Former Wasps player was told he would never walk again after an accident in 2017 – two years on his sights are set very high indeed

“I seem to be in a good mood all the time,” Ed Jackson says as he remembers the accident which broke his neck, ended his rugby career and left him paralysed with a medical prognosis that he would never walk again. Next Monday it will be exactly two years since Jackson hit his head so hard when diving into a swimming pool that he fractured his C6 and C7 vertebrae and shattered a disc. His spinal cord was partially crushed and he had to be resuscitated three times.

Jackson not only survived but, showing immense will, he shocked his doctors by defeating the paralysis which left him immobile from the neck down. A year after the accident, Jackson, who walks with a heavy brace on his leg, climbed Snowdon.

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He is now preparing for two imposing climbs which, in November, culminates in him scaling the 6,500m Mera Peak in the Himalayas as he strives to raise enough money to build a spinal injury unit in Nepal.

Sitting in Jackson’s garden, on a gorgeous day near Bath, it’s easy to share his good humour. But it is impossible not to be moved by the sobering magnitude of everything he overcame. Remarkable courage and hope define the former No 8, who played for Bath, Doncaster, London Welsh, Wasps and the Dragons.

“My friends ask me: ‘How can you always be so positive?’” Jackson says as a bulldog called Barry snores at his feet. “Or they tell me to stop being so annoyingly positive. I’m just happy now – even though I’m limping around – and the fact I can stand on top of a mountain is ridiculous. Even being able to walk down stairs feels amazing.”

The 30-year-old suggests: “I’ve learned more about myself in the last two years than ever before. But most of the learning happened those first two weeks. I almost got to the point where it wouldn’t matter if I was in a wheelchair permanently. That was after two weeks and everything else since then has been an incredible bonus.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jackson in action for Wasps in 2015. Photograph: Tony Marshall/Getty Images

On Saturday 8 April 2017, Jackson was recovering from injury as a player for the Dragons. “It was a lovely day like this and we had a barbecue. I took my T-shirt off and walked to the edge of a feature pool with a waterfall at one end. I couldn’t tell which was the deep end so I dived in, crumpled straight to the bottom, hit the top of my head and thought: ‘Oh, that hurt!’ When I tried to stand up I couldn’t.

“Confusion turned to panic. ‘Shit, I’m going to drown.’ Luckily my dad was in the pool. He’s a retired GP and he knew it was a neurological or spinal cord issue. A big egg came up on my neck because my disc exploded and one of the shards went into my spinal cord, which is why I’ve got permanent issues. But someone cut through the lining so the swelling could escape – which was very lucky. If that hadn’t happened there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be here.”

In the pool, while waiting 45 minutes for an ambulance, Jackson was kept afloat. “A woman called Di held my head while my dad held my body. I’d met Di for the first time that day but she’s become a special friend. My dad kept his composure but he knew there was a chance I wouldn’t make it. We’ve seen it recently when, unfortunately, the French rugby player died – it’s like a heart attack because of the spinal shock.”

Play Video 2:22 'Focus on the positive': Ed Jackson's road from paralysis to climbing mountains – video

Jackson survived surgery but he was given the terrible news that his paralysis was almost certainly permanent. “After five days of staring at my toes and trying to wiggle them with nothing happening,” he says, “I thought there’s a good chance they’re right. On day five the doctor said: ‘Ed, you need to realise you’re probably not going to walk again.’ They were worried I was in denial. But it was me putting on a brave face for my family.”

He had recently got engaged to Lois, whom he has since married, and “every night on my own, I imagined what it would be like for her to look after me for the rest of my life. That was the main driving force for me to get better. If this was going to continue all my life, I would never have forgiven myself.”

Jackson could not swallow or sleep easily. In the dark, with machines beeping around him, his mind was at war with itself. “That fear of the unknown is terrifying. Every day I would start with an hour of staring at my toe and trying to wiggle it. I would sleep and then do the left foot. That was how I got through it – distracting myself, being regimented.”

On day six his toe twitched. “I would spasm quite a lot. It felt like your body’s detached and all of a sudden your leg would kick in the air. The toe did the same. But then I flicked it. Flicked it again. I lay there thinking: ‘Oh my God. I think I moved that.’ I did it again. I shouted: ‘Mum get in here! My toe’s wiggling!’

