Hi everyone,
my name is Alessandro, I'm twenty-two years old and on August 10, 2021 I had a motorcycle accident that completely turned my life upside down. I live in Pompeii and working in a restaurant in Praiano I often happened to go back and forth between one city and another. On August 10, returning from Pompeii, as soon as I entered a tunnel that connected the coast to my city, I lost control of the moped, slipping on a patch of oil that was on the asphalt.
I had a serious impact on the ground which caused my vertebrae to explode and lung compression and all this caused an incomplete spinal cord injury at d6 and d7 levels which caused me to lose the use of my legs causing paralysis.
Throughout the accident, the arrival of help and the diagnosis I remained conscious, well aware that I was struggling between life and death and aware that I would probably lose the use of my legs. Despite this, I never gave up trying with all my strength to stay alive and convincing the doctors to operate on me even though the chances that the surgery would have succeeded were very slim. After an operation that lasted 11 and a half hours my life was saved and I survived. This was followed by about 10 months of rehabilitation of which 50 days spent in Telese terme and the rest spent at the Montecatone rehabilitation insitute hospital where I mostly completed my clinical picture rather than the rehabilitation one.
However, this rehabilitation was not enough and although I am grateful to life today and I wake up every day with the awareness of having survived a potentially fatal accident, I cannot resign myself to a life in a wheelchair, as there are still some possibilities of being able to walk again or at least to be able to recover many muscles essential to my movements. Do not misunderstand me! Life is great, whether standing or sitting, whether I look at it at other people's eye level or at their pelvis, and yet, my twenty-one years of standing as a barman and head nurse and to travel around Italy to acquire as many skills as possible, to date they push me not to give up and to try everything in order to be able to be aware, one day, that I have done everything possible and that I have rehabilitated myself in the best possible way.
Inquiring, therefore, I found a very famous private rehabilitation clinic at a national level, the Giusti center in Florence, which, after having visited me, deemed me suitable to start an intense, continuous and personalized rehabilitation process within the structure.
This path will consist of 5/6 hours of rehabilitation per day and has an initial duration of about two and a half months which would be followed by a home therapy path and a return to the Giusti Center for verification, control and setting up a new rehabilitation program.
The short-term goal of rehabilitation will be to recover the basic motor patterns, strengthen the muscles of the trunk, recover and strengthen the muscles of the pelvis, recruit the muscles of the lower limbs and take various postures including the static and dynamic upright one.
However, since it is a private clinic, the weekly expenses are high and in addition to the rehabilitation costs, food and lodging in Florence would be added.
Unfortunately, today my family and I do not have the possibility to bear all these medical expenses and I cannot think of precluding myself from this rehabilitation due to lack of sufficient money. So I'm here today, about a year after that terrible day that changed my life, asking for the help of all of you to try this last road, give my best and have the final awareness of having tried by all means to to go back to that standing life that I had built for myself with so many sacrifices, to that life in which, after so much apprenticeship, I had reached a job position that I loved, to that life that was swept away from me in seconds.