Four years after losing his ability to walk, Mike Shoreman is attempting to cross all five Great Lakes on a paddleboard in an effort to raise money for youth mental health.

“I realized very quickly I didn't want kids to feel the way I felt, which was alone, and scared,” said Shoreman, who in 2018 was diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt syndrome, which can occur when a shingles outbreak affects the facial nerve near one of your ears.

Shoreman says his first symptom was a painful earache, but things quickly deteriorated.

“Vision impairment, the nerves in my face shattered and collapsed,” he recalls. “And then I woke up one morning and I couldn't walk anymore.”

Ramsay Hunt is the same syndrome with. In Shoreman’s case, it wasn’t caught quickly enough and his vision, speech and mobility are all severely impacted.

“I was a paddleboarding coach here in Toronto,” Shoreman says. “And overnight I lost my business, my independence and my social life. I ended up having a mental health breakdown.”

Shoreman was able to get treatment at a mental health facility. He wants to make sure mental health programs exist in schools and communities across the country.

“Through the recovery and through putting my life back together I really leaned on community and they really showed up for me.”

If successful, Shoreman will become the first person with a disability to cross all five Great Lakes. So far he’s raised nearly , which provides mental health support to young people across the country. His goal is to raise $250,000 by the end of the summer.

“Every single Canadian knows someone who has had a mental health journey or has had one themselves,” Shoreman says. “This is something that affects rich or poor; it affects every single person.”

Less than a year after his diagnosis, doctors told Shoreman he’d likely never paddleboard again. When he decided to try, he lasted three minutes and spent the next day-and-a-half recovering.

But those three minutes, started a slow return to the water.

“At that point in time I was still using a cane to walk, so it gave me a lot of confidence,” he says. “I felt like I lost a lot of my power as a human being when everything fell apart and getting back on the board that day, I felt like I was at home.”

So far, the 39-year-old has conquered Lakes Erie, Superior and Huron. He aims to cross Lake Michigan at the end of July, and Lake Ontario in August.