‘My soul suffocated’: The moment Dinesh Palipana realised he had been paralysed
After Dinesh Palipana was in a terrible car accident, he tried to open the car door to escape and realised he couldn’t. Now an ED doctor, he has opened up about that moment and how it transformed his life - for the better.
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Dinesh Palipana knows he is unrealistic.
He was unrealistic about resuming his medical degree after sustaining a spinal cord injury with quadriplegia. He was unrealistic about working as a doctor in the country’s busiest hospital emergency department. He is currently unrealistic about curing paralysis.
Realistic has never been in his playbook.
Being doggedly unrealistic and even unreasonable, however, has seen Palipana,
who barely escaped with his life in a 2010 car accident that damaged his spinal cord, emerge
a Gold Coast-based emergency room doctor, lawyer, medical researcher and disability advocate.
In 2021, Palipana (OAM) was Queensland’s Australian of the Year. In February, he skydived in Byron Bay; in May he modelled at Australian Fashion Week; last month he logged his first flying hours in a Foxbat aircraft.
He gives hundreds of speaking engagements with an international profile, is the doctor for the Gold Coast Titans physical disability rugby team, a senior adviser to the Disability Royal Commission, the co-founder of advocacy
and support organisation Doctors with Disabilities and, in three weeks this year, he wrote his first book.
Palipana has no time to waste because he knows how precious life is and how, on the turn of a dime, everything can change.
Palipana, 37, has fearlessly fought and scraped and determinedly pushed himself “through the hardest and darkest of times’’ to achieve what most people assumed was impossible.
He has reframed his life and perspective into what he does have, not what he doesn’t; into what he can do, not what he can’t.
He regards his accident and his quadriplegia as a turning point in his life for the better because, from losing everything, Palipana believes he has ultimately emerged stronger, more capable and happier. It has, he says, made him a better doctor and a better, more sensitive, compassionate human being.
In his autobiography, titled Stronger, which will be released this month, Palipana declares: “I’m the lucky one.”
“Even though I might not have always seen it then, the challenging parts have been ultimately good for me,’’ he says.
“After all, you can’t make a sword without forging metal in a fire.’’
On January 31, 2010, Palipana, a third-year medical student at Griffith University, was visiting his parents, Chithrani and Sanath Palipana, at their Burpengary home, north of Brisbane. He had dinner and then hugged his mum goodbye – the last thing he ever did while standing up.
It was a rainy night and Palipana was driving just under the speed limit when his 2004 Nissan X-Trail aquaplaned on a “shiny black slick’’ of a puddle on the Gateway Motorway, mounted a roadside embankment, the nose of the car then striking the tarmac.
It “flew through the air, nose to tail’’ and, when it landed, Palipana looked down to see his white T-shirt soaked in blood.
He felt no fear or pain. But when he tried to move to open the car’s door handle, he couldn‘t. Then, in a terrible moment of realisation, he describes how his “soul suffocated’’ as he realised his life would never be the same again.
“A thousand thoughts raced through my mind. In those seconds, my life changed forever,’’ he says.
The first emergency vehicle on the scene was a fire truck that also lost control after hitting the black slick on the road. It slid straight past his car before reversing back.
Palipana was conscious throughout the ordeal – while being cut from his car with the jaws of life and during his roadside treatment.
Lying in the ambulance, Palipana looked up and saw the face of his tending trauma paramedic, who he immediately recognised as Queensland Ambulance Service medical director Dr Stephen Rashford, who only months before had presented a lecture as part of Palipana’s medical studies at uni.
Rashford’s lecture and expertise of the “pointy end’’ of medicine had been something of a lightbulb moment for Palipana, sparking his early interest in trauma and emergency medicine.
And so Palipana looked up at Rashford and said to him, “You lectured me not long ago’’, all while Rashford worked to stabilise his body from the injuries that were perilously close to claiming his life.
Rashford told him: “Everything will be OK.
If you want to get back to medicine after this, you’ll find a way.’’ Palipana says, of his now extensive – and not always positive – experience of being a patient, that he remembers how doctors and medical physicians have made him feel. Rashford, in that moment, made him feel
at ease.
