The son of Kate Sylvester and Wayne Conway tells The Spinoff about fashioning a new identity and moving forward.
It’s been a year since Tom Conway broke his neck. January 25 was the official anniversary, one the 25-year-old Aucklander describes as a “huge milestone”. We’re sitting in a back corner of the Sylvester workroom, where he goes twice a week to visit his brothers, Ike and Cosmo, and their parents. It’s a far cry from the Auckland Spinal Rehabilitation Unit, where he was this time last year.
It was a “penguin dive” into the family pool that put him there. Diving with his arms at his side to protect a dislocation-prone shoulder was something Conway had done countless times before. On this occasion he hit his head on the pool floor, causing a complete fracture of the C7 vertebra. He couldn’t move anything below his shoulders and couldn’t swim to the surface. His friends saved him, diving in and pulling him from the water. Conway was rushed to Middlemore Hospital for emergency surgery: removing vertebrae fragments, adding screws and a bone graft. After a week in ICU and another in a ward he moved to the Auckland Spinal Rehabilitation Unit.
Conway stayed there for three and a half months – the unit has 20 inpatient beds – for rehabilitation following his injury. There he learned how to live with a spinal cord injury, got set up with assistive equipment and worked on regaining movement. His days were a mixture of physiotherapy, education, occupational therapy and medical examinations. Something was always beeping. He’d count down the time until his discharge date.
When he eventually did leave, home was somewhere completely new – a duplex that offered more space, augmented with ramps and a more spacious bathroom. “I thought everything would be better because I was at home, but it was actually way harder.” Amidst the adjustment period were a couple of difficult weeks when he realised this injury was forever: he’s paralysed from the chest down.
Conway’s come a long way in one year. “When I woke up, I couldn’t use my hands at all.” They slowly started waking up and in July he underwent nerve transfer surgery on both arms to gain more function. “Now I can grip things and pick things up. And that should continue to evolve over the next five years. [It’s] fairly new surgery, so I’m lucky that I could have had that.”
He could barely speak after his first spinal surgery, which affected his throat, but his voice came back too.
An expressive, energetic talker, Conway gestures frequently with arms and hands – movement he still has control of. He gets around with the help of a wheelchair, taking the bus and being driven by car, which he relies on a wooden board to transfer in and out of. He hates people touching his wheelchair without his consent. “That happens all the time,” says Conway. “Don’t help me unless I ask.”
These days he wakes up at 6.30am and meditates. His support worker arrives at 7am to get him ready for the day, which takes an hour and a half. Then there’s an hour of stretching and mobilisation – he’s at risk of muscle atrophy and joint freezing – another hour of standing, then shoulder rehab. “If it weren’t for my bloody shoulder, I wouldn’t have broken my neck.”
He attends the Training for Independence programme at Rope Neuro Rehabilitation in Grey Lynn twice a week, where functional electrical stimulation (FES) helps retrain his nerve pathways and stimulate his muscles. A whole day is devoted to “cognitively exhausting” hand movement. Hydrotherapy is his favourite time of the week; Conway still loves swimming. Core strength exercises show some of his abdominal muscles are working – “little by little changes” – and two weeks ago movement was detected in his glutes.
The first few months after the accident he couldn’t even sit up; the spinal cord injury made controlling his blood pressure difficult. “Now I can stand for an hour and maintain a safe blood pressure.” He hopes to progress from a standing frame to leg braces. “Then hopefully by the time I get married, I will be able to stand for a short period.” (Conway proposed to his partner earlier this year. “Her support is unparalleled.”)
With much of Conway’s time spent in the house, his environment has a profound impact. Conway and his fiancee Isabelle Carson have a kitten, Agnes, who keeps him company. “I’d never been a cat person, but it turned out to be the best thing ever.” She’s always on his lap.
