Paralyzed last year in a diving accident, Eagan man finds hope in stem cell surgery overseas

When Jay Magee became paralyzed after a diving accident last year, all he wanted was to be able to walk again.

These days, he’s just hoping to just get back the full use of his hands.

“It’s taken me a year and a half, and I can move my arms and feed myself and brush my teeth, but I can’t do a whole lot more than that,” he said. “It can be really frustrating.”

Now Magee has a reason to hope...

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh refused to apologize for accusing Mr. Fox of "acting" out severe Parkinson's symptoms during a 30-second television ad endorsing Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for U.S. senator and a strong advocate of publicly funded stem-cell research.

Nerve cells grown from human embryonic stem cells and injected into the brains of rats with a syndrome mimicking Parkinson's disease significantly reduced the animals' symptoms, but the treatment also caused tumors in the rodents' brains, scientists reported yesterday.

Although he is paralyzed, he is acutely aware of his body. His experience is different from a person who has had a severe spinal injury and has no sensation from the neck down. "I can feel my toes. I can tell you the places where I hurt. I feel tired when I've been sitting in one place too long. I feel like I could just get up and walk."

As he sits in an alcove off his living room talking about what it's like to be unable to move, Luis' wife Valerie is at his side. She periodically crosses and uncrosses his legs, puts a glass of water to his lips so he can sip from it and makes small adjustments in the direction his wheelchair is facing. Except for brief respites, she's his full-time caregiver.

"They call it [becoming a quadriplegic] a new birth," she said.

Julie Cernel of St. Joseph Rehabilitation Center in Bryan, who served as Moore's physical therapist for 13 months, has improved her functional mobility and strength through exercises and aquatic therapy.

Terry Cole of Sikeston doesn’t know what the future holds, but he and his therapists know he’s ready to undergo stem cell treatment at the end of the month in China.

Cole, who’s been paralyzed for nearly 32 years, and his wife, Cindy, will leave Oct. 29 to spend a minimum of 30 days in a city near Hong Kong. There, he will be the subject of a study involving one of two procedures involving umbilical cord blood stem cells, which are harvested from umbilical cord blood after a baby is born.

Paralyzed patients dream of the day when they can once again move their limbs. That dream is making its way to becoming a reality, thanks to a neural implant created by John Donoghue and colleagues at Brown University and Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems.

With spinal-cord injuries and some types of stroke and neurodegenerative disease, the information-relay system between the brain and muscles is disrupted. The Cyberkinetics device consists of a tiny chip containing 100 electrodes that record signals from hundreds of neurons in the motor cortex. A computer algorithm then translates this complex pattern of activity into a signal used to control a computer cursor, robotic arm, and, maybe eventually, the patient's own limb.

In a study of 18 snow-boarders treated at their hospital for spinal cord injuries, Japanese doctors found that failed jumps were the cause in most cases. Nearly all patients were young men who considered their skill level to be intermediate or "expert," but none had ever received formal instruction in snow-boarding.

Although spinal cord injuries are relatively rare compared with less severe snow-boarding mishaps, such as wrist and shoulder injuries, they can be devastating should they occur.