In 1971, Ian Waterman was a butcher in Jersey. He’s 19 years old, new to his debut, and is pulling out all the stops to get the company going. Then he suddenly had a stomach flu. but it is not the truth. He became trembling and weak. Within days, he collapsed and was in the hospital, unable to move or feel his body.
He never regained that feeling, but despite the odds, he apparently made a miraculous recovery. Horizon tells the extraordinary story of Ian. Ian has developed a rare neurological disorder that doctors in Jersey have been unable to diagnose. It destroys all the sensory nerves responsible for the sense of touch and relaying information about the position of muscles and joints, which are so vital to our ability to move around the world that they are called the sixth sense.
Without this “proprioception,” we can’t have an internal sense of posture or body position, nor can we initiate or control movement. Ian was told he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. But Ian is not paralyzed, and he is determined to live as normal a life as possible.
