The second it took for Brady Rice to lose his footing on a popular cliff-side trail at Rockwood Conservation Area was a second that could have changed his life forever.
But a little over a month after the fall that fractured his spine and left him temporarily paralyzed from the waist down, the 22-year-old Cambridge man is recovering from surgery and learning to walk again thanks to doctors and physiotherapists at Hamilton General Hospital.
Also helping his recovery is the outpouring of community support generated through a GoFundMe campaign set up to help cover private physiotherapy costs, outpatient care and any modifications needed to his parents' home.
Rice was initially hesitant with the idea when his dad told him about the page set up earlier this month by a family friend.
"I didn't think it would go anywhere," he says.
But in the two weeks it’s been active, the online fundraiser has generated over $13,000 in donations toward a $25,000 goal.
It's exceeding every expectation.
“When I saw the support I was getting, I couldn’t believe it,” Rice says, adding he’s “beyond grateful” to the friends, family and people in the community who want to see him back on his feet.
Rice is looking forward to that day too, already thinking about the next trail he'll conquer even though his friends have joked he’ll have to stick to parking lots for a while.
The Bruce Peninsula trail will have to wait.
“In my mind I tell myself it was a freak accident,” Rice says. “But it definitely opened my eyes to being more cautious.
"It’s the little stuff you might overlook that are the killers.”
Rice and a friend were hiking Rockwood Conservation Area on Dec. 14 when the accident happened.
They were on a trail overlooking one of the park's many limestone cliffs when they reached a point across from a rock face popular with climbers.
That was when Rice says he stepped on a rock coated with moss that “ripped off like a sheet of carpet,” sending him sliding over the edge and into free fall for the rest of the way down.
He landed squarely on his tailbone, 33 feet below in about six inches of water.
“I didn’t feel pain but I felt the impact of hitting the ground really hard,” he says.
Rice never lost consciousness, but the stress of the ordeal has left some details a bit fuzzy, he says.
As he lay there, his legs submerged in the frigid water, soaking wet and bleeding from a small cut near his ear, it took just a few seconds to know something was terribly wrong.
He couldn’t move or feel his legs, despite the numbing cold rapidly sending his body into shock.
Paralyzed from the waist down, he attempted to drag himself from the water as his friend called 911 and made her way down the cliff.
Fearing further injury, the dispatcher urged his friend not to move him, telling Rice to keep his legs and back in the frigid water to reduce swelling.
The dispatcher stayed on the line the entire time it took paramedics to locate them an hour later.
They quickly got Rice onto a rigid plastic stretcher and hauled him out to an ambulance where they immediately inserted IVs and began warming him with heat packs.
Looking back, he’s grateful to the EMTs, knowing the quick response that got him to hospital and into the care of surgeons saved his life.
An Ontario Provincial Police officer captured the moment when an air ambulance landed next to the Rockwood mill ruins to take Rice to Hamilton where surgeons rushed to repair a three-column fracture to his T12 vertebrae.
The fracture sent bony fragments into Rice's central spinal canal, causing the narrowing that impacted his movement.
After widening the gap, the surgeon fused two titanium rods onto either side of his spine to support it. The incision required 18 staples to close.
The rods will be there for the rest of his life, but his doctor jokingly assured him that since they're titanium, they won't set off metal detectors.
They also won't prevent him from doing anything he'd normally do.
Rice is recovering in the hospital's sixth floor rehabilitation unit where he’ll stay until his release next Thursday, a month earlier than scheduled.
Recovering in hospital over the holidays during the most infectious wave of a global pandemic was about as bad as it sounds, but Rice says regular visits from his parents have made it bearable.
He was taken out of an ICU bed early in his recovery to make room for a COVID patient.
Visits are restricted to two a day, at separate times, so Rice's parents haven't been able to visit him together.
His doctor expects him to make a complete recovery, but not without months of rehab outside of hospital.
During his early days in rehab, he couldn’t walk at all. Now he’s using a walker to get around.
“I have pretty good range of motion now,” he says, adding the only areas he still doesn’t have feeling are some toes on his left foot and a spot on the right side of his stomach.
"One thing I was really scared of was the thought of no hiking after my injury," says the outdoor enthusiast.
Now that walking without help is within reach, Rice says his next goal is learning to run again.
"They’re expecting because of my age I'm going to be 100 per cent."
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