Take It Lying Down: Finding My Feet After a Spinal Cord Injury

"A stunning account."—Kirkus, starred review

“This profoundly literate memoir of courage stuns and moves, and in its ferocious honesty, delights.”—Mark Medoff, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Children of a Lesser God

Take It Lying Down is “a movingly intricate weave—a detailed and poetic chronicle of healing against all odds, an intense love story, a narrative of a young man’s journey from Maine to New Mexico and adulthood, and a book of literary inspiration and wisdom . . . this is not a medical book, not a self-help book: it’s a literate, occasionally theatrical, surprisingly buoyant, always philosophical and compelling journey through one man’s life.”?From the Foreword by Len Jenkin

Six months shy of retirement and on a family vacation in Mexico, Jim Linnell steps off the porch of a rented guest house and breaks his neck. He is medevacked to his hometown hospital in Albuquerque and from there to a spinal cord injury hospital in Denver, where he learns he may live the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. How does a person absorb such news?

Jim’s injury is incomplete: He has a two-year window for improvement. After three months of rehabilitation at the hospital, he and his wife, Jennifer, return to their home with an armada of equipment for his therapy, a heavy dose of anxiety about how they will manage together, and many unanswerable questions: Will Jim get better? What kind of future will they have? Can they move past denial to accept the possibility that Jim may remain a quadriplegic?

Take It Lying Down portrays a man reclaiming his life from catastrophe—it is a book of exemplary courage.