Father paralyzed in horrifying Florida beach accident details remarkable road to recovery

Ben Board, 38, on his road to recovery from a spinal cord injury he suffered last year. (Courtesy of Ben Board)

Ben Board wants to be able to run again with his two boys: Cameron, who’s almost six, and Wesley, who is two and a half years old. But the 38-year-old single father from Hamilton is still recovering from a spinal cord injury.

It all started as a weekend trip to Miami, Fla. with his friends in April last year.

Just hours into the start of their trip, Board was down at the beach. He had just shown his friends a jellyfish that was lying out on the sand and was running back to the ocean before he dove in, head first.

“Unbeknownst to me, it was very shallow where I dove because of a sandbar,” he told CTV News Toronto. “I hit my head, and I felt a snap at the back of my neck.”

Board said he tried to stand, but nothing happened. He remained face down in the water.

“I realized I was paralyzed, and then I realized that the air in my lungs was all I had,” he said. Board said he wondered if anyone was rushing over to help him, or if he was going to drown beside everyone out on the beach.

“Just when I thought I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, and I could feel that urge coming and my vision going, a wave turned me just enough that I was able to gasp one more breath of air from the side,” he said.

That’s when one of his friends saw him, clearly in distress, and rushed over to save him.

As he was being dragged up onto the sand, Board said he could remember looking down at his body and trying to move again.

“I had some movement in my biceps, which allowed me to sort of wiggle my arms, flail them a little bit,” Board recounted. “I’m panicking and trying to move – and that’s the only thing that happened.”

He said he quickly realized the gravity of his situation and started to cry for his two sons.

“I knew that everything was in jeopardy in terms of my future as a father, and of course, the father that I intended on being for my boys.”

A series of fortuitous coincidences played in Board’s favour on the beach that day.

Surgeons – including neurosurgeons and spinal surgeons – swarmed him as soon as they saw the commotion, as they were all in the area for a conference. They directed beach patrol on how to move his body into the back of their vehicle and onto an ambulance.

“Another coincidence, to my benefit, occurred because where I was hurt in Miami was in very close proximity to Jackson Memorial Hospital, which has on its campus the [Christine E.] Lynn Rehabilitation Center,” Board said.

The Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center for The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis is known as an “elite” facility in the U.S. for patients recovering from cancer treatment, traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury. It's roughly 10 kilometres away from Miami Beach.

Board received emergency spinal cord surgery that night, where they fused the C4 and C5 vertebrae of his spine, which form the midsection of the cervical spine near the base of the neck.

‘IT WAS TOUGH’

Board spent four weeks receiving care in the U.S. – one week in intensive care, and the remaining three at the rehabilitation centre.

“My accident, absolutely, turned everybody’s life upside down,” he said, adding the incident led to the separation from his wife just weeks following the accident, and he hadn’t yet returned home. “It was tough.”

His older sister, Kirsten Weiss, flew to Miami to see him. Board said she gave him a sense of “warmth and comfort” immediately after his accident.

“She was eerily calm, and said, ‘Ben, I believe that you’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna be Ben again one day,’” he said, recounting a phone call that they had just days after he was out of surgery.

Weiss told CTV News Toronto that after the initial shock and fear, a wave of calm washed over her.

“It was like a deep intuition, and I couldn’t explain it, but I just knew that he would be okay,” she said.

THE ROAD TO RECOVERY

Board left Miami on May 9, 2022, when he had a chartered medevac to take him to the Hamilton General Hospital’s Regional Rehabilitation Centre.

“I was fortunate that my family was, at that point, local because, of course, I was very isolated from my family and friends in Miami,” he said.

From there, day by day, he worked on regaining his mobility. “It was very slow, and I was told daily by my team that that’s the nature of spinal cord recovery,” Board said.

In total, Board was hospitalized as a tetraplegic for 14 weeks. He progressed from laying in bed to using a wheelchair, then to a walker, and then a cane.

“It’s so hard to stay positive and focused because every day you’re kind of like, ‘Is this how I’m going to be for the rest of my life?’ Then a week later, you’re like, ‘Oh, I can actually do a bit more than I could last week,’” he said, adding he remembers what it felt like when he first stood up again or when he was able to go to the bathroom, unattended.

Mike Finlay, an outpatient physiotherapist, told CTV News Toronto he started working with Board at the tail end of his rehab journey.

“When he came first to see me, he was walking with a rollator walker, he wasn’t using the wheelchair anymore, so our goals were to kind of progress his walking, his balance,” Finlay said.

“He had a lot of spasticity,” he added, which is a stiffness or tightness in the muscles that can impact movement.

After about four to five months – when they finished his rehab in December – Finlay said he can walk independently.

“But again, the spasticity was kind of still there and kind of affects the way he walks, but he’s still able to walk fairly independently and safely, which is really good and which we want to see,” Finlay said.

THE NEXT STEPS

Board said he can now walk his son home from school, which is about three blocks away from their home. But the spasticity wavers day by day.

“It’s affected if I’m feeling tired, if I’m feeling stressed, if I’m coming down with a cold, so many different factors can elevate the spasticity and turn me from being somewhat limber to extremely locked up, kind of like Tin Man without oil,” he explained.

This is partly why Board is exploring alternative therapies, specifically mesenchymal stem cell secretome therapy – which has been proven in some clinical trials that it can improve motor and sensory function in those with damaged spinal cords – alongside robotics-assisted physiotherapy with a hybrid assistive limb (HAL), a lower body exoskeleton that can enhance the wearer’s physical functions.

Board said he extensively researched the benefits of these therapies and would love the opportunity to see if it would work for him.

“The sobering realization came that these treatments, this technology in North America is just in the clinical trial phase. It is very, very far away from FDA approval, and it’s very difficult to get into a clinical trial,” he said. “It’s kind of like winning the lottery.”

Both Board and Finlay noted the spinal cord community is pretty small, and research is still in its early stages.

“That’s the challenge for us in spinal cord. So research is progressing, and still being worked on, but we can’t say definitively this works or whether that works,” Finlay said.

The therapies will set Board back between $65,000 to $75,000, so he set up a GoFundMe to help with the costs, as he said he’ll have to go to a clinic in Germany. He said it’s the only clinic approved for this stem cell secretome therapy worldwide – and provides HAL to its patients too.

“As a newly single father, I owe it to myself and my kids to pursue any treatments that prove effective, including cutting-edge medical advancements, and so it’s my mission to overcome financial hurdles that stand between me and my best recovery,” Board said in a statement.

Part of Board’s long-term goals in his recovery is being able to keep up with his sons.

“To walk better, to be able to run or even shuffle or jog or something would also be a big part of that,” he said in terms of his recovery goals with his parenting, adding if he could see improvements in the stiffness in his arms and hands he could throw a ball with them better.

“Those little things that, you know, you always would take for granted that you’d be able to throw a ball around with your kids or run behind them as they’re learning to ride a bike or those sorts of things. That’s really all I want to be able to do, just increase what I can do to a more functional level.”