Spinal Cord Injury and Paralysis

CNN: A Life Reclaimed in Tiny Steps

(Baltimore, MD) -- We hope that you will share in our excitement that one of our patients was chosen as the deserving recipient of a new home through the ABC reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Laying in a hospital bed on a Sunday night, Morgan Dunnigan believed her parents and physician when they said she would wake up the next morning for a surgery that promised to make the pain in her neck disappear, make the tumor hurting her spine go away, make everything better.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was spring of 2007, and the town of Hastings, Nebraska, was looking forward to summer. Memorial Day weekend had come and gone, and Kirk and Jami Ortegren had just watched their son Jack crawl for the first time.

There was broken glass and debris everywhere, and I could hear sirens in the distance. Just moments before I was sleeping in the car as we drove home from a family vacation in Florida. I was jolted awake as the car flipped over, and I could feel myself being thrown around as if I were in a washing machine. I was strangely calm, lying half in and half out of the backseat - until the paramedic checked me for injuries and I couldn't feel anything. I began to panic. When I asked if I was paralyzed, he wouldn't answer.

I've always been an athlete. When I was younger, I pitched the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) World Series twice. After high school, I played baseball for the University of Arkansas at Monticello. But, despite those achievements, I never imagined how much physical strength I would need in a wheelchair. Late one Saturday night two years ago, I got on my fourwheeler to visit a friend, but I never made it to his apartment.

When Lily Wilkinson was three, her neck was broken in an automobile accident leaving her paralyzed below the waist. A moment of screeching tires and crumpling metal, and her new life appeared etched in stone before she had ever entered kindergarten. After months of intensive care, her parents were told she would never be able to use or feel her legs again.

As she typed the words into the Internet search engine, Loretta McRae knew it was a long shot. In the months since the 15-year-old struck her head on an ocean sandbar in Australia, sustaining a C6 level spinal cord injury, virtually every expert said she'd already gotten her miracle. She was alive, she could wiggle her toes, she was regaining sensation in her limbs.