Kambah pensioner John Peers is hoping to go home soon after spending nearly two years in hospitals in London, Sydney and Canberra following a freak accident that left him paralysed from the chest down.
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Fairfax Media first reported on Mr Peers, 61, in August last year when he was recovering in the Canberra Hospital.
Mr Peers had been on a holiday financed by an inheritance from his mother in London on May 30, 2014, when he was paralysed in the accident in a London hotel.
He had simply sat on a chair to untie his shoelaces when his whole life changed. The chair was on rollers on a slippery floor and it shot out from under him, sending him backwards where he hit a desk and broke two vertebrae in his neck.
A subsequent operation fused his neck with screws and plates so he is unable to move his head
Mr Peers was treated at Charing Cross Hospital in London and later the Royal North Show and Prince of Wales hospitals in Sydney. Travel insurance covered his trip back to Australia by air ambulance.
He was transferred to the Canberra Hospital on May 11 last year.
Mr Peers last August appealed for help from The Canberra Times after he had been reclassified by the Canberra Hospital from an acute care patient to a "nursing home-type patient" and asked to pay for his care while in the public hospital.
Already a disability pensioner before his accident, Mr Peers said at the time that after meeting the costs of his care in the hospital, he would be left with $30 a week from his pension. He also believed he still required acute care.
The Canberra Hospital said at the time it was bound by Commonwealth laws to enforce the charges and encouraged Mr Peers to make an application to have the fees waived based on financial hardship.
In a new development, Mr Peers' partner, Vicki Lilley, told The Canberra Times this week that his financial hardship application had been approved and the costs had been waived.
It was some bright news for Mr Peers who in the meantime had contracted pneumonia and spent two months in the intensive care unit late last year.
He was now back in the rehabilitation ward and moves were now being made to allow him to go home with the assistance of carers.
Ms Lilley said a meeting was being held on Monday to work out his schedule of carers as he moved first into her home, which already had wheelchair modifications, and later into his own home once modifications had been made there.
"We hope the end is in sight," she said.
