“I’ve Been In Pain My Whole Life. If I’m Going To Get Hurt Surfing, So Be It.”
Jade Morgan recounts his latest spinal injury + the art of living with a body that refuses to stay intact.
“I just went straight to the bottom on my back, and this very uneven rock just went right into my spine. And I just folded around it.”
Jade Morgan has just endured his second serious spinal hit in a life that seems to run on a steady loop of them.
For those needing a refresher, Jade is 28, originally from Encinitas, but has spent the past two and a half years on Australia’s South Coast, sniffing out waves that seem specifically designed to rearrange vertebrae. He’s cut from the Tai Buddha–Mikala Jones cloth: chasing heavy, isolated set ups, for whatever strange compulsion drives a man to risk paralysis for pleasure. These days he works full-time to bankroll the pursuit.
A few days back, he was surfing Big Rock, La Jolla, a wave that feels about as Californian as a Russian winter, when he got folded like an old lawn chair. Bent backwards the wrong way, he was left to stew in the water for an hour, his surfboard a makeshift stretcher, until help eventually came.
“It was kind of a weird day, really solid, but not really doing it,” Jade says. “I was just waiting an hour between waves for the sets, and every set I got just had this weird shoulder on it. So then I was like, oh, I’ll just go for an insider, and I pulled into this barrel and it went dry on me. And I tried to get through the last section and high line it, but it just like flipped me upside down. I went straight to the bottom on my back.”
He was bent the way nobody should be bent, unless you’re on the receiving end of an old-school rack torture. The pain, sudden and intense, was a feeling he’d known before.
“There was too much impact for something not to be wrong,” says Jade. “I pretty much had the same feeling as I did last time I broke my back. I just knew something was wrong right away.”
His first spinal injury came surfing a remote wave in Big Sur. With nobody around and no cell service, he was forced to paddle himself in, crawl to shore, climb a cliff, and hike back to the road, all with a broken back.
“I was by myself and got dry-docked trying to duck dive,” Jade remembers. “I was surfing a wave that only breaks on a king tide, so it’s usually exposed rock. I got caught trying to duck dive, had to bail my board, and push through the wave on my feet — but it just pancaked me straight onto the reef.”
Luckily, San Diego ain’t exactly off the beaten track, so this time around, there were people around to help.
The first person he called out to, as luck would have it, was a lifeguard. He got to him fast, slapped him into the spinal safety position, and floated him there for the next 45 minutes, all the while four other lifeguards materialised from the ether.
Still, thanks to the conditions, Jade had to wait, bobbing in the water for an hour before a boat showed up to haul him out.
“The first guy wanted to swim me in, but there was too much lump on the inside to make it happen,” says Jade. “So, they decided to call the lifeguard boat. But when they did, they realised the C-spine board was too big — getting me on was gonna be too challenging. So, they had to call in the big boat, the fire boat. It’s called the Triton, and the nose of it slides down, so they just slid me straight up onto that thing and then got me aboard.”
It was aboard the Triton where Jade finally got his hands on some pain medication, after marinating in what he calls “9 out of 10 pain,” only managing to hold it together by breathing like a monk on speed. They rushed him straight to the hospital after that, where he spent the next two days getting scans.
Luckily, after the first inspection, his spine seemed to be intact — aside from severe bone bruising and trauma to the sacrum and lumbar, where he’d taken his last hit. But when the MRIs eventually came back, the picture wasn’t quite as reassuring.
“Looking at the spine, everything’s pretty solid up in the cervical and thoracic,” he says. “But when you get to the lumbar, the lower L4, L5, and S1, they were all pretty discoloured. They didn’t have that clean, white look like the rest of the spine. They looked dead. And, unfortunately, all the discs between L4, L5 and L5, S1 were severely herniated, pushed out, and just pressing right onto the nerve.”
After his last injury, Jade spent years wrestling with nerve pain, burning through every form of physical therapy on offer. Nothing worked, until a 10-day silent retreat, of all things, finally did.
“I basically became a monk for 10 days,” he says. “You just sit there in lotus pose, no physical contact, no eye contact, no phones, no technology — straight-up monk mode for 10 days. I sat in pain the entire time. I’ve never been in so much pain. It felt like I was re-breaking my back over and over. But when it ended, the pain stopped. It was the craziest feeling. And I haven’t had that nerve pain since.”
Unfortunately, this time around, it looks like spinal surgery is unavoidable. Surgery always comes with risk, which is why Jade spent years last time trying to fix himself without the knife, eventually resorting to ten days of monk-like stillness in search of an answer. This time, though, he figures there’s no other option. The plan is to bring the dead parts of his spine back to life by cutting some of it away. Sometimes you’ve got to prune the tree to keep it standing.
If all goes well, shaving a little bone should stop it from jabbing the nerves. If it doesn’t, well, Jade’s built a sort of stoic, slightly masochistic rapport with pain.
“I’ve been in pain my whole life,” he says. “If I’m going to get hurt surfing, so be it. At least I’m doing what I love. Unfortunately, I really like waves that are kind of scary and critical — usually over reef. So I just have to accept that. I’m definitely not going to stop. It’s what brings me joy.”
“Fuck, I’ve had so many times in my life where things have been taken away from me,” he finishes. “I got in a really bad accident when I was 17 — I had to relearn how to walk, talk, eat, drink, and breathe again. So I’m used to it. But my cup’s full now. I’ve had so many good days of surfing in my life. I guess now I can take some time to just re-live those.”
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