Ed Jackson in intensive care at Southmead Hospital, Bristol. Photograph: No credit

“The next few months became a series of those moments. The elation every time you’d get a little win was more than anything I’d ever experienced in sport. Some days I turned to my dad and said; ‘Is it wrong I really enjoyed myself today?’ Every now and again I’d get a victory that didn’t just mean I’d won some silverware. I was changing my life. I kept chasing those wins.”

The loss of his best friend, Tom Maynard, also strengthened Jackson. Maynard, a gifted county cricketer, died on a railway line in 2012 amid a personal crisis. “Tom’s death was my first big trauma. Tom was like my brother. But I got through that. Then the accident happened. It wasn’t as bad. What happened to Tom made me stronger. I started to look for the positives.”

Jackson began to help those around him. “After four weeks, I went to Salisbury’s spinal unit and met Nasser. He had been there six months and he was never going to walk again. He was in his late 30s and came from a rough background in Bristol. I remember we were watching MTV one night and his foot was tapping against the wheelchair. I said: ‘Nas, what else can you do?’ He lifted his leg and I couldn’t do that. I said: ‘Nas, surely that’s something to work with?’ I didn’t want to believe he would never walk again because it would definitely mean I couldn’t. Me and the physio Pete dragged him to the gym, trying to motivate him. He said: ‘They’ve told me there’s no chance.’ But we kept going and he was trying to help himself when I left a couple of weeks later. He messaged me after six months and said: ‘Ed, I’m walking with a stick.’”

Once Jackson could walk he decided to climb Snowdon to coincide with the first anniversary of the accident. “Pete said: ‘You’re mad. We’ll have to come.’ We started fundraising because I wanted to pay back all the money the charities had given me. I wanted to start helping.”

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He reached the summit of Snowdon on 1 April 2018. “Seventy people were on the start line so I didn’t have a choice but to get to the top. My wife was there and it was teary. I saw it all flooding back. All of a sudden cider and champagne glasses were shoved in my face. I drank three and I was completely pissed because I’d hardly drunk for a year. I got up all the way there without falling over. Within two metres of leaving the top, I fell straight on my face. Drunk. It was hilarious. But the walk down definitely sobered me up.”

Jackson’s new not-for-profit organisation, M2M, stands for the millimetres he moved his big toe to the mountains he now climbs. He and Olly Barkley, the former England international, run M2M and are committed to raising £250,000 for a spinal injury rehabilitation unit in Nepal. Jackson and his wife visited the country last October and, after seeing the stark conditions paraplegics and quadriplegics endure in otherwise beautiful surroundings, he resolved to make a difference.

“It’s partly to do with the Nepalese being Buddhist,” he suggests. “They deal with these injuries because they feel it was meant to be. But other people don’t have any sympathy for disability. They believe it happened because of something done in your previous lives. So they can’t believe we want to help. That’s why it’s so inspiring. No one’s wanting a handout. And £250,000 to build an 80-bed hospital is crazy. That’s what the CEO of an average British hospital would earn a year.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jackson is committed to raising £250,000 for a spinal unit in Nepal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

The pleasure Jackson takes in simple attributes is clear. “Standing is a beautiful thing,” he says. “When I did that for the first time in hospital I realised how short the physios were. I’d been on my back staring up their noses for months. I think they had a shock looking up at me.

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“I was still in a wheelchair when I went to New York three months after the accident. Some of our friends bought me tickets to see my favourite band – Fleetwood Mac. I had stood for the first time a week before but the doctors said: ‘It’s not sensible going to New York. You’ve got catheters in …’ I still went with the wheelchair and catheter.

“I was in the front row of Fleetwood Mac, in the wheelchair section. There are great perks to being in a wheelchair. One of them is a blue badge, so you can park on double yellows. It’s my favourite thing. The other is front-row concerts. At one point I grabbed the railing and stood up. Everyone shouted ‘Oi!’ because they thought I’d just brought the wheelchair to get into the front row. Or maybe they thought: ‘Fleetwood Mac saved him.’ But I’m quite tall, so that annoyed them.”

Jackson smiles at a beautiful memory. “Part of the healing process is laughing at yourself. I still have accidents, and wet myself, or fall over, and if you can’t laugh at yourself you’re going to cry. There’ve been lots of laughs along the way. Laughs and mountains.”

Climbing is exhausting and dangerous for a quadriplegic but, with his face lit by sunshine, Jackson reveals a previously secret dream. “I’ve not said this publicly before but I want to be the first quadriplegic to climb Everest. I would love that to be where the story of my recovery ends. And then I just want to go on helping and laughing and living.”

To support Ed Jackson visit www.them2mgroup.com