Overcoming Disabilties Team Room

[ronnie1]

Thank you for posting this Jan. Angela is very inspirational to me.
Ronnie ( 87degrees here)

[Kona2]

Thank you for posting this Jan. Angela is very inspirational to me.
Ronnie ( 87degrees here)

87 degrees...that's a heat wave! We were in those temperatures that have a minus sign in front of them yesterday morning.....

[brotherjim]

Happy Valentines Day , I am posting a link from the Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation. A very sweet video by a musician with an SCI. It is great but warning , has some PG-13 content.

Spinal Cord Injury and Paralysis Community
http://www.spinalcordinjury-paralysis.org

[brotherjim]

I had written to Angela and here is her very nice response-
Thank you Angela, you inspire us all.

Angela Madsen
Thanks for the positive feedback and sharing my story with others. Will be in Boston for the Concept2 Crash B's with my newly designed rowing seat for folks with disabilities.
Thanks again
http://www.rowoflife.com

[rosita]

Thanks for posting the video Jim, I loved it. Very handsome young man, but alas, he appears to be taken. Woe is me
Rosi

[brotherjim]

I have a rather long inspirational article to post. I will post half of it today and the rest tomorrow.




Rob Summers owned a secret to beating the odds, until a car burst out of the darkness and his luck ran out on him. Or did it?

By Nathaniel Reade


In the summer of 2006, Rob Summers seemed to be leading a charmed life. A tall, clean-cut, 20-year-old with short brown hair and blue eyes, he had a girlfriend, he could bench-press 315 pounds, and he was close to achieving his lifelong goal of becoming a major-league pitcher. He had just finished his sophomore year at Oregon State University; he was living in Portland and playing in a summer league, hitting home runs and throwing strikes. Then, for a brief moment, he ran out of luck.

One warm Tuesday night he walked out to his car to get his gym bag. When he got to the end of his driveway he saw headlights: a car, careening down the road. The lights grew bigger, headed straight at him. He jumped, but the car hit him, flipped him into the air, and kept on going. The driver was never caught.

Summers lay on his back, staring up at a sky full of stars. When he tried to grab his phone, his arm wouldn’t move. He tried to yell; no sound came from his mouth. His body felt oddly lacking in sensation, as if he couldn’t feel where he was in space. He passed out. A neighbor found him lying in a pool of blood four hours later and thought he had been shot.

Summers regained consciousness in a hospital. The hit-and-run had ripped apart his ankle and torn all the tendons attached to the C-6 vertebra in his neck, causing the bone to bruise his spinal cord. He had no control over his body from the elbows down, aside from one finger. His girlfriend visited him, then never returned. She never answered his calls.
Summers remembers the surgeon talking to him before he left the hospital. He was handed a long list of drugs and told that he would never be able to stand or walk. Chances were, the doctor said, he wouldn’t be able to control his hands either.
The doctor didn’t give him the worst news. People with spinal-cord injuries like Summers’ are far more likely to be unemployed and single. They have higher medical costs and suffer from very high rates of stroke, infection, and heart disease, which means they tend to die young. Statistics suggested that Summers’ injury would shorten his life by almost 20 years.
Summers, however, wasn’t fazed. “You don’t know me,” he told the surgeon. “I will stand again, I will walk again, and I will play baseball.”
Rob Summers believed this because he had faith in a system he had used with great success for much of his life—a sort of family recipe for goal-setting. This system not only made him think he could beat the odds, but it also made him, in some ways, a very lucky man.


Rob summers didn’t start out good at baseball. He grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, the oldest son of a real estate developer and a teacher, and spent most of his first Little League season obliviously playing with the grass and jumping around in the outfield. “At the awards ceremony at the end of the season, my coach couldn’t find anything else good to say about me,” Summers says, “so he made up an award: Best Cartwheels.”

Figuring sports weren’t Rob’s thing, his parents signed him up for clarinet lessons. The following year, however, he announced that he wanted to play baseball again. He moved to the infield, which he found more interesting. He started pitching.

“I discovered,” Summers says, “that I had a natural talent for the game.” His parents told him that wasn’t enough, that he’d have to work hard as well. After one game when he hit a home run over the fence, he says he decided “that my parents were wrong: I could get by just fine on my talent.” The coach made him a starter.

Then he went three games without hitting the ball once. He ended up back on the bench. “Maybe,” he began to think, “my parents were right.”

