MEET MY MIRACLE SON
QUADRIPLEGIC SNOWBOARDER
It’s hard to tell who is having the most fun – the cute-as-a-button toddler filling the park with heart-melting giggles, or his proud daddy pushing him on the swing.
It’s such a simple moment, but one doting dad Joshua Wood will never take for granted.
‘I love every single minute with AJ,’ the 35-year-old tells New Idea.
A walking stick is the only telltale evidence of the harrowing journey this inspiring father-of-one has been on.
And though he can now carry 18-month-old AJ in his arms, surf and even ride a motorbike, in June 2000, Josh – an elite sportsman and adrenaline junkie – was told he’d never walk again. He’d shattered several vertebrae and crushed his spinal cord in a snowboarding accident.
‘I landed on the back of my neck,’ he says. ‘It’s probably the first time I’ve felt real, true fear.’
After surgery to stabilise his spine at the Austin Hospital, a doctor told Josh – then aged just 17 – he had been paralysed from the neck down.
‘They wrote me off,’ he says. ‘And if I was going to be a prisoner in my own body, then there was no life worth living.’
Josh turned to his mother, Kay Ledson, 67, and begged her to put him out of his misery.
‘I said: “Mum, you need to drag me out to a paddock and shoot me.”’
Kay says when the doctors initially told her Josh was a quadriplegic, she ‘lost it’.
‘Josh’s prognosis – if he lived – was less than a three per cent recovery. If he managed to get out of bed, he would rely on a motorised wheelchair operated with mouth controls.
‘They basically gave us a checklist [saying] he’ll never get out of bed – they were very adamant that he’d never be able to father children naturally.
‘I said: “You don’t know me and you don’t know my son. My son will walk again, and how dare you say that to me.”’
Though they had no idea what the future held, Kay refused to accept the devastating prognosis and made a promise to Josh.
‘I said: “I will do whatever it takes, I will spend whatever it takes, for you to get better.”’
Waking up the next day, Josh had an epiphany.
‘I decided that every time they would tell me I couldn’t do something, it would make me even stronger. I decided to fight.
‘We tried to keep my body as active as possible. Family and friends would massage my hands and feet every day.
‘We just tried anything. I didn’t believe in natural therapies, but when I broke my neck I was
‘I decided to fight. We tried to keep my body as active as possible’
going to do anything it took.
‘I learnt visualisation, my chiropractor did sensory tests. He would find little sections of my legs and hands which had tiny feeling.’
That slender ray of light through the darkness gave Josh a surge of hope and he began to set himself goals.
‘I had a really itchy nose, which drove me nuts. In five days I went from not being able to move my hand, to moving my hand so hard I nearly broke my nose.’
Kay believes Josh was able to regain function by rebuilding his neural pathways, through below-injury based therapy.
‘He has to think about his movements, then force his body to comply,’ she explains.
After a further two weeks of intense visualisation, Josh flicked his big toe, which cemented his determination to walk out of the hospital.
Incredibly, after just five months, he took several tentative steps out of the same doors he was stretchered in through.
‘To this day I only have five per cent function of my spinal cord. But the messages from my brain to my feet are just delayed,’ Josh says.
Since then the Melbourne local has continued to devote himself to his recovery, and in 2010 he met Amelia.
‘She’s the first person who’s never asked what’s wrong with me,’ he says.
‘I never really liked myself after this injury. I didn’t think someone would just love me for who I was. After meeting Amelia, I believed in myself more because I mattered to someone who wasn’t a relative.’
The couple married in 2013, and despite the doctors’ grim predictions they were thrilled to fall pregnant with their longed-for son AJ – completely naturally – three years later.
Josh’s injury means he struggles to multi-task, but he was determined to be a hands-on father.
‘It was small steps, but I learnt how to carry him, I learnt how to take him out of his cot, I learnt how to bathe him. I just find ways to make it possible.’
Mum Kay is currently in training for a seven-million-step walk across the US to raise funds and awareness of below-injury therapy for spinal damage.
‘Josh had the best doctors in the world looking after him, but they were good at mending – they were no good at healing,’ she says.
‘The whole hospital system disables you from the moment they give you the prognosis. It’s all about accepting it’s not going to get any better.
‘You are constantly having to fight to stay positive. But Josh is living proof it is possible.’
Josh Wood has defied medical odds to have the family of his dreams