A few years after the car accident that left him a quadriplegic, Cliff Voll visited his sister Joanne in Sauble Beach.

Determined to be independent, the St. Clements man made a reservation at a new hotel that billed itself as wheelchair accessible. When he arrived, he discovered that his wheelchair accessible room included a step up into the room and another step into the bathroom.

Voll’s sister tried to persuade him to give up the plan and stay with her, but Voll was adamant. The hotel was advertised as wheelchair accessible, and it was going to live up to its billing. He ordered the people at the front desk to get a piece of plywood for a makeshift ramp and make the room wheelchair accessible.

That determination and persistence helped Voll get through the long recovery and life change that follows a spinal cord injury.

“There’s a point when you have this when you decide whether you live or die,” he said.
The accident happened on a wet March night in 1979, at Queen and Westmount streets in Kitchener. Voll was driving a little too fast when he hit black ice, lost control and struck a hydro pole. The impact of the crash tore the car in half.

Voll notes with wry humour that he broke only one bone in the accident – his neck. He knew almost immediately that he was paralyzed; he remembers his rescuers asking him what hurt, and realizing he couldn’t move his legs.

Voll was fortunate in two ways: the two passengers in the car weren’t hurt, and the accident happened just half a mile from St. Mary’s Hospital.

He spent the next eight months in hospital. A week in intensive care was followed by two months in a circle bed, being rotated every four hours to relieve pressure. Then he went through six months of physiotherapy, working on regaining motor skills in his arms and hands, building strength and learning to get around in a wheelchair.

The severity of a spinal cord injury depends on where the spine is damaged. People who injure their spines below the neck are paralyzed below the waist but have full use of their arms and hands and varying control over the torso, depending how high the injury is. At the other end of the spectrum, people who damage the cervical cord high up the spine are paralyzed in the arms, legs and torso and can only move their heads a little. The lung muscles are also affected, and they are forced to use a ventilator to breathe.

Voll falls in the middle of the spectrum; he’s classified as a C7, a quadriplegic, but he has almost full use of his arms and hands. That allows him to use a manual wheelchair and live independently. His sister Joanne, a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital at the time of his accident, had him work on moving his hands as soon as he was stable. She gave him a notebook and told him to date the page and start writing.

“It looks terrible now, but you’ll be able to see your progress by the end of the week,” she said.
It was in rehab that Voll met Dennis Downey. Dennis had gone through rehab after a spinal cord injury a year earlier, and an occupational therapist asked him to show Voll how to get in and out of cars. The two were almost the same age, and became good friends.

Voll moved back home to St. Clements in November of 1979, and the following spring he started wheeling around town. At first, wheeling the block from his house to the church was gruelling. Every day he went a little further, until eventually he could make it all the way around the block.

A few years later, he got into wheelchair sports. He tried wheelchair basketball but didn’t have enough upper body mobility or balance, so he got into racing – first sprints, then 10-kilometre road races.

“I always came in last, but it was a lot of fun,” he said. “The beauty of it was meeting all the other wheelchair guys.”

Voll hasn’t participated in wheelchair sports for a number of years, but Downey is coaxing him to take part in the Wheels in Motion event in Elmira June 13. This is the 25th anniversary of Rick Hansen’s Man in Motion world tour, and organizers are hoping to top the $26,000 raised by 150 participants at last year’s event.

Sixty per cent of the money raised comes back to Elmira to help individuals with spinal cord injuries. Organizers already have a few projects in mind, including paying for some ice time for the local sledge hockey team and covering the costs for people to use the pool and accessible exercise equipment at the Woolwich Memorial Centre. Some of the money will go into a fund to help the newly injured.

In the 30 years that Voll has been using a wheelchair, both the treatment of spinal cord injuries and wheelchair accessibility have come a long way, but there is still room for improvement, he noted. Better treatment means that people who might have died of spinal cord injuries 30 or 40 years ago now survive and have to learn a new way of living, like he did. That means the need continues to raise funds and awareness.

“We’re better, but we’re not perfect,” he said.