In hospital, Palipana was stabilised for surgery.
He also remembers a doctor, he presumes was the anaesthesiologist, telling him: “You’re very badly injured. I can’t guarantee you’ll wake up from this’’. This time, he felt terrified.
Palipana was operated on by trauma surgeon Professor Michael Schuetz who opened Palipana’s throat to access his spine from the front. His spine was put back into place and secured by two screws; bone was taken from his hip and grafted to his spine.
Paralysed from the chest down, he spent eight months in Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital. After rehabilitation, he can now move his arms and wrists but not his fingers.
Palipana was born in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 1984, just a year after the country fell into civil war that ultimately dragged on until 2009.
His father was an engineer for the civil service and the family moved around a lot for his job, from populated metropolitan areas to a small fishing town.
While Palipana describes his overall childhood memories of Sri Lanka as good ones, he also experienced horrifying scenes of war – people beheaded, others being burnt alive inside tall stacks of tyres, the heads of people on stakes lining the road.
The family left Sri Lanka in 1994, applying successfully to migrate to Australia under a skilled migration scheme, and landing in Sydney on Palipana’s 10th birthday. His half- sister, who didn’t grow up with him in Sri Lanka, also moved to Australia with the family.
They moved to Byron Bay in 1995 and then to Burpengary, north of Brisbane, and Palipana began Grade 11 at nearby Morayfield State High School.
In 2003, he began law school at Queensland University of Technology where he found himself drawn in by “the trappings of society’’ – a pretty girlfriend, his black Nissan 300ZX car and night-life.
He also began struggling mentally. In a competitive environment, without a well-developed sense of self, Palipana says his goals became superficial and he developed debilitating depression, anxiety, panic attacks and agoraphobia.
He found his mental health struggles so debilitating, Palipana now says, having dealt with both depression and physical paralysis, that depression paralysed him more than his spinal cord injury ever did.
Ultimately, it was his medical treatment for depression that turned him towards a medical career, realising that doctors’ help had changed his world.
Medicine was a career, he says, that he could “use my head and my heart to help anyone, anywhere’’.
And so, after graduating with his law degree, he started medical school at Griffith University in 2008. (Palipana completed a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice and an internship between his emergency department shifts to be officially admitted as a lawyer in 2019).
In the year after his accident, Palipana’s parents separated (“My dad walked away and we didn’t have any money’’) and he and his mum moved back to Sri Lanka to be closer to a family support network. He says he hasn’t seen or heard from his half-sister or father for “many years’’.
Palipana describes his mum, 59, who practises the martial arts sport Muay Thai, as a “lion-hearted lady’’ who is “a fighter in spirit and in body’’.
“She’s strong, courageous, persistent, feisty, who is full of patience and love,’’ he says.
“Whatever I wanted to do, she made it happen. No dream was too big, no vision too bold. She fought for us, for me. She’s always been there for me. She has actually set the bar very high for humanity.’’
After four years, in November 2014, Palipana and his mum returned to Queensland and Palipana recommenced his medical degree, becoming the first medical graduate with quadriplegia in Queensland and the second in Australia.
It wasn’t easy. Some of his peers, now ahead of him in their training, ignored him and talked down to him.
During his surgical rotation, he says he was mocked and belittled and bullied daily by a female non-training surgical registrar.
After graduating in 2016, Palipana was the only Queensland medical graduate without an offer of employment. He was eventually employed by the Gold Coast University Hospital as the state’s first quadriplegic intern.
He says he still faces “attitudinal barriers’’ within the medical profession from an estimated 5 per cent or less of the “establishment’’ who are not inclusive and will ask “how can a person with a disability do this?’’.
Palipana is now a principal house officer in the hospital’s emergency department, working with his girlfriend of more than a year, Scottish-born fellow emergency doctor, Chiara Ventre, 29. He also teaches students as a senior lecturer at Griffith’s School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Serendipity. When something accidentally fallsinto place so perfectly, it was like it was always meant to be.
It is something Palipana has experienced several times in his dream of finding a cure for paralysis.
