After publishing my last post outlining the accident that left me paralyzed from the torso down, I wanted to provide an update a year later since I had an influx of comments, emails, calls, and even visits after I broke the news to the public.

To say that the past year in recovery has been difficult would be an understatement. During this time, I have had to learn to walk again, and with almost full paralysis, the chance of me being able to use my limbs to their full extent like I was once able to is slim. Even spending several hours a day with physical therapy can only give me back limited access to my limbs.

While I haven’t thrown away my trekking poles quite yet, it’s an important realization and difficult moment of self-reflection to understand that I won’t be able to hike again after the accident. While there will be some mobility restored in the coming months as I complete my roadmap that my physical therapist has curated for me, a full recovery is out of the picture. Given the nature of hiking a mountain, I don’t think that I’ll be competitively hiking (or hiking for leisure, for that matter) soon, but that won’t stop me from cheering on my fellow hikers and team members.

I thought I’d just give a quick update on how I was doing because I haven’t updated the site in so long. To see it turn from an image board into a personal blog isn’t the turn of events that I saw happening when I first had the idea for Fukung, but you know what they say: “expect the unexpected.”