If Marnie Ohlfs could do anything, she would tuck her two boys in at night. She’d play tag with them in the park and drive them to get ice cream after school.

Ohlfs, a Parker resident who grew up in Longmont, has been in a wheelchair since a Nov. 2, 2003, car accident caused a spinal cord injury that left her legs weak and uncoordinated and her hand muscles rigid. She originally was paralyzed from the chest down but regained some function over time.

“I want to be the kind of mom I was before the accident,” said Ohlfs, 43.

She hopes to walk again.

Because of that dream, she hasn’t moved from the two-story home she and her husband bought shortly before the accident. She can’t get upstairs to tuck her sons in bed; she hasn’t yet learned to drive with her hands.

She plans to travel with her family at the end of May to San Diego for six weeks of therapy at Project Walk, a nonprofit exercise-based center for those with spinal cord injuries.

She has been to Project Walk and has heard stories that others with spinal injuries have walked after therapy at the clinic. She also gained more movement in her legs when she was there.

Project Walk founder Ted Dardzinski said most of the center’s clients don’t go home walking but do return in better physical condition.

“We don’t promise anything,” Dardzinski said.

But he said some people do walk again. Recovery depends on how hard the person works, the injury type and the time elapsed since the injury, he said.

Project Walk does not accept insurance, and Ohlfs estimates it will cost $15,000 for six weeks of therapy and lodging. Although her husband, Michael, a financial adviser with Charles Shwab and an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval reserves, will use paid vacation and sick time, part of the trip includes unpaid family leave, not included in the $15,000 estimate.

Daniel Lammertse, the medical director of Craig Hospital in Denver, cautioned about expensive alternative therapies.

There is no scientific proof that exercise-based therapies result in neurological changes in patients, he said, although they may result in cardiovascular and muscle mass benefits.

“People with spinal cord injuries do change and improve over time, even without going to Project Walk or other exercise-based programs,” he said.

For this reason, Lammertse noted, clinical research trials are needed to answer questions about the effectiveness of exercise based treatments for improved neurological recovery.

Ohlfs has heard these arguments. But she has movement in her legs, and she’s eager to try.

“I’m hoping that I will come back here being able to walk,” Ohlfs said.

Life before

About 250,000 to 400,000 Americans have spinal cord injuries, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. There are 11,000 new injuries every year.

Before the accident, Ohlfs was a busy mom who home-schooled her children and exercised regularly. Her kids now attend public school, and she spends a lot of time alone.

On that snowy morning, the car her husband was driving slid off Interstate 80 in Evanston, Wyo. As the car flipped, she turned to check on her children. They were fine, and so was her husband.

She believes turning her head led to the dislocated disk that caused the paralysis and a hairline fracture at C1, the vertebra that actor Christopher Reeve injured when he fell off of his horse.

When a CT scan at Craig Hospital in Denver several weeks after the accident showed the C1 area was unstable, doctors put her in a halo, a brace to keep her head immobile, for three months. It was uncomfortable, and she became nauseous because her head couldn’t move with her body, she said.

After five months of hospitalization, she left Craig Hospital with some movement in her toes. Later, a physical therapist treating her at home said she believed she had the ability to walk, saying she could “feel her muscles fire.”

Ohlfs thinks some of what’s blocking her recovery may be fear.

“It’s such an emotional thing,” she said. “There’s a kind of depression that gets in the way.”

Doctors at Craig Hospital said whatever additional function Ohlfs regained in the first year after the accident would be all she would ever get, she said. But her primary physician expresses hope that she will walk again, she said.

Lammertse said there is animal model evidence that suggests that exercise can influence neural circuitry and recovery, but it doesn’t suggest that exercise alone would “cure” paralysis from a spinal cord injury. Instead, scientists believe that exercise will be an important adjunct treatment to regeneration of nerve cells using stem cell-based therapy once such therapy is proven and approved.

He said those with spinal cord injuries will get physical and mental benefits from exercising, just like the rest of the population, and he has seen some positive benefits from it.

“Most of the time, when patients access these expensive out-of-pocket alternative therapies, they report some positive benefit,” Lammertse said. “I have yet to see any evidence of out-of-the-
ordinary recovery.”

Ohlfs first visited Project Walk in September 2005 and did three hours of therapy five days a week for two and a half weeks. Her parents, Longmont residents Dalene and Bill Sheeder, paid $4,000 for the therapy, and her husband’s parents paid for their lodging.

Staff at Project Walk developed a personal program for her and filmed it so she could continue with a home project, she said. But after coming home and facing the same stresses, she regressed, Ohlfs said.

“When I was at Project Walk, I did really, really well,” Ohlfs said. “Physically, I became stronger. Mentally, I became more confident. It was the happiest I had been since the car accident. Nobody there put any limit. They believed the sky is the limit. It was a positive, exciting atmosphere.”

In June 2006, she returned to Project Walk for three days.

“In those three days, I was a different person,” she said.

Now she is looking forward to not only therapy at Project Walk but to continuing therapy afterward with SCI Recovery Project in Boulder, an
exercised-based program not associated with Project Walk that opened in July.

“Traditional medicine generally says this (exercise- based recovery) is not proven,” said David Hart, SCI’s founder and director, and a personal trainer who previously worked at Project Walk. “Yet there are results. People are gaining function.”

At the least, clients improve in the areas of bone density, circulation and weight loss and lower their risk of heart disease, Hart said. But he said there are significant other changes.

When he worked as a trainer at Project Walk, he saw several people with spinal cord injuries graduate to a four-arm crutch or walker, he said.

He also said one of his SCI clients couldn’t move his upper body but now can adjust himself in his wheelchair; he is no longer stuck looking in one direction. Another client can use his hand instead of his chin to operate his electric wheelchair.

“A lot of people are being told, ‘You’ll never move again, so just don’t try,’” Hart said. “It’s been proven that with exercise, you can regain function. By giving up hope, you are condemning yourself to life in the chair.”