You’ve got to have a plan to be successful.

Amy Latimer, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queens University, Kingston, and Executive Director of the Revved Up Exercise Program, knows that’s true...especially when it comes to leading a healthy, active life.

This is Riley's story.Riley Inge is one of over 2,000 participants in the Rick Hansen Spinal Cord Injury Registry. Riley provides information about his injury which the Registry uses for its work in translational research. The aim of this research is to seek breakthroughs in acute care, rehabilitation, and community integration through facilitating communication, promoting best practices, and partnering with communities. 

Forwards, backwards, curves…steps!

Curbs, uneven roads, gravel, mud and grass…negotiating life from a wheelchair is not easy.  But with a few new skills, can come unexpected rewards.

“It seems incredible that you would just give someone a wheelchair and expect them to be able to use it,” says Cher Smith, Occupational Therapist at the Nova Scotia Rehabilitation Centre, in Halifax.  “There is no other piece of $6000 medical equipment that we would just give to someone without training them on how to use it first.”

Daryl Rock has scuba dived in the lakes and rivers of Canada, in and around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as well as in Hawaii, the Bahamas, Bonaire, Fiji and Tahiti. That would be quite an accomplishment for anyone, but Rock is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.

On November 30, 2002, former British Columbia premier Mike Harcourt slipped off the deck of his Pender Island cottage and tumbled down a six-metre cliff to the rocks and ocean below.

The impact of the fall left Mike with a serious spinal cord injury similar to the one that permanently paralyzed Rick Hansen in 1973. However, thanks to increased attention and investment in SCI research and care since then, Mike experienced a very different outcome. The combination of a highly trained trauma response team, expert spinal cord surgeons, active rehabilitation, and of course, Mike’s tenacity and determination resulted in his walking again; he didn’t have to accept permanent paralysis.