In 2012, Darek Fidyka underwent surgery in which cells from his olfactory nerve were inserted into his damaged spinal cord. Photograph by Carla Van De Puttelaar for The New Yorker

When a spinal cord is damaged, location is destiny: the higher the injury, the more severe the effects. The spine has thirty-three vertebrae, which are divided into five regions—the coccygeal, the sacral, the lumbar, the thoracic, and the cervical. The nerve-rich cord traverses nearly the entire length of the spine. The nerves at the bottom of the cord are well buried, and sometimes you can walk away from damage to these areas. In between are insults to the long middle region of the spine, which begins at the shoulders and ends at the midriff. These are the thoracic injuries. Although they don’t affect the upper body, they can still take away the ability to walk or feel below the waist, including autonomic function (bowel, bladder, and sexual control). Injuries to the cord in the cervical area—what is called “breaking your neck”—can be lethal or leave you paralyzed and unable to breathe without a ventilator.

Doctors who treat spinal-cord-injury patients use a letter-and-number combination to identify the site of the damage. They talk of C3s (the cord as it passes through the third cervical vertebra) or T8s (the eighth thoracic vertebra). These morbid bingo-like codes help doctors instantly gauge the severity of a patient’s injury.

Darek Fidyka, who is forty-one years old, is a T9. He was born and raised in Pradzew, a small farming town in central Poland, not far from Lodz. At 3 A.M. on July 27, 2010, Fidyka and his girlfriend, Justyna, woke up to the sound of someone smashing Fidyka’s Volkswagen outside their house, a few miles from Pradzew. They got out of bed, rushed out the door, and found her ex-husband, Jaroslaw, battering the car with a cinder block. They were not completely shocked. The three of them had been friends since their teen years—Fidyka had gone to Justyna and Jaroslaw’s wedding—but Jaroslaw eventually became a heavy drinker. He started beating Justyna, and then went to prison for it. Justyna obtained an order of protection, and eventually took up with Darek. He moved into her house. “Our earlier relationships hadn’t worked out, so we decided to give it a try,” Fidyka recalls. But Jaroslaw, paranoid, believed that his two friends had begun a relationship while he and Justyna were still married.

Outside the house, Fidyka and Justyna tried to calm Jaroslaw down. Though Fidyka was tall and athletic—he was a contractor and a volunteer fireman—Jaroslaw pounced on him. “I didn’t expect him to have a knife,” Fidyka says. Jaroslaw stabbed him eighteen times. Several of the wounds punctured his lungs, and one nearly cut his spinal cord in half.

As Fidyka lay on the ground, he felt his body change. “I can remember very vividly losing feeling in my legs, bit by bit,” he says. “It started in the upper part of the spine and was moving down slowly while I lay waiting for the ambulance to arrive.” He adds, “I was aware of everything. I could feel my strength leaking out with every thrust.”

Jaroslaw dropped his weapon and ran away. He hanged himself shortly afterward, in a nearby orchard.

Today, Fidyka lives at Akson, a rehabilitation facility in Wrocław, a city in western Poland. The attack left him paralyzed from the waist down. The Akson facility is affiliated with the city’s university hospital—Wrocław is the former German city of Breslau, long a place of medical excellence—and occupies a two-story building on the town’s outskirts. The long, low structure, a former Hare Krishna center, was built on open land, but it is being walled in as Poland prospers and new buildings are constructed. Fidyka lives in a narrow room on the second floor. He has a laptop and a few books; the only picture on the wall is of Pope John Paul II. Justyna left him six months after the knifing.

On the day I visited, there was a bowl of clementines that his mother, who lives in Pradzew, had brought for him. Many nights, she sleeps there, in a bed on the other side of the room. Her scuffs are lined up next to his sneakers, which are eerily spotless.

Fidyka spends much of his time downstairs in an exercise room, trying to gain back his lost strength. I watched him there one sunlit morning this past spring, as a physical therapist helped him stretch. Cramping and spasms are a problem for the paralyzed, and a large part of what therapists do for them is provide artificial impetus to muscles that are meant to be in motion. Fidyka lay near two female patients: a C6-C8, who had been paralyzed from the waist down after a car crash, and a T5-T8, whose spine had been damaged during an operation for a tumor. Fidyka was lying face down on a gym mat; the therapist was sitting on him, on a cushion, and pulling up on his back. Physical therapy is not meant to be watched. It is intimate and awkward, the gap between the well and the diminished underscored at every moment.

Fidyka looked very tired. A cold had sapped his energy, and it was a Friday. When you do physical therapy eight hours a day, five days a week, it is as hard as athletics. On weekends, when Fidyka and his mother go home to Pradzew, about a hundred miles away, he is depleted.

People with a damaged spinal cord can get better without interventions. In the first few months, it is not unusual for a patient, especially one with partial spinal-cord damage, to regain some strength or sensation in the legs, or some bowel control or sexual function. But after this period the likelihood of improvement drops off radically. Scar tissue covers the wound, and even nerves that were initially unscathed die, leaving the body less able to renew or rewire damaged nerve circuits. According to Steven Kirshblum, a medical director at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, in New Jersey, after a year fewer than two per cent of patients with a complete spinal-cord injury show significant motor recovery. Each year that follows shuts the door a bit more firmly. At the time of my visit to the Wrocław facility, the T5-T8 still had a chance of improving—the botched tumor operation had taken place only nine months earlier—but it had been seven years since the car accident that left the C6-C8 unable to walk. For her, physical therapy was maintenance and precautionary—for flexibility and over-all health, and to avoid bedsores.

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At first, Fidyka appeared to be on the same path as the C6-C8. After he was assaulted, an ambulance took him to an emergency room in the county capital of Bełchatów, where he lay in a coma for three days. “My family and friends told me that it was touch and go,” he remembers. When he awoke, his first response was joy at being alive. At the time, his sister, Wioletta, was pregnant, and the stress caused by his injury sent her into labor; while he was unconscious, a niece had been born. Upon waking up, he called Wioletta. “This is the first time for her,” he said, of the baby. “The second for me. I’ve received a second life from God.”