It’s important that home is somewhere he’s happy. “We’ve curated it so much. Every square centimetre of it is beautiful to look at.” There’s a “really meaningful piece of art”, a piece of limestone carved into a C7 vertebrae by Conway’s mate, Cole Cranswick. Another work, photographs of german shepherds, is by Elijah Broughton – the friend who pulled Conway from the pool as he was drowning. “He saved my life. The dogs look after me.”
Broughton wasn’t Conway’s only saviour. “I had a couple of other friends who were there that night and dragged me out,” he explains. “I’m so lucky to have them.” On his anniversary they all went to Sandringham restaurant Satya and reminisced. “It’s good to talk about, because for a while it was traumatic to remember. But I’ve kind of overcome that, and now I can feel grateful for the way things turned out.”
That took work too – a transformative two hours with his psychologist unpacking that fateful evening. “Every moment of it, everything I could remember, how that made me feel.” After that, addressing it became easier. “It doesn’t provoke that fight or flight feeling that it would before; I’d get into a loop of experiencing that over and over again.”
Ongoing psychology and meditation have been vital. “Those two tools have kind of given me the means to stay afloat.” Conway pauses and corrects himself. “Not just afloat. I feel like I’m thriving.”
While Conway can’t work yet, he visits the family workroom a couple of times a week, where his twin Ike and brother Cosmo are busy with the Sylvester label, which relaunched in April 2025.
Originally a sister line to their mother Kate Sylvester’s namesake brand, which announced its closure in 2024, Sylvester was revived by the three brothers soon after. “It was all pretty much ready to go. Then the injury happened,” says Conway. “So that was pretty devastating, watching it from the sideline, being locked in hospital.” He was allowed leave to attend the store launch in Commercial Bay, his first out-of-hospital visit. “That was super emotional. We were all there crying.”
Conway grew up around fashion, cultivating a distinctive sense of style and deep appreciation of clothes. That got rocked this past year too. What he could wear changed radically.
The short women’s T-shirts he loved now ride up in his chair, while blazers catch on the wheels. His beloved belts dig in and can create pressure issues, as can jean rivets. They’re things no one thinks about until they have to. Conway gave away all his shoes – they no longer fit his swollen feet. “Everything’s had to be reconsidered. Initially it was a really big identity thing and I didn’t feel comfortable in any of my clothes,” he says. He’s working on that though, fashioning a new sense of self. “Ties are still part of my identity, that’s not restricted at all.” Realising he could still tie them himself was a special moment.
He’s also appreciating utilitarian garments more than he used to, like the work of Kiko Kostadinov and Rei Kawakubo. “High fashion, but also technical and functional design – that’s really resonating with me, because it’s kind of how I have to live my life.”
When he’s out and about, a secondhand Prada bowling bag sits on his lap holding all the essentials. He’ll fish around in it with painted nails (no longer able to bite them since his injury) for his Dior “granny glasses”.
Conway’s identity has evolved since his accident. So have the responsibilities in his relationship, with Carson now the breadwinner. But when all the household chores are done, he and Carson are on the couch and his wheelchair is gone, “the roles can become what they were”.
Books are a respite for them both. So are movies. “We live right next to Saint Lukes, so I can hop on my electric wheelchair, she can hop on my lap and we can zoom to the cinema.” (Conway is a huge Lord of The Rings fan, and Elijah Wood made a surprise appearance at a Sylvester event this year; it was one of the highlights of his year.)
The recent Nick Cave concert was too. “It was pretty spiritual to be honest.” Music helped Conway get through the roughest parts of being in the spinal unit, with Nick Cave’s work especially helpful because it deals with grief. “After experiencing grief and trauma, I think it had a newfound significance to me.” Concerts are something he can do; he’s looking forward to Mark William Lewis, Agnes Obel and Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Another high has been watching his brothers’ growth. “It’s bittersweet. I just love watching them evolve into that. And I know that my time will come too.”
While Conway’s natural recovery is starting to taper off he holds a lot of hope in the future. “I’m 25 and science and technology has gone crazy; they’ll figure out something and I’ll be walking again.”
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