Help Jo

This is the story of a young mum who never thought that borrowing a friends makeup brush would be the beginning of a fight for her life.

Jo, a young single mum to 3 year old Tommy, contracted MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant form of golden staph. This infection invaded her body and eventually attacked her spine, leaving her paralysed from the waist and wheelchair-bound as a T1 paraplegic.

At 1am on the 22nd of February 2015, Jo was air lifted by RACQ Careflight from the Warwick Hospital to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, to under go life saving surgery to remove an CA-MRSA epidural abscess that was strangling her spinal cord from T3-T10. After the surgery, her doctors informed her that due to the extensive damage all they way down her spinal cord and swelling, she was now a T1 paraplegic and will be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Surgeons had to do a lumbar laminectomy to remove 5 bones in her spine because the abscess had turned them septic. She was told due to the severity of the infection, had it been left roughly 1 hour longer her spinal cord would have been severed at T6 and 2 hours longer and she wouldn't have survived.

Jo spent 4 months undergoing a gruelling rehabilitation program in the spinal ward of the Princess Alexandra hospital in Brisbane, but the hardest part was being away from her little boy Tommy.

Initially told she would never walk again, her best-case outlook is she may one day be able to walk an hour or two a day. She will never again have control of her bowel or bladder. Never again will she be able to chase her little boy around the yard.

Being the remarkable young lady she is, with so much strength, courage and determination, Jo has learnt to walk again slowly and for only 1-2 hours a day - an accomplishment that doctors told her may never be possible. However, still faces the reality of being wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life.

Jo's journey has not ended, after she left spinal ward of the PA hospital, on 29/06/2015. She has on-going rehabilitation and medical costs for the rest of her life. She needs to keep up physiotherapy sessions and care for her young son while making sure her health is not affected and being able to find funding for all the extra costs involved in this drastic life change.

Our aim is to raise some much needed funds for Jo and Tommy to help ease the worries they are faced with and provide Jo with vital financial support for her on going medical and recovery expenses.