Five months after a fall left him paralyzed, this doctor is walking again

It was just before Thanksgiving when Dr. Joseph Casarona woke up in the middle of the night in his century-old home in Cutchogue and accidentally stumbled down the winding stairwell from the third floor to the second.

He suffered a serious spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down.

Doctors at Stony Brook University Hospital hoped he would be able to walk again some day after surgery. But they were not sure.

Five months later, Casarona, 69, is leaving Emerge Nursing and Rehabilitation in Glen Cove this weekend — walking with the assistance of a cane.

Casarona, an addiction psychiatrist and neurologist, credits his recovery to the immediate surgery at Stony Brook after he was taken there by helicopter, top-notch rehabilitation, his own positive attitude and some luck.

“I’ve basically improved beyond my expectations and beyond their expectation,” he said, referring to rehabilitation staff. “I told people, ‘I’m going to beat this.’ And I did.”

Casarona estimates he has restored about half of his functionality — and is aiming for close to 100%.

Dr. Harry Mushlin, director of Complex Spine and Deformity at the Stony Brook Neurosurgery Spine Center, said he is impressed with Casarona’s comeback.

“He has made a really spectacular recovery,” said Mushlin, who performed the surgery on Casarona’s spinal cord injury. “I thought he might possibly walk. I just didn’t think it would be that quickly.”

Mushlin added, “It wasn’t like he was guaranteed to be paralyzed and then started walking ... but he went from being someone who might not walk ever again to walking within four months, and that’s a pretty miraculous recovery.”

Mushlin said Casarona probably falls into about the top 1% of patients for the speed of his recovery.

“There’s no guarantee that he was going to walk again,” Mushlin said. “He fell into the lucky group that does and he was lucky that it was such a good recovery.”

After his procedure at Stony Brook, Casarona spent about two weeks there in the neurosurgical intensive care unit and then was transferred to Rusk Rehabilitation at NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital in Manhattan, where he said he spent five weeks.

Then he went to the facility in Glen Cove for more rehab.

Casarona remembers the night of his accident with horror.

'As I fell to the ground I was already paralyzed. I couldn’t feel anything except my face.'

-Dr. Joseph Casarona

“As I fell to the ground I was already paralyzed. I couldn’t feel anything except my face,” he said.

For weeks after the surgery, Casarona "felt like lava was running through every nerve of my body," he said. “It was the most excruciating pain that I had ever experienced.”

He still feels the impact of the fall. He can only raise his arms about shoulder high, and has a tingling or numb sensation in his hands and feet.

Casarona can’t put on a shirt by himself, but can almost do buttons and zippers, and can put on his pants if they are loose like sweatpants. He can usually take care of his own basic hygiene but sometimes needs help.

The muscles in his hands were atrophied, but now they have strengthened, and he can use a phone with the help of a stylus device.

Casarona recalls that when he was in the ICU at Stony Brook, Mushlin and other doctors told him that if he worked hard he might get close to 100% of functionality back in about a year, he said.

“I survived and I’m functional right now,” he said. “I can’t be happy enough to be at this point where I’ve gotten maybe 45 to 50% of my life back.”

Casarona's positive attitude was critical to the recovery, he said.

“I’ve had multiple traumas in my life, which I have been able to resolve,” he said. “I just looked at this as one of the many that have been thrown to me by the universe that I had to work on.”