There's about a quarter inch of nerve fiber in my neck that's interrupted. Unfortunately, it's the part that runs signal for all my voluntary motor control. The interruption means I can't deliberately move anything below my chest.
Quadriplegia is paralysis of all four limbs. They screwed up and mixed Latin and Greek when they named it, so they’re trying to change it to tetraplegia now, but it's not catching on. Americans don't know tetra means four, and they don't tend to change things they already know and like. Sometimes there's wisdom in that. Sometimes there's foolishness.
Other people are trying to get rid of the term for dumber reasons. They want to replace it with person-first language. "A person experiencing XYZ." They have misidentified the horror of the condition as coming from the terminology. The horror comes from the reality. Any new word you force will adopt the same dour tinge.
Quadriplegia means a lot different things, depending on where in the neck you got unplugged. You can actually be quadriplegic and up and running around, if the damage was light enough. Most people think of Christopher Reeve, though, and he couldn't move his arms at all. People used to compare me to him, long before my injury. If I believed in manifestation, that would piss me off, but I don't.
Unlike him, I can move my arms, just not my fingers or triceps or wrist flexors. Trained physical therapists often think I can use my triceps (I really can't) because my body started using an odd combination of shoulder mechanics to reverse-engineer a tricep-type motion. The brain is incredibly plastic. In this way, I am more like a paraplegic than the Million Dollar Baby or Me Before You archetype whose story Hollywood thinks should end in suicide. Thank goodness. Some people even first think I am a paraplegic, if they don't know the things to look for on a quad's chair, and if they haven't seen me pick up a glass with closed fists or type an essay with my knuckles.
I think about the cure for this most days of the week. I wonder if an Operation Warp Speed could figure out nerve regrowth in a year or two. What would it cost? What would the benefit be? Would it leave me with a weird Bell's palsy tic like the mRNA vaccine did? We all disdain effective altruists and utilitarians for being wireheading tabula rasa narcissists, but, ultimately, any decision making in the field of public health spending starts to sound eerily like their philosophies. We have limited resources, and we want unlimited healthcare. This is also why health insurance companies are sin eaters for the fact that we cannot afford to give everyone all the treatments they could ever want all the time.
Still, I want mine. That's the American way. So, I daydream. After all, I've got a perfectly good set of legs. They still want to run. They're still fit and young. "Other than the one thing," a specialist once told me with unintended humor, "you're perfectly healthy." So, why waste a whole body on account of a quarter-inch interruption? It makes me think of the little bridge connector I used to connect my two AMD GPUs together in my first PC at fourteen. The first one I got was defective, so my whole expensive second GPU was just sitting there as dead weight. Thankfully, I ordered another, and the problem went away.
I consider news events in terms of how well they will or won't serve the cure now. Would a war in the Pacific speed up the timeline? Would it slow us down? Who's to say? I frequently joke that I want Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg to get really into dirt biking and cliff diving—the most common causes of cervical spinal cord injury, and the reason our population is three-quarters men. The stereotype of paralyzed people is mostly that we're bold and outgoing young dudes, which makes sense when you consider most of the paths that lead here.
To be fair, Musk is doing his part with Neuralink, although in my view they are years behind the less showman-oriented cybernetic research initiatives. He's working on letting the brain control machines, but he's not working on the important element of routing that signal back to the muscles. I personally do not need an implant chip to control a mouse or a wheelchair. I can use a joystick for that. I should also clarify I take no pleasure in the thought of rich men becoming paralyzed. I don't believe they deserve to suffer. I just know, if they knew how this felt, they would marshal their significant resources in search of the cure. It's the cure I want.
There are some people I do find myself wishing ill on, though. Street racers are the main ones. I hate them for endangering not only themselves but others. I hate that they get to go home safe after a day of terrorizing the city, and I got totaled by bad weather even though I played by the rules. When I see a street racer weaving, especially at night, I imagine him hitting the highway barrier and going up in a huge, thick fireball. It would be a relief to me—a relief he can no longer hurt anyone else. In this vision, he usually dies, to save us all the money we would spend on his expensive surgery and rehab. It's a good thing I don't believe in manifesting.
Then I'm back to thinking of the cure. They say the main predictor of suicide is hopelessness, rather than presently grim circumstances. That's one reason I find teen suicide so needlessly tragic. If you're reading this, kid, don't do it! Life gets better for a while yet, until it doesn't.
I don't really believe in hope, which is very different from being hopeless. Hope and hopelessness, like optimism and pessimism, both seem like deliberate miscalibrations of the part of your reasoning that evaluates future probabilities. It's not hope or lack thereof to look at the evidence and decide the likelihood of an event like the cure occurring in a given n year timeframe. It's just sense.
As a gambling man, I put the odds of a cure at about 1% a year, advancing to maybe 2% a year by 2100 if we keep this 'world peace and developed nations' thing mostly intact. You could model this as rolling a hundred-sided die each December and hoping for 100. This is to say, it could happen by Christmas, but also I wouldn't hold my breath.
The real fantasy of the cure is, of course, not the technology itself but the living we do thereafter. I have a pending date with a friend to hike the rest of Koko Head on Oahu. This cure, or a trail-capable mech suit, better come before she or I succumb to our respective human entropies. I don't like leaving commitments like that unfilled.
In my dreams, I have kind of a hobbling walk when I stand, which of course to a guy who can't walk at all feels like the most magnificent thing in the world. Maybe that's what it'll be like when it really happens.
Now, pause. See? That's where the hope creeps in, despite my best efforts. "When it really happens." The cure takes on an almost religious inevitability, a rapture quality. The paralyzed community is divided between recently-injured people who are delusionally optimistic about a cure and long-injured people who are convinced it will never possibly happen. It's hard to live in the analytical, in the tempered, in the maybe. Paralysis is all about halves, though. Working half, frozen half. Half feeling. Half productivity. Half days where life is almost okay, and half days where the agony and arduousness of it all just trample you under their hooves. Maybe it's fitting for the end to all this to be half-likely a cure and half-likely death.
When I was in the trauma ward with tubes in my heart, stomach, wrist, throat, et cetera, an eccentric woman told me completely baselessly that she 'had a feeling from the universe' I would be back to normal in two years. I don't know what's more obnoxious—the Abrahamics who tell me their god did this to me for good reason, or the spiritualists who appoint themselves head priest of bullshit when it comes to 'communing with the universe.' All of their superstitions come from the same root—an inability to handle the reality of a material world where things just happen and there are no guarantees.
The annoying thing is, though, there is some roundabout truth to what the spiritual woman said. Perhaps she was a vessel for a deeper knowledge than she could fully interpret and comprehend. Two years have seen a sort of new equilibrium emerge, with new rhythms and new hobbies and new thought. I was terrified of losing the man I was, in the hospital, and the truth is that he is indeed now gone. That's fine. All men go. He couldn't have handled the world I now live in, and I somehow just barely can. I could handle it, honestly, even if I knew for sure no cure would ever come. But I think it will.