Tara Moss never stopped holding on to hope.
Despite suffering from an agonising condition dubbed ‘the suicide disease’, the bestselling author dreamed that one day she would walk again free from agony.
And finally, Tara’s courage and persistence have been rewarded.
WATCH NOW: What is CRPS? Article continues after video.
In an emotional milestone moment shared on social media, the outspoken disability advocate was able to climb a flight of stairs on her own after more than seven years of chronic pain.
“I walked up stairs this week using a backpack. Stairs. It didn’t hurt,” the glamorous former model, private eye, broadcaster and public speaker gushed in a recent Instagram post.
“Such a simple thing was, to me, a true miracle. I was so happy to be upright again, but I honestly didn’t dream that I could one day be walking any distance without a mobility aid, let alone up stairs.”
At long last, Tara is in remission from complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) following two-and-a-half months of treatment at a specialist US medical facility in Arkansas.
Now the brave mother of one can stop using her brightly painted wheelchair and set down the walking stick she nicknamed ‘Wolfie’.
“What a remarkable time in my life,” the 49-year-old wrote, announcing that she was now in zero pain following around 165 hours of “treatments, care, pain and miracles” at Spero Clinic.
“What I’ve already experienced beats all the odds. I am so grateful for this moment after almost eight years of profound dizziness, brain fog, fatigue, mobility impairment, and constant excruciating pain I was told would never end.”
WATCH NOW: Walk the talk with Tara Moss. Article continues after video.
The Canadian-Australian writer and activist first developed CRPS – a mysterious condition that involves abnormal inflammation or nerve dysfunction – following a hip injury back in 2016.
Then living in the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney, Tara started to experience “a cold fire” throughout her body, firstly in her right hip, spreading up her leg and eventually throughout her right side.
Her nervous system became so over-sensitive that the merest touch of a feather would often trigger hours of torture.
“It’s like having your body in a bucket of ice that you can’t get out of,” she told Mia Freedman’s No Filter podcast just last year.
“But it changes all the time and varies in intensity, so every day I’m just managing the pain as well as possible.”
Over the decades, Tara has been no stranger to misfortune and tragedy – the premature passing of her beloved mother in 1990, a traumatic sexual assault when she was only 21 and two failed marriages.
Today, however, the future looks bright and pain free, at home in Canada with husband Berndt Sellheim, an Australian poet, photographer and author, along with their 12-year-old daughter Sapphira.
Recently, a jubilant Tara exulted online, “Healing is a process. That means my family will have to leave me [at the clinic] so Sapphira can get to school next month. That’s so important.”
“But when it’s hard I will remember this: For the first time in years I got to walk with my girl. And it didn’t hurt … there are no words.”