“That failure taught me a lot,” he says. In particular it opened his mind to something his mother gave him to read-—a tattered, 20-page booklet, missing its cover. His mother’s father had gotten it in his youth from a friend. The family never had a specific name for the pamphlet; they just called it “that thing from Grampa.”

You can actually buy it on Amazon today for three dollars. Titled It Works and signed with the initials RHJ, the booklet contains the sort of vim-and-vigor prose you find in a Hardy Boys mystery (for instance, “Jimmy the office boy” exclaims, “Gee, I wish that were mine,” as a red roadster whizzes by). But It Works offered something bigger than a roadster to Rob Summers. It offered food for thought, in the form of a clumsily worded question:

“Are some people born under a lucky star or other charm which enables them to have all that which seems so desirable, and if not, what is the cause of the difference in conditions under which men live?”

RHJ answers himself: No, some people aren’t more lucky than others. They just tap into a power that lies within everyone’s “subjective mind.” Mostly, it seems to do with knowing what you want. First, write down a list of desires, in order of importance. Change the list daily until you’re happy with it. Then read it three times a day. Think of these desires as often as possible. And don’t share them with anyone.

A skeptic might label this, quite literally, wishful thinking. Psychologist and researcher Heidi Grant Halvorson, however, says the approach has a point: “The first step to getting anywhere is to decide where you want to go.” But she says that simply having those desires—to make more money, to quit smoking, to take a vacation—may not be enough. You have to know how to convert them into conscious goals. Halvorson knows just about as much about goal-setting as anyone on the planet; she co-edited a textbook on the subject, The Psychology of Goals, and authored a book for the lay public called Success: How We Can Reach Our Goals. Decades of scientific research have revealed that, done right, goal-setting can in fact increase our productivity and our satisfaction. Goals can focus our attention and effort toward the things we want in life, and away from things we don’t. They can inspire us to reach greater heights, persist through setbacks, to learn, explore, and problem-solve.

[Kona2]

I have a rather long inspirational article to post. I will post half of it today and the rest tomorrow.

Sure, keep us in suspense !

[brotherjim]

And now, the rest of the story,

Done wrong, however, goals can produce more harm than good. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain, found that 78 percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them, which often makes them feel more hopeless than if they’d never set a goal at all. And a 2009 Harvard Business School study found that stretch goals can produce all kinds of problems in the workplace, including depression, staff conflict, and crime.



In the late 1960s, for instance, Lee Iacocca was feeling the pressure from inexpensive, fuel-efficient imports, so he set an ambitious goal: Ford was to build a car that weighed less than 2,000 pounds and cost less than $2,000, and they were going to bring it to market by 1970. This goal caused engineers to rush through safety checks and produced a car best known for its exploding gas-tanks: the Pinto. A major retailer in the 1990s set a sales goal for the staffs at its auto-repair centers of $147 an hour. This might have increased the company’s revenue, but it also led to unnecessary repairs.



Stretch goals, the Harvard study says, can force employees to compete with each other when they should be working together, or inspire them to stop working once they’ve reached their target. They can also cause a loss of “intrinsic motivation,” that natural desire we have to perform a task well.



And isn’t goal-setting—striving for some outcome off in the future—the exact opposite of everything they tell us we should do to promote happiness? Aren’t we supposed to be present in the moment, savor it, focus on what we do have, and think of others rather than ourselves? Aren’t goals too future-oriented and selfish? According to Halvorson, goal-setting can make us not only more productive and more successful but more satisfied right here and now. But only if it’s done right.



Rob Summers’ grandfather clearly got his goal-setting right. He pulled himself out of poverty and built a thriving insurance company, crediting some of his success to the instruction in his It Works pamphlet. He wrote down his goals and read them to himself several times a day. But he also added components and taught them to his daughter, who made improvements of her own. So when Summers was 12 and trying to succeed at baseball, his mother didn’t just have him read the pamphlet; she taught him the family recipe. First step: She bought him a blue, spiral-bound notebook, and told him to write down his long-term goals.



Summers won’t talk about the goals he writes down today or let anyone read his notebook; this is a key tenet of the recipe. “My grandfather advised against telling other people about your goals, or showing them your notebook. He said that makes you a talker, not a doer. And it gives people a chance to step on your goals by being negative about them.”



Summers will, however, reveal three of the goals he wrote down in his first notebook: to get back his starting position in baseball, to help his team win the state championship, and to buy himself a Super Nintendo. Three months after he started writing in his notebook, Summers earned enough money to buy the Nintendo. That year he not only started on his baseball team, but was voted MVP of the league. His team won the state championship and placed fourth on the West Coast.



