I turned 36 on September 10th!! It was supposed to be a nice day relaxing with my wife and toddler while we waited for our oldest daughter to get out of school. We were going to go out and have a nice dinner and spend the evening enjoying each other’s company as a family.

While my wife was driving our oldest daughter to school, I needed to fix a leak in our toilet. I was lying on the ground trying to turn the water off to my toilet so I could replace the flapper valve and ball. While I was down there, I felt something suddenly shift in my back and immediately went into excruciating pain. I lost all feeling and strength in my legs, and they locked in place. I literally couldn’t feel anything in them, and my legs couldn’t support my weight at all.

Alone in the house with just my two-year-old daughter there with me, I had to figure out how to get from my bathroom floor to my bed to have any chance of slight comfort until my wife could get home and drive me to the hospital, and I also needed to keep my daughter calm while she watched her daddy go through the single most painful event of his life. My bathroom is really small, I was on the ground and could not move anything below the waist, I was facing away from the door, and my baby girl was starting to freak out too, not knowing what was wrong with daddy.

I used my upper body to pull myself through the doorway and then up onto the counter in my bathroom. My daughter was standing on her little tooth-brushing step-ladder right next to my counter, so I grabbed her and held her for a few seconds to calm her down a little bit.

Daddy’s little trooper calmed down almost immediately and held her hand on my shoulder while I crawled to and up onto my bed. She stayed by my side until mommy got home.

There was a zero percent chance my wife and I were going to get me into our car, so I ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital, and after some testing and an MRI, they found a herniated disc at T12-L1 that was severely compressing the nerves/spinal cord and had caused a spinal cord injury.

The neurosurgeon told me that we had a long road ahead of us. The priority wasn’t my back pain anymore, but instead it was making sure I would be able to walk again and keeping me from spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair.

The surgeon did a laminectomy at T12-L1 for neurological decompression, a bilateral medial facetectomy, and a discectomy to remove the herniated disc material and relieve the pressure. So basically they removed some bone around my spine to make more room, then removed the part of the herniated disc that was pressing on my spinal cord and nerves so they weren’t being crushed anymore.

I’m in the ICU recovering now, but I’ve already had some really encouraging improvement. I can wiggle all of my toes, move my ankles, bend my knees, lift both legs off the bed, and push against resistance. Most importantly, I have feeling back in my right leg. When this happened, I couldn’t feel anything whatsoever in that leg, and now I can feel everything again.

Like the surgeon said though, I have a very long road ahead of me. I have to learn how to walk again, I have to build strength around the parts of my spine that got removed, and I have to learn the tools necessary to make sure this never happens again.

I just started a new job and I am the sole financial provider for my family. I work very hard for my girls, and it brings me a lot of satisfaction knowing that my girls can rely on me for their every need. My wife has medical problems of her own that make it difficult to work.

I expect that I will be out of work for at least two months, so we will need to raise at least two months of expenses to ensure that I can focus on healing and getting back to 100% for my family and get back on track with supporting them.

The funds will be allocated as follows:

Two months of expenses: $6,118

One month: $3,059

* Rent: $1,433

* Car Payment: $630

* Groceries: $800

* Phone & Internet: $196