For Pruitt, who is involved in an ongoing follow-up study, the changes have not been so dramatic. It’s just another milestone in a journey he will never abandon.

“You’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly everything is better,” he says. “It’s something I have to work toward continually.”

He has backed that up for 29 years.

At 15, Pruitt was severely injured in a motorcycle accident in his hometown of Ardmore, Okla. He spent three months in a Rehabilitation hospital and came home in a body cast. With a spinal cord injury between his 11th and 12th Vertebrae, he had some sensation in his legs but almost no Motor control.

“They told me everything I can’t do,” he says. “You’ll never walk again, you’ll never father kids. I kind of took the attitude of trying to prove everyone wrong.”

His parents, who ran a cafe in Ardmore, set up parallel bars in the house to build up his arms and rigged up a stationary bike to exercise his legs, with his dad turning the pedals. He preferred crawling around the house to using a wheelchair.

“I just always stayed active and tried to do as much as I could,” Pruitt says. “My idea was that when new techniques came around, I wanted to be able to take advantage of them.”

The path wasn’t always smooth. He dropped out of high school, married young (“We took off in a ’73 Monte Carlo with hand controls”) and had two sons. But he got his GED, took drafting courses and studied computer design in college.

Then Pruitt was recruited by Texas Instruments, which brought him to Dallas in 1982. He got around on crutches, swinging his legs in tandem, and swam and stretched for exercise.

Busy with work and family, he didn’t bother with formal therapy.

“I lived an active life, but maybe I got kind of lazy,” he says.

That changed in 1995, when he was spraying fire ants around his Garland home. He hooked his foot between rocks, fell and broke his tibia and fibula, the two bones in the lower leg.

Doctors sent him to Winchester, who started him on a device called Parastep. The system combines crutches, leg braces and electrical stimulation to enable some paraplegics to stand and walk.

“I can do a reciprocal gait, which means putting one leg in front of the other,” he says.

The system was too bulky and time-consuming to use in daily life, Pruitt says, but the exercise helped his muscle tone and flexibility.