A Canadian aid worker who was beaten and left for dead on a beach on Koh Lipe last August is walking again after months of gruelling rehabilitation.
“I got a second chance; I’ve been blessed,” Chris Channon told The Toronto Star as he walked out of a rehabilitation centre in Toronto on Thursday.
Four months earlier, when he was flown home from Thailand, he was paralysed from the neck down. Doctors classified him as an "incomplete quadriplegic", meaning there was a chance he might one day regain some movement in his limbs with the help of extensive rehabilitation.
While his legs are functioning and he can walk with a cane, the former adventurer and long-distance runner's arms are still mostly paralysed, leaving him dependent on others for feeding, bathing and using the washroom.
Mr Channon, 50, formerly worked in construction in Whitby, a town east of Toronto, but quit and sold his house and became a full-time humanitarian worker after visiting Liberia in 2011.
He spent three years working in refugee camps in Africa, and helped to build a hospital in Nigeria and a school in Liberia. Between February and July last year, he was in the Philippines doing disaster relief work following Typhoon Haiyan.
He was travelling through Thailand last August while negotiating a contract to become a project manager at a refugee camp in the Middle East. While taking a brief holiday on Koh Lipe in Satun province, he suffered the attack that would change his life.
On the night of Aug 14, he told The Star, he recalled being accosted while walking on a beach trail by a local man he now believes was acting as a distraction. As he was trying to push the man away, everything went blank.
He was hit in the back of the neck with a steel pipe, which shattered his C4 vertebra and compressed the C5 into the C6. His feeble cries for help went unanswered by nearby beach revellers, The Star reported. Mr Channon spent the entire night lying on the sand, unable to move, while mosquitoes and fire ants gnawed his flesh and stray dogs licked his face.
The identity of the attacker and the motive remain a mystery. The incident went unreported in Thai media at the time.
Around dawn the next day, he said, a New Zealand couple came to his aid and he was transported to a local clinic on a piece of plywood on the sidecar of a police motorcycle. He was then taken via speedboat to a hospital in Hat Yai, where he underwent emergency surgery. He was later transferred to a hospital in Bangkok.
After arriving back in Toronto in September, he entered the Toronto Rehab Foundation’s Lyndhurst Centre to begin his long rehabilitation.
Mr Channon believes he will regain movement in his arms and once he does, he has some goals he wants to achieve. He intends to run a half-marathon in September with his 22-year-old twin sons. Next January, he plans to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. And he vows to continue his humanitarian work in Africa.