Painted Toes: Reconnecting To Your Body After Spinal Cord Injury

When Aaron Baker landed on his neck at 19 years of age, his doctors diagnosed him as a C4-5-6 complete quadriplegic and gave him the prognosis of having only a one-in-a-million chance of ever feeding himself again. He refused to accept this prognosis and fought to regain sensation. Today, his achievements include pedaling a bicycle across the country multiple times, racing that bicycle for the United States Paralympic cycling team, walking independently across Death Valley, California, and becoming an ambassador, entrepreneur, husband and father. Beginning June 10, 2024, Aaron launched a world tour and a 503(c) foundation, “Adversity into Adventure“, to raise awareness and funding for high-impact organizations for people with disabilities, and to drive funding for disability recreation, rehabilitation and neurological research.

In this excerpt from Aaron Baker’s new book, Painted Toes, he recalls an intimate and painful turning point in his quest for recovery.

“Day 31 began the same as the day before… Abruptly awoken by the attending nurse on staff to check my vital signs, bladder catheter, and turn me from a slide-lying position to my back. By 6:30am, the fourth floor, intensive care unit was buzzing with activity; intercom commands, alarm sounds, frantic voices and the occasional clash-bang sound of a gurney bed or utility cart. I despised waking this way, especially because the few morning hours between 4-7am were my best sleep.

My routine started out at 7am with the hot, stale plastic smell of eggs served under a worn Tupperware lid. A smell that made my stomach turn. The feeding tube down my throat had been removed and I was now encouraged to begin eating solid food. But between the skin crawling smell and the fact that my throat was still raw from plastic tubing, I could barely choke down applesauce and pudding, let alone scrambled eggs or toast.

Weight continued to fall off my body. Before my accident I was a lean 145 pounds of muscle, but I now I lay in bed, weighing a frightening 100 pounds of skin and bones, muscle atrophied, gaunt, half dead.

After the morning therapy session was over, and I again lay starring out the window, despondent and scared, my siser Arielle entered the room with a small bag.

She walked over to my bedside, leaned over and kissed my forehead, then pulled up a chair next to the foot of the bed. Without saying a word, she began to unpack her bag.

Straining to see what she was pulling out, red, blue, yellow, green… She carefully placed small bottles of nail polish on the bed. Her calm and quiet, yet playful energy was apparent as she uncovered my bare feet.

“What the hell are you doing, sis?” I asked. She glanced back at me with a devious smirk. “Don’t paint my shit!” I snapped. She blatantly disregarded me and grabbed my left foot.

“I’m going to paint your toes, dude.” She giggled, and dipped the brush into the sky blue nail polish. I watched with rage as she made her first brush stroke onto my left big toe. In my mind I was kicking her away. Just then she said: “If you can kick me, I’ll stop.”

Ohh, the agony! Looking back, that moment was both endearing and agonizing. I loved the fact that my sister was playfully intending to cheer me up, but my inability to defend myself in the act was a real, heavy dose of reality… I was seriously paralyzed.

As the last stroke of blood red polish covered my right big toe, Arielle stood up, and stepped back to marvel at her masterpiece. “There, that’s better” she said proudly.

I lay there with disdain, skinny and pale, with ten toes as bright as a rainbow. All the colors of light, combined on two paralyzed feet. I starred at my candied toes, perplexed and pissed off, yet slightly pleased with their color.

This is how my recovery from paralysis began. I was going to channel my anger into these focal points.

As a motorsports athlete, I used visualization as a way to imagine in my mind perfect technique on the track. Before the race began, I would close my eyes and see the track; every corner and every jump. I would feel the handlebars in my grip and sway side to side as I flowed around the course with perfection.

The intellectualization of my intentions became the bedrock for the reconnection to my body after injury. And although I had no prior anatomy education, I could see in my mind the inner working of my skeletal, muscular and electrified neurological system.

I would imagine the color blue from my left big toe traveling up my leg, into my torso, filling my chest and swirling up my spine, through the injury site in my neck and into my brain. I did this with the color red, up my right leg, and the color yellow for my left arm, and green for my right. All these colors swirled in my mind and created a bright white energy that I forced throughout my body like a rainbow prism.

Days after Arielle painted my toes, it happened. Wiggle, wiggle… My left big, blue toe began to twitch. Again, I whispered to myself. The color blue was beaming through my body and down my left leg… Again! My mind was laser focused on the toe… Again! Like a spark plug, I exploded a neuro-chemical impulse from my brain into my body… Again!

I laid there staring at my blue toe, twitching it on command. Just then my mother entered the room. “Look! Look! Watch what I can do!” I was beaming with pride, excited to show my mom this new flicker of hope. She threw her hands in the air and yelled out “Yes! We can do this, buddy.” In that moment we both knew recovery was possible. To what extent, we had no idea.

I would show everyone that entered the room my new ability, proudly showing off my colorful toes. My toes became the focal point for conversations of optimism.

However, my neurosurgeon did not seem to be quite as excited as we were. On the contrary, he wanted to prescribe me medication to subdue the spasms in my muscles to “make me more comfortable.” I defiantly argued that although my muscles were spasming involuntarily, I could close my eyes and feel the contractions, connecting my mind to my body.

I refused to take any medication that would dull my senses or impair my ability to heal. I understood that my entire body was energy, and that every cell was intelligent. My job was not to lay passively in bed, numb on medication, but instead focus my mind and orchestrate the flow of kinetic energy throughout my body. I began to imagine healing with every breath. My mantra became “Thank you, body.”

– Excerpt from Painted Toes: The Art of Reconnecting to My Body After Spinal Cord Injury by Aaron Baker.

For more information about the art of visualization or to get your copy of Painted Toes, leave a message in the comments section below.

Best in Health,

Aaron