Firstly, there was a chance meeting in a lift that saw Palipana strike up a friendship and then research partnership with Italian biomedical engineer Dr Claudio Pizzolato (he used to live down the hall from Palipana in the same apartment building during his final years of medical school).
Their BioSpine program – using thought control, electrical stimulation and drug therapy – aims to transform the way spinal injury patients are rehabilitated and attempt to restore function in paralysis.
In 2018, Palipana gave a talk at the annual conference of the Australian Lawyers Alliance. Motor Accident Insurance Commission (MAIC) boss Neil Singleton was in the audience and it ultimately led to MAIC providing a $2m grant to the BioSpine project, based out of Griffith University.
In a chance conversation, Palipana learned that MAIC also provided funding to the Jamieson Trauma Institute (JTI), at Brisbane’s Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, headed by trauma surgeon Professor Michael Schuetz, the surgeon who operated on Palipana on the night of his car accident.
And so almost a decade later, Palipana and Schuetz met up again in 2019 and they have now, serendipitously, struck up their own spinal research work at JTI in what Palipana says is an amazing, “full circle’’ collaboration.
“When I met Michael again, it was so surreal, it was like coming full circle,’’ Palipana says.
“To see the guy who fixed my spine that night and to talk to him, it was a fairly emotional moment.
“We talked about what happened, the journey I’ve had and about the work he was doing … that’s how we started working together.’’
His work with Schuetz will look at how the care and outcomes of spinal trauma can be improved.
They aim to build a database and “data dictionary’’, working with Canadian data company Praxis, that will include data such as demographics, mode of injury (such as motor vehicle accident or fall), what type of surgery, complications, rehabilitation and outcome after discharge.
It is hoped the database will expand nationally and internationally.
“There is a lack of data that informs how we can build better systems and how we can build better care,’’ Palipana says.
“To our knowledge, there is no neurosurgery database which is being built and no spinal trauma database.
“Having good data is a really important start and by using that we will be able to optimise a lot of things in the care of spinal trauma patients. We want to build something that can improve the outcomes for people with spinal trauma.’’
Schuetz says Palipana brings a unique perspective to spinal trauma research in terms of his experience with his own spinal injury and being both a patient and doctor.
“He is the perfect man for it. Dinesh understands the challenges of cord injury in the community, in the hospitals, daily. You can’t read about it, you have to understand it,’’ he says.
“Knowing patients with those kinds of disabilities, to achieve what Dinesh has achieved is phenomenal. It’s quite exceptional. Only a few people worldwide have these kinds of injuries and this energy.
“Everyone has a story, but what Dinesh has made out of his story – that’s the exception.’’
True, meaningful perspective often only comes when life takes an unexpected turn, when something or someone is lost, when life changes in a devastating and permanent way.
In this respect, Palipana has perspective in bucket loads – from the shocking scenes of war he saw as a child, to the fortunate country in which he now lives, his mental health struggles and the catastrophic car accident that stripped everything away.
Palipana is today determined, ambitious, gracious, kind, optimistic and fulfilled. He laughs easily. He dreams big. He counts his blessings. He loves life. He plans to squeeze every last drop out of each and every day. “We need to be fearless. We need to dream big. We must be unrealistic. Unreasonable,’’ Palipana says.
“Anger can destroy us. If we hold on too tight, it destroys us from within. I try to reframe it into what I do have, rather than what I don’t.
“I’m grateful for simple things. I don’t think about things I don’t have.
“When I wake up in the morning I think about it … I’m alive, I’ve got my mum, I’ve got a roof over my head, I have food, I have a great job that I love.
“I feel very fortunate to be living here and to have had access to all the things that I do. I’m very grateful for life and for the journey I’ve had so far. It’s made me who I am.
“I previously thought that the spinal cord injury meant that I was going to miss out on life. (But) disability didn’t mean inability. I realised that I could have something far better than I ever imagined.’’
On the 12th anniversary of his accident on January 31 this year, Palipana posted to Instagram: “12 years unparalysed. Nothing is guaranteed. I am the master of my fate. On day one, I would have done anything to have my life back. On day 4,383, I love every minute of this blessed life.’’
Stronger by Dinesh Palipana, published by Pan Macmillan Australia, is out Tuesday (July 26)
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