ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN

摘要

After many furious jabs, the blade finally found its mark and slipped deep between two vertebrae. It was 2010 when Darek Fidyka collapsed from multiple stab wounds in a forest at night, far from help.From that moment on, he was paralysed from the waist down and without sensation. In the hours to come, he could no longer control his bowels or bladder, and would lose his sexual function. His spinal cord had been completely severed. No one had ever recovered from this injury before.1 had been working for years on rat models of spinal cord injury and believed I had a cure. Dr Pawel Tabakow, a young neurosurgeon in Poland (the victim was Polish), had been shadowing my work for many years. A consultant neurosurgeon in the department of neurosurgery at Wroclaw University Hospital, he was determined to try out my methods and work out how to scale up from our microscopic rat injuries to the amount of damage suffered by his patient.