'Rare condition left me unable to breathe or talk for six weeks'

An avid skateboarder who was diagnosed with a rare condition which left him in hospital for four months, where he lost 30kg and spent six weeks unable to “breathe or talk or move”, has transformed his passion into creating colourful sculptures from recycled decks after being left unable to walk without pain.

Nicholas Harding, 42, from Bristol, was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) in 2019, a serious condition in which a person’s immune system attacks the nervous system, leaving him in hospital “in intense pain”. He recalled being in intensive care and “locked in”, where he experienced full-body paralysis but his mind was awake, which he described as “horror movie stuff”.

His doctors told him he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and unable to walk, with skateboarding completely off the table, but Nicholas said he “rejected (his) prognosis”. Five years on, he has relearned to speak, walk, eat and roll on a skateboard and to get his “fix” he has been creating sculptures from recycled decks since 2020 and is on the verge of turning his artwork into a small business on Etsy.

“It’s about trying to find some beauty in amongst the tragedy,” Nicholas said. “All the broken skateboards and all my broken muscles, I can still do something that has some value.”

Nicholas said he got his first skateboard for Christmas when he was around seven or eight years old, but he didn’t start taking the activity “seriously” until his teenage years.

“Since the age of 17, pretty much every day of my life I’ve tried to skateboard, so it was about 20 years of skateboarding,” he said. “For me, it changed the way I see the world, so all of a sudden there’s a lot of value in places that people overlook. Whether it’s a kerb in a parking lot, or a bench in a park, or a handrail, the potential for these previously inanimate objects changes.”

He added that skateboarding was like a “tsunami of cool” in the way it enriched his life.

“It’s given me a broadening of my social and political horizons and everything else really, all sorts of people like to skateboard, so in terms of music and culture that comes with it, it’s like a tsunami of cool. It’s a toy but it means so much more than that. It was always my private little happy place – being on my skateboard is instant clarity.”

At the age of 37, Nicholas said he had started to feel unwell, but realised something was “seriously” wrong when he was unable to lift himself out of the bath. “I was feeling poorly for a couple of weeks, I’d been to the doctors a couple of times and I’d actually had the paramedics to my house in the middle of the night because I knew something wasn’t right,” he said.

“I’d had a very sore left leg for a couple of weeks and I’d had a hot bath to try and ease the pain. After 10 minutes in the bath, I couldn’t physically lift myself out and that’s when I knew something was seriously, seriously wrong. It was a scary moment.”

Nicholas said by the time he got to A&E, five minutes from his house, he could not walk: “I was in the waiting room for less than 10 minutes and by the time I was taken through to see the consultant, I was losing the ability to speak and breathe and I was slumping, all my muscles had gone.”

Nicholas said he was rushed to the intensive care unit (ICU) where he was intubated and had paralysis in his upper and lower body: "The first 15 days in ICU I was awake, I was what’s called ‘locked in’, so fully tetraplegic, and I couldn’t breathe or talk or move, but mentally I was awake, I wasn’t sleeping,” he said.

“That was the scariest part, it was horror movie stuff being unable to move or talk or in any way help myself, but feeling the most intense pain you can imagine and being drugged out of your mind – it’s quite a combination. I had contracted triple pneumonia, I lost a tooth, I was blind in one eye, which the GBS specialists had never seen before.”

After 15 days in the ICU, Nicholas was sedated and fully ventilated for six weeks. He added that GBS starts in the fingers and feet and “works its way to your core”.

“It starts with tingling and then it’s the most intense pain I can describe,” he said. “The symptoms go from one to six – one is mild tingles, six is dead, and I would have been six if it wasn’t for the NHS and the life support system they had me on.”

After spending four months in hospital, Nicholas had lost around 30kg and described himself as “a skeleton”, but after a further three months in care, he began putting on weight and returned home.

“They told me I wouldn’t be walking again, I’d probably need a colostomy bag. I’d get the use of my arms and upper body back but everything else was extremely unlikely,” he said. “As soon as I was told I wouldn’t be able to do skateboard, that’s what kind of what lit the fire for me.”

Nicholas has regained strength in his hands and arms but said he has almost no strength in his feet and lower legs. “I can walk, I can ride a bicycle, but it hurts because I’ve got so much nerve damage,” he said. “Walking for me is like having my toenails pulled out and walking on Lego – that’s the way I would describe it.”

Nicholas said he has been “really focused” on his recovery, which includes physical therapy, mindfulness, breathing exercises and nutrition. He added that his partner, who used to be a personal trainer and is a professional dancer, will give him muscle exercises for his lower body.

“It sounds funny, but a lot of the rehabilitation for my feet will be ballet training exercises because it’s all lower leg and strengthening the ankles and feet,” he said.

During the first Covid-19 lockdown in the summer of 2020, Nicholas started to create sculptures from his old skateboards. “I did it just for myself to try and give myself something to do,” he said.

“There’s a harmony with the skateboards and myself in doing this. I’m trying to keep myself out of the bin, I don’t want to be finished, I don’t want to be put on the shelf and told ‘no more’, so I’m doing this with the toys that have been told the same thing. I started with my decks, which I got through pretty quick, then I started asking friends if they had any old skateboards they’d be willing to part with and it snowballed from there really.”

To create the sculptures, Nicholas cuts out the middle and flat section of the deck into two or four panels, stacking the pieces of wood on top of each other before carving and cutting shapes into the structure. He said each piece takes between three days and three weeks to create, from cleaning the boards to the final product, and he has made more than 300 to date.

“I’m only just getting strong enough now to have the control of the tools to finely detail my work,” he said. “You can see in my work the clear progression because my physical ability is catching up to my idea. I still haven’t made what I want to make, but every single time I make something, I get closer to that idea and get physically stronger as well.”

To find out more, visit Nicholas’s shop on Etsy at www.etsy.com/uk/shop/MobiusMaples