Written by someone
who's been living it

Landon

On May 18, 2013, I was 21 years old. It was a warm afternoon on Lake Maurepas — the kind of day you don't think twice about. I dove off the front of a pontoon boat and hit the water at the wrong angle. I broke my C3, C4, and C5 vertebrae in the front of my neck. I was airlifted to New Orleans.

The weeks and months that followed were a complete recalibration of what I thought my life would look like. My inpatient rehab was at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans — three months of relearning how to exist in a body that operated completely differently. I want to be direct: the doctors and staff at Touro during that rehab were exceptional. They taught me the fundamentals — how to direct my own care, how to communicate my needs clearly, how to start building something that looked like independence. If you or someone you love is facing inpatient SCI rehab in Louisiana, I would strongly recommend their team.

That's exactly what happened to me. There were programs I qualified for that I didn't find for months. Technology that could have genuinely changed my daily life — that I stumbled across years later by accident. Every single one of those gaps costs something real: independence, quality of life, and sometimes money spent on solutions that already existed for free.

With time, the technology has advanced in ways that continue to genuinely surprise me. When I got home in 2013, voice control was novelty. Today I can adjust my thermostat, lock my front door, open my blinds, control my TV, and raise my bed — all from my pillow, through a speaker on my nightstand. The gap between what's possible now versus then is extraordinary, and it keeps growing.

I built AccessWiki because someone should have handed me this website the day I left Touro. My purpose is simple: if you're newly injured, or if you've been living with paralysis for years and just haven't found the right tools yet, this is your shortcut. The research, the trial and error, the hours figuring out what actually works in real life — it's all here. Use it. Share it. That's the point.

I'm based in Baton Rouge, I'm a C3–4–5 quad, and I've been navigating this life for over 13 years. I'm not a doctor and I'm not a therapist. I'm just someone who figured a lot of this out the hard way and doesn't want you to have to.