Translator: Michelle Lo Reviewer: Denise RQ
Ladies and gentlemen, I've got problems.
I'm paralyzed, I'm blind, I'm bald,
I'm from Northern Ireland.
(Laughter)
I've got problems. There's no doubt about that.
I suspect some of you do, also.
I'm not excited about the problems. I'm excited about the possibilities.
I'm going to deal with the blindness and the paralysis a little bit,
and the baldness, and where I'm from.
But I'm really going to talk about possibilities.
You see, when I was young, I wanted to be involved.
I wanted to be in the mix.
And whenever I put my superman costume on as a kid,
I didn't have X-ray vision.
I had desperately short sight,
and had to wear big, thick glasses when I could see.
I couldn't leave them in the phone box like Clark Kent could.
And that short sight led me to have a a detached retina.
When I was five, I lost the sight of my right eye.
When I was five.
And I went on to have more detachments in my good left eye.
I was hit with a rogue Frisbee when I was eight
and had a temporary period of blindness before the doctors fixed me,
and another period of blindness with another detached retina, aged 14.
Throughout my childhood, I wanted to be involved,
but the doctors advised, in fact, they banned me
from being involved in contact sports, ball sports,
the ones that were offered in my school: rugby, cricket, hockey.
But there were possibilities for me to compete,
and I found my outlet in rowing.
I think you call it crew in the States.
And I was able to compete, get involved in my sport of rowing.
And eventually, by the time I was 22,
I was competing
not only for my university but also for my country.
And one morning before training,
I was down at the boathouses as the sun came up.
I swung open the doors of the boathouse,
and the sun dazzled on the river flowing by.
And as I looked at it, the edges of my vision were blurred.
The same blurring that I had when I was eight and when I was 14.
My retina was detaching in my good left eye.
And just like before, I lost the sight.
But this time, it wasn't temporary.
I lost the sight after an operation,
and I was blind from that period on within two weeks.
I was catapulted back to my bedroom where I grew up
wondering what the possibilities were, doubting whether there were any.
Unable to tell the time, unable to tell if it was day or night;
when I went to bed for five minutes and woke up,
I didn't know if it was time to get up, the next morning,
or whether I'd just been asleep for those few minutes.
I was heavy under the weight of biases,
about what I thought blind people couldn't do.
And the horrible reality was and is I was, I am, one of those blind people.
But they, I, could and can do things with our lives:
work, study, play sport.
And my drive to compete, to be involved, got me back in the rowing boat.
And eventually, I won silver and bronze medals
in the Commonwealth Games rowing for Northern Ireland,
which is not, if you think about it, remarkable.
Because the great thing about rowing when you're blind,
is, as soon as someone gets you into the boat,
you're actually sitting down and going backwards.
So it's not ...
(Laughter)
it's not remarkable.
In fact, it should probably be compulsory as rehabilitation for blind people.
Through sport, I find the possibilities of life again.
And I converted from a rower into an adventure athlete,
racing in deserts, mountains, oceans, and the polar ice caps.
And on the tenth anniversary of losing my sight,
I entered my biggest race yet:
an epic adventure racing to the South Pole.
I had to get through the first hurdle:
past the race organizer, a guy called Tony Martin,
who is a stereotypical British Army guy.
He's an ex-British ...
He'll shout at me for calling him Army.
He's actually ex-Royal Marines.
They don't like to be called Army.
He's got a big handlebar mustache.
He talks with a sergeant major staccato voice.
He's quite intimidating.
And I had to get past him to get an entry into the race.
And I phoned him, and I said, "Tony,
I've raced six marathons in a week in the Gobi Desert.
I've been and done North Pole. I've raced in the Himalayas.
I've done an Ironman Triathlon."
He wasn't interested in my resume - a big list.
Since subjecting him to what I've just done to you wasn't floating his boat,
and he chipped in, "Yep, yep, yep, yep ...,"
clearly disinterested.
But I was building up to the big point.
"Tony, I'm blind.
And I appreciate if you've got to check with your health and safety people
to accept my entry."
He had no interest in that, and he told me, "Look, mate,
there is no health and safety in Antarctica.
And if you fall down a crevasse, I'm not going to come down and get you,"
inspiring confidence that I should go and do the race.
But I accepted the terms. I entered the race.
And I, with my two teammates, raced over 43 days,
1,000 kilometers, 16 hours a day,
dragging sled, just manhauling those sledges on skis,
racing against Norwegian Special Forces, ex-British Royal Marines,
a double Olympic Gold medalist, and other accomplished adventurers.
I was inspired by the polar adventurers of old,
and 100 years later,
I became the first blind person to race to the South Pole.
