When Andrea Stolarchuk woke up in the night to feed her baby she felt pins and needles from the waist down.
“I thought, ‘that’s funny’,” the mum of three said, recalling the night back in October 2022.
“I went back to bed and still had the feeling on both sides.”
“I got up thinking, ‘if I walk around, it might get better’, but I couldn’t walk straight. I was like a baby foal.”
She called an ambulance and was taken to Gold Coast University Hospital where she spent the day having tests.
Although the doctors had no answers she was started on steroids and plasma injections.
Andrea continued to deteriorate to the point where she lost all feeling and movement from her chest down.
Doctors scrambled to find answers and eventually a further MRI showed inflammation in the spinal cord and she was diagnosed with a rare condition called transverse myelitis.
“It was scary, but I had a mindset of at least I’m not dead. I also thought one day at a time. If I think of a year’s time it’s scary, but if I think of today, it’s ok,” she said.
“I wasn’t a resilient person before, so I surprised myself.”
“I also thought ‘why not me, things happen in people’s lives all the time’; I let go of the why.”
After two weeks of plasma injections and high dose steroids, Andrea was able to wriggle her big toe, which she described as so exciting.
Doctors never did find an answer to what caused the illness, which has damaged her spinal cord from about C6/7 to T2/3.
Andrea said they suspect it was her body fighting a cold.
“They gave me a diagnosis but never a prognosis,” she said.
Three and half months after that fateful night she left the hospital in a wheelchair.
“I had to learn to walk again. Little bits of movement returned,” Andrea revealed after spending hours in the rehabilitation ward gym.
“Learning to walk is wild, first you have stand up which is a massive deal, at one stage I had four people around me.”
Andrea has progressed to a walking stick. She maintains a rigorous rehabilitation program, spending two hours a week at Making Strides on the Gold Coast and attending Pilates, yoga and gym workouts on the mountain.
She said she owes much of her recovery to her husband David, as well as friends, family and the mountain community, who supported her doing school runs and dropping off food.
“It’s an amazing community,” she expressed.
“I’m lucky I can stand and pick up a glass and give someone a hug, I have a lot of gratitude for that.”
“You can be happy with a spinal cord injury, or you can be sad and that’s something you can control.”
Like many of the mountain’s newer residents, the family moved here in December 2022, when COVID allowed for more flexibility in David’s work.
“We wanted the lifestyle, the space, the sense of community and being in nature,” she shared.
“We both grew up on the gold coast, so Tamborine Mountain was somewhere familiar.”
A lot of their time in between work is spent running the kids to Tamborine Mountain Dance Academy or sport and the occasional short walk.
On her days off work Andrea takes advantage of the children’s activities on the mountain.
“If we are in the mood for a later night we go to Hops and Harmony,” Andrea said.
She is also in the Mountain Cookbook Club, where everyone creates a meal from one chosen cookbook and they meet up to enjoy a lunch.
“It’s such a cool idea. It’s really unique to the mountain,” she said.
“The people who live here are interesting and I love the interconnectedness. It’s so nice for the kids here.”