In the years that followed, Summers earned good grades. He played football and basketball. He mastered the mechanics of pitching and hitting, isolating the exact muscles required, and strengthening them. During his junior year in high school, professional scouts watched him throw six innings in the state playoffs, allowing one hit and no runs, their radar guns registering pitches more than 90 mph. In his senior year he got offers from universities and the pros. He accepted a scholarship to Oregon State, which won the Pac 10 championship the following year.







Some might say that Summers’ accomplishments came from a lucky star or his innate abilities. But ability, says Halvorson, “is just one small piece of the puzzle. Research shows that effort, persistence, commitment, and the strategies you use to reach your goal are far more powerful predictors of who succeeds and who fails. Self-discipline, and not giving up when obstacles arise, actually significantly out-predict IQ on every measure of achievement I’ve ever seen, including test scores and college grades.”



Halvorson has identified various key factors for successful goal-setting, and she says Summers’ family recipe “nailed them all.”



After the accident, Summers was so focused on getting better that when he moved from Oregon to Kentucky he didn’t even bring his spiral-bound notebook with him. By the fall of 2008 he was 22 and living in an apartment inside a Louisville hotel, far from his family and friends. Through rehab he had regained use of his hands; he had moved there to participate in “locomotor training” rehabilitation at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Research Center, run by Susan Harkema, a Ph.D. who had worked with Christopher Reeve.



Scientists such as Harkema now realize that our spines are a lot smarter than people once thought. No mere pipelines between brain and muscle, they’re packed with interneurons—cells that organize the messages from our sensory nerves and control most of our unconscious action. Your spinal cord plays a leading role every time you scratch your arm, shift in your seat, or shoot a perfect three-pointer without having to really think about it. What’s more, the spinal cord is capable of re-learning. Animals with completely severed cords have been trained in labs to stand or even walk by having their limbs manipulated for them until the cords learn to do it on their own.



Every day for more than a year, Summers went to Harkema’s lab at the University of Louisville. He worked out with various strengthening devices, or he was strapped into a harness that supported his weight over a treadmill while lab assistants moved his limbs. He got stronger. But after a year of improvement, he plateaued. He didn’t improve. His dreams of walking again, and even standing, seemed to have vanished permanently.



Summers had a well-deserved reputation for being optimistic and emotionally even-keeled. In high school he was his football team’s kicker, and one game came down to a single field goal. If he missed it, they’d lose. If he made it, they’d win. He looked so calm striding onto the field that his coach smacked his helmet as he went by. “Summers,” the coach said. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were a pothead.” Summers made the field goal.



Now, however, he felt as down as he ever had in his life. His health-insurance money ran out and the research project with Harkema ended. By November of 2008, he had nothing to do but sleep late, watch television, and stare out the window at the cold and the rain.



His mother could tell over the phone that something was wrong. She reminded him of the family recipe. “Take it to heart,” she said. “Once you do, you’ll be fine.” She emailed him a scan of the old It Works pamphlet.



After he reread the pamphlet, Summers wheeled himself out of his apartment and down to his car. It was raining out. He hated doing errands in the rain. He had to open the car door, hoist himself into his chair, detach the wheels, put them on the seat beside him, do the same with the rest of the chair, then close the door. When it’s raining, he gets soaked.



This time he did it willingly. He drove down the freeway to an Office Depot and bought himself a blue, spiral-bound notebook. When he got home he wrote down new goals and spent days revising them. His grandfather’s recipe told him to consider a wide spectrum, including family, community, and helping others. This process made him realize why he was depressed: He had become too focused on just one goal, of getting better. “I need a life,” he told himself. “I can’t just be a lab rat.”



Halvorson, the psychologist, says numerous studies show that self-oriented goals often fail to produce happiness. Instead, it’s best to pursue goals that fulfill three basic human needs: relatedness to the people around us, a sense of competence, and the freedom to pursue our own choices.



Summers broke down his long-term goals into manageable daily tasks, such as exercising his thigh muscles for two hours. This combination of daily tasks and long-term goals “gives me a sense of purpose,” he says. “And when you have a sense of purpose in life it makes you a happier individual. Instead of freaking out, I can relax because I know exactly where I’m going to be in five years.”



He started getting up in the morning again. He spent more hours in the gym. He read more. He met an investment expert who taught him day trading, which made him feel intellectually active again. He taught the mechanics of pitching and hitting to a group of local kids, one of whom was signed by the Red Sox.



