It has been almost 23 years. On December 20, 2026, I will complete 23 years of a new life — the life that began at the exact moment the old one ended, on a Saturday morning, December 20, 2003.
An ordinary day, almost until the end
On the second trip of the day, I was going to pick up parts for an auto parts store. It was the same route as hours before. I was relaxed, working calmly, having no idea that that route—which I had already taken that morning—would be the last one as I knew my life up to that point.
I was cut off by a black Ford Ranger pickup. The motorcycle hit the front wheel of the car, and I was thrown over the hood, landing on the other side. The first point of contact with the ground was my neck, protected by my helmet. It was that helmet — brand new at the time — that saved me from a traumatic brain injury. But it couldn't save what was behind it: the force of the impact fractured my fifth cervical vertebra and injured my spinal cord at the level of the fourth vertebra.
It was right there, in that exact moment, that my life turned upside down for good — and I didn't even know it.
What I remember (and what amnesia erased)
The blow was so hard that I got amnesia. I didn't remember anything: neither what I was doing, nor where I was going. I only know that I fell, half face down, half on my side, and that I fell already paralyzed. I could see one of my hands stopped right there, in front of me, and I couldn't move a single finger.
Some things came back later, in pieces. I remember a shadow over me — I only understood later that it was a gentleman with his umbrella covering me to make shade, because it was almost noon, the sun was strong, and the asphalt was certainly scorching. I asked him to take off my helmet. He said he couldn't, but he had already undone the buckle, which might have been suffocating me. The helmet stayed there at eye level, blocking almost everything — I could only see the feet of the people around.
He said the rescue team had already been called. And I passed out.
When I woke up again, I started to pray. Out loud, talking to God right there on the floor. I heard people talking around me—“he's praying,” “he's talking to God”—even though I couldn't see anyone, just feet passing close to me through the gap in the helmet.
I passed out again. I woke up inside the ambulance, seeing the nurses looking at me. I passed out one more time. When I opened my eyes again, I was already in the emergency room. From then on, I've been awake — and lucid — to this day. I never had any more problems with consciousness or memory because of the accident.
The penny dropping slowly
Only later, little by little, did I come to understand the magnitude of what had happened. In that first moment I still didn't know the difficulty that lay ahead — I only knew that my body wasn't responding like before.
I was hospitalized for 55 days. The fifth cervical vertebra practically shattered upon impact. The level of the spinal cord injury was at C4 — and the higher the injury on the spine, the greater the sequelae. In my case, sensation disappears from the nipples down. In my arms, it only starts from the shoulders, and even then gradually: first it feels numb, then it actually turns into sensation.
Today I am a quadriplegic — but not completely without movement, as many people imagine when they hear that word. I have some movement in my arms, just without strength. My hands and fingers do not pinch: I cannot hold small objects between my fingers as I used to.
Surgery was the beginning of everything that would come after
I waited from December 20th to December 30th for the swelling in my neck to go down so I could have surgery. The surgery is usually performed from the back of the neck — mine wasn't. They made an incision in the front, beside the Adam's apple, and placed a rod there, screwed into the fourth vertebra (which had been affected at the spinal cord level, but hadn't broken) and also secured to the sixth. They took a piece of bone from my hip to rebuild the fifth vertebra — a natural bone graft to prevent rejection, instead of using the synthetic material that was used on the spot.
That is where the first major challenges came from, which would have changed everything that followed: urinary tract infections. Someone with a spinal cord injury like mine needs either an indwelling catheter (which is the worst thing for someone with a spinal cord injury) or intermittent catheterization (relief catheter) at least every six hours—after that, the retained urine becomes the perfect environment for the proliferation of bacteria, which multiply inside. The hospital simply wasn't prepared to care for a spinal cord injury patient. They didn't place an appropriate indwelling catheter to drain the bladder as it should have been, nor did they perform intermittent catheterization—and the infections came.
I spent all this time wearing a cervical collar, always lying on my back, unable to be turned or moved, because my neck was broken. The collar hurt so much, just from having to stay in that position. When putting the cervical collar on, the nurse put the wrong collar on, and it was sinking into the back of my head. I didn't know that wasn't normal — I just knew it hurt, and it kept hurting and hurting, until I started crying. Another nurse noticed the mistake and changed it. But until then, it was a lot of suffering.
Suffering that, unfortunately, was not only mine. It is the portrait of a Brazilian healthcare network unprepared to deal with spinal cord injury survivors—something I have lived with for 23 years, including nowadays, in health clinics.
What comes next
This is the summary of my accident. There is much more to tell—about recovery, about relearning how to live, about the mistakes and successes of the healthcare system, about the practical life of someone who has been a quadriplegic for almost 23 years. I will leave each of these topics for future posts here on the site, in the hope that they help other spinal cord injury survivors and their families go through all of this with less loneliness and more information than I had…