Sydney Fowler - How I Became Paralysed

She did this whole 37 minute video straight-through, no edits, even when some piece of berserk consumer electronics interrupted her!

WCBD News 2 Report from March 2020:

This is how she waterskis:

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Nature Video - Nerve Repair: Regeneration in Spinal Injury

Massimo Hillyard - Can we repair injured nerves?

4:18 Neurons naturally regenerate axons as a whole, they don't heal locally, at the site of the lesion, as bones or skin do.

Dr. Dena Shahriari on her research in recovering from spinal cord injury:

But Sydney's spinal column, at least after the first operation, appeared not to have suffered any lesions. She said that it popped back straight once the pressure of the infection was relieved.

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young on extreme neuroplasticity in the brain:

For more an Alexander Luria's work, see http://www.neuropsychotherapist.com/alexander-luria-life-research-contribution-to-neuroscience/:

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Luria's book The Nature of Human Conflicts sounds interesting:

"Luria developed the ingenious 'combined motor method,' which helped diagnose individuals' hidden or subdued emotional and thought processes. This research was published in the US in 1932 as The Nature of Human Conflicts and made him internationally famous as one of the leading psychologists in Soviet Russia. In 1937, Luria submitted the manuscript in Russian and defended it as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Tbilisi."

Because the damage in Sydney's case was done over such a protracted period, it is possible that what happened was not so much damage to her spinal column as it was her own thought-processes and behaviour over the period of the trauma that changed the "neural coding" in her motor cortex. She mentioned at one point in her story that she even managed to walk again after her legs first failed. So perhaps it was not that the nerves were damaged, but rather that the signals they received after the first operation were compensating for the reduced function due to the pressure on the spinal column, and when that was removed they didn't revert, perhaps in part because of the second infection, about which she didn't give many details.

Dr. Kelly Lambert on Neuroplasticity and Behaviorceutical Therapy

Claudia Angeli - Physiotherapy for spinal chord injury

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This bit about the bridging is interesting: 6:33.

This post is continued here: Two Ways of Doing Physiotherapy.

See also Sydney Fowler - Paralysed for Three Years.