Then Susan Harkema called him into her office.



She told Summers about a project she was working on with Reggie Edgerton, a spinal-cord researcher at UCLA. They wanted to try a device similar to one that Edgerton had used successfully on lab animals. Called an “epidural stimulator,” it consists of an array of surgically implanted electrodes. Edgerton describes the device as a “hearing aid for the spinal cord.” It turns up the volume in the nervous system, making it more possible for those interneurons to communicate.



Harkema explained to Summers why she thought he’d be perfect for this. Thanks to his reinvigorated training regimen, he was very fit. He had great support from family in case the procedure didn’t work. And the bad luck of plateauing was actually good luck: It meant that any positive results after the operation would clearly be linked to the stimulator. Was he interested?

Summers met with the doctors on the research team. They told him to assume that the stimulator wouldn’t work at all. Even if it did, they said it would take three to five years before he’d be able to stand on his own. He had to understand, no person with his degree of paralysis had ever stood on his own. And even if that worked, it might take another five years of therapy before he could take a step—if he was incredibly lucky. And the surgery itself carried risks of permanent harm.

“Would I let my son do it?” one surgeon said to him. “I don’t know.”

Summers said, “Let’s do it.”
You have to document this,” a friend in Oregon said to him. His friend called a 24-year-old actress and screenwriter named Rachael O’Brien. She found a camera crew and flew with them to Louisville. She met Summers the day before the surgery.

On December 7, 2009, Summers was wheeled into an operating room lined with 58 doctors and researchers in white coats and surgical masks. “It reminded me of going through the gauntlet of cheerleaders before a football game,” he says. “The head surgeon spoke to the throng, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to witness history.’” In a six-hour operation, they opened him up and implanted the stimulator, along with a power pack. They turned the device up to 10. Summers’ legs began bicycling on the table.

He spent the next two-and-a-half weeks lying in his apartment and waiting for the incision to heal. O’Brien and her film crew slept there too, on blow-up mattresses Summers had bought at Costco. For the first time since the hit-and-run, his back hurt. “In some ways, a good thing,” he says. As the group cooked meals and played video games, they got to know each other, and something happened between Summers and O’Brien.

“I’d never met anyone like him,” she says. “He was not your typical 23-year-old. He seemed more mature. I really admired his drive.”
The research team waited impatiently until the day after Christmas to get Summers back into the lab and turn on the stimulator.
That first time Harkema’s assistant turned on the stimulator’s power source, implanted under the skin above his hip, Summers instantly began flopping around. His legs tingled, “like when your leg has gone to sleep and wakes up again,” he says. “Not painful. But not pleasant.”
On day two he sat in the lab on a bed, his legs dangling over the side. The assistant turned on the power. Summers’ legs kicked in a walking pattern, which he didn’t control.

On day three, the researchers put him in a harness that supported his weight over a treadmill. Again he was switched on. He’d been in the harness many times before the surgery. At first, it had supported him entirely. After a year of therapy, he was able to support himself by 60 percent. But without the harness, he still would have collapsed. This time, with the stimulator firing, the researchers gradually reduced the support. They got the harness down to 40 percent support—the maximum he had achieved before surgery. And they kept going: 30 percent, 20, 10 … At zero, Summers still stood, just three assistants helping him balance. “Let go,” Harkema told them. They let go.


The recipe from Rob Summers’ grandfather instructed him to set high, optimistic goals. “When your brain detects a big discrepancy between where you are now and where you want to be,” says Halvorson, “it throws resources at it, such as attention and effort, often without you realizing it. Challenging goals mean more resources, which in turn mean greater success.”

Optimism helps as well, she says. “Perhaps the best predictor of an individual’s success is believing that if you don’t have the ability now, you can get the ability if you work hard and don’t give up on yourself.”
Summers’ mother had taught him to work backwards from his goals, breaking them down into very specific sub-goals and steps. When he set the goal of becoming a professional pitcher, for instance, he didn’t stop there; he assessed what would be required and determined that he needed three types of pitches. Then he broke down the exact steps he’d need to develop those pitches and organized them into five-year, one-year, six-month, three-month, monthly, and weekly goals. This level of detail helped him see the level of work involved.

Psychologists have discovered that if our plans are extremely specific they double the chance of success. “This is really key,” Halvorson says. “People routinely fail to think about the steps they will need to take to actually make success happen. Specificity is essential, otherwise the critical actions just don’t get taken.”

