The accident happened in 2011. Jeff Marquis was mountain biking in Montana when he sped off a jump without fully committing. His body flew over the handlebars, and he landed on his head.
“The first thing I noticed is [that] I was having a lot of trouble breathing,” Marquis tells MensHealth.com. “It kind of felt like I had the wind knocked out of me, and then I realized that my hands weren’t working right, and I couldn’t get up … I had the good sense to not let anyone move me, because I was quite certain something was very wrong.”
“I was quite certain something was very wrong.”
He’d been wearing a full-face helmet, but it didn’t protect him from what happened when he hit the ground: a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down. Marquis thought he’d never walk again, and his parents thought they’d be caring for him throughout their retirement.
“The short version of the diagnosis was that my life was never going to be the same,” Marquis says.
But against all odds, the 35-year-old is now able to stand and take steps on his own — and it’s all thanks to groundbreaking science that could one day change what it means to be paralyzed from a spinal cord injury.
Marquis is one of four paralyzed patients who benefited from epidural stimulation, a treatment that uses an implanted electrical device to restore the body’s damaged nerve pathways. All four of the patients regained the ability to stand independently, and two — Marquis included — learned to walk again.
“The novelty of the project was the combination of epidural stimulation with intense training following spinal cord injuries,” Dr. Claudia Angeli, senior researcher at the Human Locomotor Research Center at Frazier Rehab Institute and assistant professor at the University of Louisville’s Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, tells MensHealth.com.
Their achievements were published in September in the New England Journal of Medicine — the same day that similarly-promising findings on epidural stimulation appeared in the journal Nature Medicine.
Marquis’ training at the University of Louisville took place over a span of 85 weeks. He spent three hours every day in the lab: an hour and a half of stand training, and an our and a half of step training. Then he’d do additional training at home at night and on the weekends.
“Eventually I was able to work up to stepping for a quarter-mile at a time,” he says.
The process was physically and mentally challenging, but it was all worth it: Today, Marquis has achieved a level of independence he never would have thought possible in the aftermath of his crash. He’s even returned to mountain biking — this time, using a hand bike.
In this Possible video, you’ll go inside Jeff Marquis’ incredible journey and explore the science that made it all possible.
Source: Read Full Article