Canadian actress Ruth Marshall is able to walk normally again following surgery to her spinal cord, and thanks to months of rehab and her enduring sense of humour.

In her new book “Walk It Off”, the actor perhaps best known for her role as Helen Edwards in “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” describes learning how to walk again following surgery to remove a tumour from her spinal cord.

“I would see people doing that walking thing and it would make no sense to me,” Marshall told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday. “I didn’t know how people were using their feet.”

In 2012, at 47 years-old, Marshall felt a tingling sensation in her feet and kept staring at them, so much so that a colleague eventually asked if something was wrong. Marshall decided to have them examined, but doctors didn’t find anything abnormal.

Marshall then went on a trip to Peru, but when she got back, a second MRI revealed a spinal meningioma, a tumour that had been growing between her shoulder blades for about a decade.

According to the Spine Hospital at the Neurological Institute of New York, spinal meningioma is a typically benign tumour that puts pressure on the spine and can cause weakness or numbness in the arms and legs and difficulty using the washroom, among other symptoms.

“Usually, it’s a fairly innocuous tumour and people, they might have it and not even know that they have it,” Marshall said. “My tumour was big and it was hard and it was wrapped around my spine and it did not want to come off.”

That complicated the surgery to remove the tumour, and meant the rehab would also be more complicated, too.

Marshall had to relearn how to stand, walk and even use the washroom, as she says her legs had a mind of their own following the operation. Her feet would move wildly without her control or knowledge of where they were taking her. She needed to secure them under the covers as she slept.

Marshall says it took a “heavy dose of humour” to cope with her new reality.

“At nighttime, it was really scary to not know where my legs were or, when I did see them, to not understand where they were going, or what they really needed to see outside the door… but the next morning when I would tell the story it struck me as a little bit funny.”

Marshall spent two months in a Toronto rehab centre where she worked on basic motor skills. Marshall says it took about six months before her life returned to normal.