rainBefore the accident, Harold Price, 82, loved riding two wheels. The retired engineer from Griffithtown, Wales, rode about 95 miles a week on his road bike. “Not bad for someone born in ’78,” he said. Other days, like June 2021, I would go out with a friend on a restored motorcycle. They were driving ten miles per hour down a narrow road when his friend pulled up in front of them. “I had nowhere to go,” Price said. He remembers his head hitting his helmet before he passed out.
Price spent several months in the hospital. He broke the fifth vertebra in his neck, putting pressure on his spinal cord. He said he would never walk again. “Obviously it was a little disappointing,” he says. He was determined to prove the doctors wrong. “My mind told me I could get up and get out. But when I tried, I collapsed.”
Back home, a friend designed a lifting frame with wheels “on the back of a fag pack” to help him stand and walk, but Price often fell. “It’s not even halfway down. It looks like it’s going to hold up, so it needs to have a strong ticker.”
While he and his wife were working to help make Price’s home more accessible in 2022, an engineer mentioned the Morrello Clinic, a physical therapy center. That’s how Price met physiotherapist Sam Miggins. After assessing the strength and movement of his legs, she turned to him and said: “I’ll let you walk.”
“You can imagine how I felt,” Price said. “For months I was told I couldn’t do it!”
He started attending twice a week. He trains on an active-passive bike with a motor that helps move his legs but still requires effort. These include resistance training, stretching to aid hip and torso movement, and walking with varying levels of support.
Progress is slow. He finds it difficult to maintain his resolve. “Sometimes I go to bed at night and feel like I don’t want to get up, and then I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to walk again. I have to get better than this.’”
It took me six months to build up the strength to use a walker. The first time was “amazing,” Price said. Even though I was hurt. Now he and Miggins are taking Zimmer for a quarter-mile walk up and down the road outside the clinic. “If there’s another patient there, we say, ‘Oh, are you going to the bar?’” he jokes. After that he was exhausted. “But mentally I feel a lot better.”
Price now uses an upright walker to walk short distances at home with his wife. You no longer need a caregiver to help your child get dressed or put to bed. At the hospital, he started walking using a quad stick for stability and with only one person supporting him. Previously, he suffered from severe cramps. “My legs would rise at right angles.” Now they have stopped.
He visits the hospital once a year to review his medications. He remembers the first time he returned after learning how to walk again. “The doctor said, ‘Well, Mr. Price, you proved us wrong.’ I said, ‘It’s because of Sam,’ and the doctor said, ‘It’s not because of Sam, it’s because of you.’”
Harold Price goes to the Morrello Clinic.