As I sat in my over-sized stuffed couch, a luxury that I rarely get these days, I propped my left foot on the coffee table and just stared at it. I then began to just move my ankle around, move my toes, invert and evert my foot. Watching the intricacies and subtleties of the movements, thinking about all of the amazing things bout the human body, all the ways it can change and adapt. And I thought of my friend Damien -- a quadriplegic who's rehabilitated himself to paraplegic -- and the miracle he has become. 

You see Damien was vacationing on Lake Mead on August 21 2004 when he jumped off the back of his houseboat, and floated to the surface. He was instantly paralyzed. He spent the next year of his life in and out of hospitals and surgeries. He was told he was a c3 c4 quadriplegic, that he would never move anything from the neck down, including his arms … let alone walk. But Damien is one stubborn, determined guy. He began an intensive round of Physical therapy, exercise therapy, chiropractic care, acupuncture, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, organic eating, massage therapy. And anything that was all-natural, and could serve as a catalyst for the body to try and heal itself. He works out 5 days a week for up to 3 hours a day, and he has now been classified as a paraplegic.

Now as I sat there today staring at my little foot, the burden of Damien’s injury really begins to hit me. You see I have been honored to help Damien on his journey back. I have been 1 small slice of the therapy team. And I have been asked to participate in something that could change the way we treat spinal cord injuries and those they affect
forever.

My entire adult life has been spent in academics, studying the human body, studying anatomy, physiology, neurology, movement patterns and efficiency of motion. So I think back on our session today, after stretching him out and loosening up his back we had him do floor rolls, now remember he has a spinal cord injury, he shouldn’t be able to do this. The first roll took me explaining it, getting him to mentally connect to the muscles, and then Greg and I helped initiate the roll pattern, by the 5th pass we didn’t have to help at all. And by the 11th pass he was able to engage his abdominals and core enough to roll forward and back on his own. So my main job in the picture is to take the muscle groups that we can get to activate and respond and build a program and hopefully set protocols that will help him progress. Over the last several months this has been easy because we are just working on activation and working any large movement patterns we can. And now we shift to working on control within combinations of patterns. It is like now we have found all the puzzle pieces and put the corner pieces together and built a frame, and we have to do the hard work in the middle.

Damien has out paced everyone with his injury. The stage he just passed through physically is what we thought was the furthest we could take someone with his injury. And I now have to gather the right people and with Damien as the willing guinea pig begin to figure out what is next. All I can say is that Damien will never give up, until he walks again, and I believe he can do it, with or without me … but for now just studying the small movement patterns of my ankle help to give me a lot of clarification and calm and the insight I need into the miracle of the body.