Facing roadblocks when learning to walk again

By Pauline Arrillaga

updated 2:49 p.m. ET May 4, 2008

Second of three parts

Day 1 at Project Walk fell on their 13th wedding anniversary. In years past, John and Marci Pou might have gone to dinner.

Instead, thousands of miles from home, Marci watched as John fought to maneuver his broken body. It was June 26, 2006, the start of a regimen that would push John to the limit physically and challenge both of them emotionally and even spiritually.

Taking hold of John’s sneaker, Chris Corpuz, a Project Walk recovery specialist, pulled his left leg straight out in front of him.

“All right,” Corpuz directed, “bring your knee up to your chest.”

John focused, trying to visualize the movement, something that 10 months earlier would have been as natural as blinking. But his leg hung immobile, until the trainer himself slowly pushed it in.

“Push it out,” Corpuz said. Again John tried, but he just couldn’t make a connection between what his brain wanted to do and his lifeless limb.

Corpuz then fanned John’s leg out to the side and said, “Bring it in.”

John’s left knee suddenly arched in a spasm, and Corpuz asked: “Are you firing that, or is that just going on its own?”

John flashed a rare grin. “That’s just going on its own.”

A Wish to Walk: Told in a 3-part series Part 1: One man's quest to walk again Advances offer hope for spinal injury patients Part 2: Facing roadblocks when learning to walk Part 3: 'I can 't believe that it couldn't happen'

He wasn’t entirely sure what “firing that” meant, considering he was a quadriplegic with no mobility in his legs following a diving accident.

John and Marci, along with their two young children, had left their home in Iron Station, N.C., seven days earlier on this cross-country quest to find him help. Their destination was Project Walk, a spinal cord injury recovery center in Carlsbad, Calif., that pledged improved function through exercise therapy.

They had vowed to give it a year, and if he didn’t show gains, the Project Walk staff would recommend quitting the program.

Improvement, scored at six-month intervals, would be rated on a 0-to-40 scale that measured John’s ability to roll, sit, kneel, stand and, the hope was, to walk — with spotting, assistive devices or even nothing at all.

To start out, John scored a 4.

‘Does everybody walk out?’
Marci kept a diary, chronicling their journey.

Day 5: “Began the day w/leg workout. John was able to get basic leg connection on (right)!”

Day 8: “John’s able to stretch arms above head & touch his hands together.”

Some Project Walk clients had, literally, walked out the door, getting around with pole-like crutches, canes or walkers. But John and Marci were told they would have to be patient.

Don’t set timetables. Don’t compare. Setbacks happen. Progress comes when it comes.

The couple shared details in interviews with The Associated Press over 18 months, inviting a reporter to join them during the lows and highs of exhausting therapy sessions.

Denis Poroy / AP Marci Pou, center, looks on as her husband John Pou, left, works out with a trainer during therapy at Project Walk in Carlsbad, Calif., on Oct. 15, 2007.

At first, though, they weren’t even entirely sure how the therapy was supposed to work.

They knew about the late actor Christopher Reeve, who in 2002, seven years after he was paralyzed, began feeling light touch and pin pricks and regained some motor function after making exercise a hallmark of his rehabilitation.

Reeve’s workout included a bicycle that uses electrical stimulation to contract the leg muscles and help them to pedal and a treadmill that simulates walking. A research team, led by neurologist John McDonald, published a paper crediting the activity-based therapy with much of Reeve’s improvement.

The underlying premise is that even quadriplegics have to “use it or lose it.” If a paralyzed person never tries to move, any neural connections remaining between the brain and the spinal cord atrophy. Exercise those limbs, and the connections may be restored.

Some researchers believe the spinal circuitry alone can be retrained to control walking through “sensory patterned feedback” — using treadmills or other devices to break down and repeat walking movements.

A quarter million people in the United States live with a spinal cord injury, and there are some 11,000 new injuries each year.

Some go to great lengths to find a magic bullet, heading abroad to have shark embryos transplanted into their bodies or trying other unproven treatments. But activity-based therapy “is not some kind of miraculous pie-in-the-sky thing. This is real stuff,” says a leading spinal cord injury researcher, Dr. Wise Young.

Project Walk was founded in 1999 by Ted and Tammy Dardzinski. Ted, a former triathlete, and his wife Tammy were personal trainers running an athletic performance center in the San Diego area when a quadriplegic came to them wanting to get back on his feet.

Using trial and error, Ted developed a workout routine. Less than two years later, the client, Mike Thomas, took his first steps, using crutches. Through Thomas, other paralyzed clients sought out the Dardzinskis and Project Walk, now a nonprofit, was born.

By the time the Pous arrived, the center had about 65 clients on site and many more who had visited and returned home to tackle the therapy.

Still, the founders’ lack of medical expertise has raised questions, while others are wary of the program’s message.

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