Cause: Help people living with paralysis walk
You can help find a cure for paralysis and help people like Chase walk again.On April 26, five-year-old Chase Ford will be participating in the Kentucky Derby Festival Marathon. But it’s not just Chase’s young age that will make this feat so amazing.
It was almost three years ago that Chase fell and hit his head on the arm of a couch. He damaged his spinal cord and lost all motor function from the neck down. The only things he could move were his eyes. Doctors told his mom, Renee, that her son would never walk again.
But thanks to caring friends like you, that’s not how this story ends.
Refusing to accept the doctors’ grim prognosis, Renee turned to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Chase began a cutting-edge rehabilitation program at our NeuroRecovery Network (NRN) site at Frazier Rehab Institute in Louisville, Kentucky. Soon he was regaining feeling and movement.
Chase is proving that nothing is beyond hope. The answers are just around the corner. And with your support for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, we will find them.
Chase’s progress is nothing short of miraculous. At our NeuroRecovery Network center at Frazier - one of seven NRN sites around the country - he began a revolutionary new locomotor training that repeats the motions of walking on a treadmill to stimulate muscles and nerves in the lower body. Never before had this type of treatment been tried with a child, especially one as young as Chase.
As Chase’s therapy continued, he began to slowly regain control of his trunk, muscles in his legs began to function, and he just started feeling better. All of these changes are the result of the nerves in his spinal cord reorganizing. Chase was literally being rebuilt.
Today, after putting in hundreds of hours of hard work, Chase can walk over 100 yards on his own and will soon lead TEAM REEVE in the Kentucky Derby Festival miniMarathon to raise much needed funds for our spinal cord injury research.
This is the fulfillment of Christopher Reeve’s bold vision: bringing groundbreaking spinal cord injury research from the laboratory to patients. Chase’s astounding recovery was paved by the work of the dedicated physicians, researchers and therapists supported by the Foundation. We have committed $77 million to advance the work of the most accomplished scientists in the world.
By donating online today, you can further this research that is making the “impossible” possible and help thousands of people like Chase who are living with these injuries improve their lives, their careers, and their dreams. Donating online is safe, easy, and secure and your contribution is tax-deductible.
This April, when Chase is participating in the miniMarathon - alongside his therapists, friends, and Foundation staffers - he’ll prove with each step that there is no limit to what we can achieve, together.
Peter T. Wilderotter
Peter T. Wilderotter
President and CEO
Posted on March 20th, 2008 under Cause • 
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