Eighteen steps and a life is changed ...

Tanya Black in the wheelchair she hopes to leave behind. Picture / Greg Bowker

It seems such a silly little thing.

Car crashes and neck-crushing rugby tackles get headlines, but not walking up stairs you've climbed thousands of times before to your apartment.

A summer's evening just before Christmas. Slip-on shoes, and slippery concrete. One slip, 18 steps, one crushed vertebra.

Merry Christmas.

Six months later and Tanya Black, 32 and paralysed from the waist down, is in a room with green pastel walls at Bruce's Fitness Centre in Te Awamutu, the same room she has visited for up to three hours a day for seven weeks.

She was on her way home from work - Winos on Lorne, the tapas and wine bar she opened with her brother in 2004 - soon after returning from 12 years overseas.

"There were about 18 steps and I didn't touch one on the way down. I just fell straight on to the landing. My flatmate heard me screaming. I knew straight away that something was really wrong, I couldn't feel my legs."

They operated to fuse the crushed vertebra in her lower back together with the ones on either side of it.

And now this room in Te Awamutu, where she hangs from a harness, face scrunched in concentration as she patiently forces her hips to push one leg in front of the other. The walker she clings to has a brake, which makes her laugh.

"Yeah - in case I build up too much speed."

She is hoping hard work will get her on her feet again, even if it's in callipers or on crutches. Four others are on her Reactivate course for spinal cord injuries - three men and another woman, aged between 25 and 40.

A motorbike crash, falling off a horse, a rugby tackle, a rally car crash - "They're all much more glamorous accidents than mine," Tanya says.

Tomorrow night she'll be out of the tracksuit and at La Zeppa in Auckland.

Her colleagues in the wine business have donated things ranging from rare vintage wines and restaurant meals to weekends away at wineries for an auction and a party to pay some bills and get her further treatment.

It was organised by Mandy Lusk, owner of La Zeppa and Vivace, on the principle that life is indeed a random lottery and anyone can fall down steps. Ms Lusk sent out a plea to others in the industry - restaurants, wineries, hotels - to donate goods.

Vivace was just down the road from Winos on Lorne, which closed this year after construction work on Lorne St cut foot traffic and Tanya wasn't there to keep it going.

Tanya herself is carrying on - the same person with the dimples and the wide smile and a different life. She wants to finish her English literature degree and maybe get into publishing.

In her down time she's writing - not a "this is what I went through" book, but a novel based on a "family legend" about which she will say nothing except that it's set in Waihi and has something to do with goldmining and a land dispute.

Tomorrow night's auction will help to pay for another three-month course at Reactivate, and some further treatment in America at a centre run on similar lines called Project Walk.

"I was given the option of doing that. I thought, hmmm, summer in San Diego, or winter in Te Awamutu? No contest. But it was about $100,000 more."

Her London contacts are also helping. In 10 days a group will take to their bikes to ride the tough mountain leg of the Tour de France to raise cash.

HELPING TANYA

* Tanya Black's fundraiser at La Zeppa, 33 Drake St, Victoria Park, Auckland. Auction from 6pm tomorrow.

* Open to the public, admission, free, or $500 for a reserved table, including tapas and two bottles of bubbles.

* Auction items include reserve and vintage wines, weekend at the Kim Crawford Apartment in Hawkes Bay, dinner for 8 at Vivace Restaurant, magnum of Chard Farm Red Gate Vineyard pinot noir - one of only 15 produced.