And I can tell you, as I tell you this story,
and remembering back to those good old days -
when I was just blind, and I felt nearly bullet-proof -
when I got back from the South Pole, I was super confident,
so much so that the first thing I did when I got back home
was to ask my girlfriend to marry me.
And remarkably, she said yes.
And I was so super confident that I of course, expected her to say yes.
South Pole, blind South Pole adventurer, you know ...
And we were ...
(Laughter)
we were due to get married in the summer of 2010.
But like things do in life, things changed again.
I fell from a second-story window four weeks before our wedding.
I landed in the concrete below,
and the people who found me thought I was dead.
The doctors predicted that I was going to die.
When I realized what was happening,
I wondered whether dying would have been a better outcome.
I fractured my skull, I had bleeds in my brain,
massive internal injuries,
I was paralyzed, blind, and genuinely broken.
For the next 16 months, I was in the hospital.
And I learned about the obvious problems of paralysis,
the things that you probably know about:
the lack of movement, the lack of feeling.
That's not the real truth of paralysis. That's part of the problem.
But I also learned that I was going to suffer
from lack of bladder control, bowel control, sexual function.
I would have spasms, neuropathic pain, infections.
My life expectancy would be reduced.
And if I felt bullet-proof coming back from the South Pole,
I felt anything but bullet-proof
lying in intensive care and in that hospital spinal unit.
But of course, it is remarkable.
It is remarkable that the formal medical structure
has turned spinal injuries into a predictable problem.
That is, they keep us alive, they get us into wheelchairs,
and we can go and live life relatively independent in a wheelchair.
But I don't want to live life in a wheelchair.
I want to get out of it. And that is not a predictable problem.
That has no hierarchy to give us the predictable answer.
It needs flat, collaborative approaches,
the same approaches that took those polar explorers to the South Pole
100 years ago;
the same approaches that inspired Christopher Reeve to dream
of a world of empty wheelchairs.
I was inspired by the polar explorers and by Superman
to go on my own voyage of discovery,
to start exploring the possibilities of a cure.
And now I roll to the gym everyday, and I explore the possibilities.
I strap into my Esko Bionics robotic legs,
and I stand, and I walk thousands of steps of unchartered territory.
I've taken over 300,000 steps in the last two years -
300,000 steps -
and every single step along the way, the data goes back in real time
to the workshop where these things were invented
back to San Francisco.
The sensors at the feet, the motors of the knees and the hips,
the computer on my back send it back to the workshop so I can improve it.
And as I break the device, they redesign it,
and retrofit all the devices around the world.
I got my device, my robotic legs in 2012,
at the time when the London Olympic and Paralympic Games were going on.
And as I walked in my robotic legs, my able-bodied friends
wanted to get into the device.
They saw the ads on TV
for the Paralympic Games and the Olympic Games,
with guys, amputees, running in carbon-fiber blades.
I have a hunch that most of my friends would chop their legs off
and take a set of those robotic legs if they could get them.
Technology is allowing
this horrible problem of paralysis to be talked about.
It's a Trojan Horse
getting me into sessions like this to talk to people like you.
But it's not going to fix the problem. It's going to be a cocktail of cures.
And I traveled around the world to meet scientists who are working on the cure,
and I met scientists, Reggie Edgerton from UCLA,
Yury Gerasimenko from Pavlov Institute in St. Petersburg,
Susan Harkema from the Frazier Institute in Louisville.
Those scientists have just published a paper
in the scientific journal Brain
about four patients that they implanted with electrical stimulation devices,
and those people have started to move their ankles, knees, and hips voluntarily.
They can stand independently.
And what's not in the scientific journal
is what one of the guys told me when I met him a couple of months ago:
that some of those horrible secondary problems that I spoke to you about -
bladder, bowel, sexual function, temperature control -
he's got those back to near normal levels.
It's exciting stuff. We're on the frontiers here.
And earlier this year,
I spent three months in UCLA working with Reggie and Yury,
combining my robotic legs with their neuromodulation:
electrical stimulation and drugs.
That's neuromodulation.
I don't even understand what the word means.
(Laughter)
But it's about exciting the nervous system to see what happens
when the nervous system is excited, and enabled,
and working in the normal working pattern.
We're starting to make progress.
These guys have to analyze the results to tell me what progress we've made.
But look, this cure for paralysis is not a predictable problem.
It's an unpredictable problem.
And that's why I'm excited about it, because that's the domain I live in:
unpredictable problems.
It's going to require collaboration
across intellectual, geographical, and organizational boundaries.
It's going to require explorers, inventors,
creatives, designers, technologists, scientists, financiers,
and adventurers of all types.
But today, I'm extending an open invitation for you to join the party
because this is an exciting expedition, it's going to be beset with problems -
we know that - but it is filled with possibilities.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)