Warriewood local Jay Stevens refused to accept life in a wheelchair following a tragic accident. Instead, he set his sights on Mount Everest.
Jay Stevens had all his cards stacked up. He was just married with an 18 month-old son, living the outdoor life on the beaches, surfing every day and running around Narrabeen Lake – when his world was turned on its head.
In January 2018, as a top-performing salesperson in his job selling medical devices, he was rewarded with a helicopter flight over Uluru after a work conference. An inexperienced pilot and a nosedive from 140 metres high into the desert left Jay with severe spinal injuries.
“The blade stopped spinning and we actually fell out of the sky,” Jay tells Peninsula Living Pittwater. “We were stuck out there in the desert for four hours.”
Jay’s sternum, all his ribs and both hips were broken and he had bruised lungs and multiple abrasions. He also had a fractured T12 L1, a thoracic vertebrae and the junction where the leg and hip nerves begin.
He could not move as he lay in the sand amongst snakes and ants until transport to hospital in Adelaide.
He was told he would never walk again.
Jay refused to accept this and on 1 December he will attempt to be the first paraplegic to walk the 130 kilometres to Mount Everest Base Camp, almost six years after the accident.
“I was laying in the hospital bed watching some documentaries and one of them was on people walking to Everest base camp.”
It got Jay thinking. “When I saw that, it hurt because of course they said: ‘you’re never going to walk again’. To have something like that taken away crushed me. As soon as I could take steps, that was always in my head. I guess the dream’s become real.”
Jay began years of rehab and eventually regained partial function of his legs and learned how to walk again with the help of crutches and walking braces.
“After four years I’d finally learned to get up with some braces on my legs,” Jay says. “But in the last two years, I’ve gone from walking 50 metres, to 100 metres and to one kilometre.”
Jay, who lives in Warriewood with wife Melissa and children Tai and Taine, can now walk up to 10 kilometres a day.
He’s in a wheelchair at home when he takes his leg braces off. “I’ve only got motor control to my knees,” he says. “My feet don’t work and my calves don’t work. But out in the community I use braces as they keep my toes up, rather than dragging.”
Jay has mastered steps, albeit difficult. “It’s like you’ve got space boots on. Because I can’t bend my knees properly, I have to swing my legs up in a really awkward way.”
Jay is aiming to get to Everest Base Camp in about 11 or 12 days, depending on conditions at the time. He will have a support team with him and has invested in heated socks to counter minus 20 temperatures. Take on Nepal has been instrumental helping organise his trip.
“My lower limbs don’t get good circulation so they’re always frozen. You get really bad nerve pain when it’s cold,” Jay explains.
He’s also got to take extra crutches with him. “If they freeze, I won’t be able to change the heights,” Jay says. “I also need a collapsible wheelchair for some of the tea houses so I can sit down and have a bit of a rest. And I have heaps of stretching stuff as I stretch constantly.”
What’s next for Jay?’ “I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, but you know, (there’s always) Kilimanjaro!” Jay is raising money for wingsforlifeworldrun.com