As a world-first clinical trial prepares to begin on the Gold Coast, three people living with spinal injuries — two from Ballina and one from just over the border — are daring to believe movement might one day return.

When Mick Chisholm was thrown from his motocross bike and into a deep washout eight years ago, he knew instantly that something was terribly wrong. His legs would not respond. His two young children witnessed the accident and started calling for him to get up, but he could not move. That single moment on a Queensland changed  everything, and the Gold Coast tradesman feared he’d never walk again.

Now 48, Mick lives only a few kilometres from where researchers at Griffith University and surgeons at Gold Coast University Hospital are preparing to attempt something never tried before in humans: repairing the spinal cord using olfactory nerve cells taken from high inside a person’s nasal cavity. The idea is to bridge the damaged section of the spine and help new nerve connections grow. The wonder of nasal cells is they’re unique in the human body in their ability to regenerate and repair. The hope — cautiously, scientifically, but undeniably — is that some people with paralysis may recover meaningful movement.

Mick wants to be one of the first. So much so, he jokes:

“I applied seven times… just to make sure they got my name.”

He travelled south last week to speak at Ballina on Richmond Rotary Club, where two Northern Rivers women who know exactly what life with spinal injury feels like listened closely and nodded along.

The breakthrough on our doorstep

Local Rotary identity Debbie Pawsey knows what it means to fight for every step.

A fall in 2016 left her unable to bear weight and she underwent surgery.  When she came to, she immediately sensed, something was wrong.

“I awoke from that with every red flag for Cauda Equina, but it was not picked up and therefore the emergency surgery to correct this was not undertaken,” Debbie said.

The prognosis she was given was bleak.

“They did not have much faith that I would walk again and bluntly told us so.”

Cauda equina syndrome is a rare but urgent medical emergency that can cause permanent incontinence, sensory loss and severe leg weakness. Debbie had to face all of it.

And yet, she refused to give up.

“Five and a half weeks later, I was walking with a gait frame,” she said.

Through about 18 months of outpatient rehabilitation, Debbie slowly regained mobility.

“I managed to ambulate with forearm crutches,” she said. Today she still lives with significant impairment, but she stands as a determined voice for the research that may change outcomes for others.

Alongside her at Rotary sat Trina Farren-Price, who suffered traumatic spinal damage during a freak accident in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race in 1975 when a powerful wave threw her heavily and crushed vertebrae in her spine. Trina still lives with the fallout. She also lives with a fierce determination that, if hope exists, Ballina should not sit back and watch the science unfold elsewhere.

It is why she has become one of the region’s strongest supporters of the Perry Cross Spinal Research Foundation, and why she invited Mick to speak.

Trina told the room it is extraordinary that a potential global breakthrough is unfolding just over the border.

“It’s incredible. This is happening on our doorstep — only an hour or so up the road. What’s happening at the Foundation and the university, in conjunction with the hospital, is amazing. And it is worldwide news.”