There’s something unusual about Ryan Lux. Maybe it’s that more than two years ago, he suddenly lost his ability to walk. Or that his paralysis led to ski bumming in B.C. that same winter. Or maybe it’s that he starts the whole story with a laugh and, “Oh, that happened a while ago!”
Lux, 21, and now a third-year journalism student at Carleton, tells his story like that of a good night out.
It started with strange back pains in September 2006, he says. A few days later his legs began to spasm, and became paralyzed. He says he wasn’t worried initially, just “kind of pissed I couldn’t walk.”
“I didn’t know it was that serious when it was happening . . . I was still doing my homework for school,” he says.
He says he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder that swells the spinal cord and causes paralysis, a condition from which less than one-third of patients fully recover. The diagnosis forced Lux to put school on hold.
“I was in the hospital for three weeks, and that was pretty boring,” he says. “But I didn’t really know [how serious it was] at first.”
When he found out, he says he was “just more worried about getting better.”
Once he started moving his toes, recovery progressed quickly, he says. With help from friends, normalcy came racing back.
“No one would wait for me – they’d just laugh at me because before I’d never wait for them,” he says. “It probably helped me get better faster . . . I had to stick with them come hell or high water, I guess.”
He says he relearned things daily, but symptoms lingered.
“I couldn’t stand on my tiptoes on one foot for like a year and a half, so I had this really awful limp.”
This, he says, presented difficulties. Especially when attempting to run 15 km, like he used to do daily.
It’s not surprising Lux says his parents blamed the paralysis on burning the candle at two ends.
That December, already almost fully recovered, Lux says he decided to join his twin brother on the slopes in Fernie, B.C.
There he says he spent the season teaching skiing lessons and being a ski bum.
“Living in Fernie, you see people who’re just chilling and life is good . . . it was a little bit hard to come back to school,” he says.
However, Lux packed up his skis at the end of the season and returned to complete his degree.
“I figured I’d already put in a year at school already,” he says, “I may as well just go and get it over with.”
Lux says it’s nice to have something other than recovery topping his priorities. “I look at it as a positive thing, in retrospect.”
But, he says, “it was a pretty big bitch for a long time.”