17/09/2025
👩👦👩❤️👨 Post 3 – Family Pillars 👩👦👩❤️👨
💞 Part 3 of my journey for Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month. The family love that carried me when I couldn’t carry myself.
“Family: The Pillars That Held Me Up”
When my world fell apart in 2007 after my spinal cord injury, I quickly realized that survival is never a solo journey. Behind every step I took, behind every fight I fought, there stood my family.
First, my mother, my earliest pillar of strength. When doctors and nurses told my parents not to waste money on me, my mom refused to give up. During one of my reviews, a senior neurologist looked at me and said, “Tabury, you are alive because of your mother.” And it was true.
She spent lot of Ghana cedis at the time (2007), I mean lot of cedis to keep me alive. She sold properties, just to pay my hospital bills and treatments.
My parents were the major importers of Kako into the country from Gambia, Senegal, and Mauritania, distributing it to market women across the country. They also imported outboard motors, which were distributed to fishermen along the coast from Benin to Ivory Coast. Many of these fishermen paid with shark fins from the sharks they caught, and the fins were later exported to Hong Kong. Because of these businesses, they knew many people.
And my mother followed every lead the market women and fishermen gave her, hospitals, churches, herbal homes, anywhere healing was said to be found. She even took me outside Ghana to some African countries.
At one point, some fisherfolk directed her to Egyam village in the Western Region, a traditional medicine home. When she took me there, there was no room to accommodate me, so she built a one-room furnished shelter just so I could stay and receive treatment. That was the kind of love and sacrifice she carried on her shoulders.
Later into my journey, I met the woman who would become my wife. She didn’t know me before the injury, she met me in the middle of it. And still, she chose me. She saw my scars, my struggles, my reality but she stayed. Today, as my wife and the mother of my child, she is proof that love can flourish even in the most difficult places.
And together, through their unwavering love, I found one of life’s greatest blessings, fatherhood. Looking into my child’s eyes reminds me that even from pain, beauty can rise. Even from limitation, legacy can be born.
Family is not just about blood. It is about those who hold you when you fall, those who stay when others walk away, and those who remind you that life is still worth living.
To every spinal cord injury survivor: you are not alone. Lean on the ones who love you, because sometimes their strength will carry you until your own returns.
By: Baffour Awuah Tabury
