All Mark Pollock Blogs
Up, dressed and smiling again
Another 4 a.m. start to the week. It doesn’t seem to matter if I take the sleeping tablets or not – I wake early in the morning. For three and a half months I have dreaded going to sleep at night knowing that I will face the lonely hours between waking up and the day […]
Emerging from Hell
I woke at 4 a.m. Silence has replaced the menagerie of beeps and alarms and groans of my open-plan home for the last couple of months. I am spending my first night in the rehab ward and the initial difference from the acute ward is the sound. For the moment I am in a single […]
Another Rehab False Start
I felt the blood drain from my face. My arms lost feeling and I knew I was on my way out. Fainting is part of the transition from bed to wheelchair, the first step to rehab. It is caused in part by the blood draining from the top half of my body into my dormant […]
Blind Man Walking. RTE 1, Tonight, 10:30pm.
Our South Pole Race documentary is on tonight. It tells the story of my attempt to deal with my loss of sight by racing to the south pole – ten years on from going blind. My broken back and future uncertainty takes nothing from the moment in time captured by Ross Whitaker (film maker) . […]
Adding Paralysis To Blindness
Unbroken by blindness in 1998, Mark went on to compete in ultra endurance races around the world. In 2010 he was left paralysed after falling from a second story window. He is now exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide and catalysing collaborations that have never been done before. Through the Mark Pollock Trust, […]
By Endurance We Conquer
Two weeks ago the surgeons cleared my spine of broken bone and stabilised the vertebrae with titanium rods and screws. They also decompressed my spinal cord. They did not find out if I will get any feeling or movement back below my belly button. They couldn’t. But I knew that before the surgery. […]