All of which helped Rob Summers meet the goals he set throughout life. But the goals in turn gave him a habit of mind, and a faith—faith in himself, and in, well, It Works author RHJ calls it the Great Power. RHJ also calls it Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for “God is with us.”
When the assistants let go, Summers remained standing. For the first time ever, a person paralyzed from the chest down was standing on his own.

“It was just an incredible feeling,” he says. “I hadn’t moved anything in four years. Now my legs were supporting me. I could feel my legs working. I could feel my feet under me on the treadmill.”
A few months later, Summers was in the lab, stimulator on, when Harkema grew annoyed. Summers and one of the trainers were giggling while she was trying to concentrate. She barked at them. “What’s the big joke?”
Rob Summers showed her: He was moving his toes up and down.

Harkema exclaimed something unprintable. She barked orders: “Lift your left toe! Now your right toe!” She was trying to tell whether he could truly control the motion. He could. His brain was communicating with his leg muscles. Maybe the spinal cord had reorganized itself around the injury site, or maybe new neurons had grown.

Summers practiced standing in Harkema’s lab for an hour per day for the next six months. Then for the following six months he worked on learning how to take steps with support. Today he practices on his own, in the guest room of a Los Angeles apartment he shares with Rachael O’Brien. In the room that now serves as his office and gym, he turns on the stimulator with a remote control, lifts himself from his chair into a contraption of metal pipes, and works on standing and stepping. Even when the stimulator is turned off (he’s only allowed to run it for two hours per day), there is evidence that his health has drastically improved. His heart rate is better. He’s stronger. He can now feel when his bladder is full. He breathes more easily and will be able to have children naturally.
In the opposite corner of the room sits a desk bearing an array of five computer screens for day trading, along with his blue, spiral-bound notebook. Every night he analyzes whether he met his goals for the day, and if not, what he can do differently. “If you’re not constantly adjusting your goals for new circumstances,” he says, “you’re not doing it right.”
Again, Halvorson agrees. “It’s not enough to just monitor progress,” she says. “You need to be assessing it, asking yourself what you’re doing right, and where you’re going wrong. Do I need to seek advice or guidance from experts? More often than not, success means changing strategies along the way to adapt to obstacles you didn’t plan for.”
Such as a hit-and-run.

“It took away my lifelong goal and dream of being a baseball player,” Summers says. But in an odd way he realizes that it was also good luck. “Without the injury,” he says, “I never would have met and fallen in love with my girlfriend. And this procedure could help millions of people around the world. This is bigger than baseball; this is a chance to give people hope.”
THE ROB SUMMERS FOUNDATION

In 2011, Summers began a namesake foundation under the umbrella of the Christopher Reeve Foundation. The Rob Summers Foundation contributes the bulk of its donations to research and will offer more people the opportunity to benefit from the therapy that has put Summers back on his feet. For more information, or to donate to the organization, visit robmsummers.com or christopherreeve.org

[Kona2]

Thanks, Jim - good story. The power of goal-setting is pretty incredible!

[brotherjim]

I was turned down by both organisations for a service dog. Most aren't training balance dogs right now . I think I might take a class in training a service dog and try to get a shelter dog and train myself ( no not myself, the dog). Good luck Elton in finding a new gym. Maybe you can see if someone in your area has a C2 rowing machine. Just a thought.
jim

[rosita]

I think you should try training Jim. I see a problem maybe with your speech. Maybe the dog could be trained with hand signals. Good luck Jim

[brotherjim]

Thanks Rosita, the speech may be a problem, have to rethink this

[brotherjim]

Feb 06, 2012

National MS Society

In March of 2009, Phil Keoghan, the host of “The Amazing Race” and MS Society ambassador, left Los Angeles on his bike for a 40 day ride across America that covered over 3,500 miles. “The Ride” is an incredible documentary that chronicles Phil’s coast-to-coast adventure where he put his 41-year-old body to the test, brought awareness to MS and inspired thousands along the way. Phil raised $500,000 during the ride for the MS movement, which has now increased to over $1 million.

On February 18th, SHOWTIME will be airing “The Ride” at 8pm ET/PT. This is a great awareness opportunity for MS and also a fun way to bring people together to watch the movie and raise funds by hosting viewing parties and asking people to donate funds in place of bringing food, wine, etc. Read more about the movie here: www.nationalmssociety.org/phil

[brotherjim]

[Drivetofast]

You can Train a dog with a whistle. I have trained many field trial dogs with one.