling to diminish, it was stored in the hospital freezer until it could be replaced.
That wasn’t all. Simon had severed his spinal cord roughly in line with the bottom of his ribcage — meaning he experienced no movement or sensation below his waist, and had no control over his bowels and bladder; his left arm was weaker than a newborn’s; he had no hear.
