What is it like to walk in the shoes of people who can no longer walk, but desperately hope to one day? The Denver Post in 2013 explained the humanity, the science and the kinetics behind a radical idea: The spine can learn. With a rapidly growing pool of proof that the spine can become the brain when trauma detaches the brain from the body, it was time to tell the stories of the remarkable people attempting to take the journey of the first step. Time to bring the exhortations from the revival tent out into the light — “Walk! Be healed! Cast off that wheelchair!” Is it real? Or is it another in a series of false hopes that have tantalized the paralyzed over hundreds of years of broken necks and broken backs? The reaction from readers was all that we’d striven for: “Stepping Toward Hope,” they said, was at once lyrical and gritty, hopeful yet grounded in the exhausting realities of reviving long-dormant pieces of the human body. Parents of current spinal cord patients thanked The Post for providing an optimistic yet persistently pragmatic explanation of the new “locomotor” therapies and how patients, hospitals and universities are employing them. Researchers wrote to say our details were accurate and telling, and would bring these startling advances to a readership that had no idea what was happening in rehabilitation gyms right next door, or halfway around the world. Explaining the breakthrough work of locomotor training demanded the unfettered cooperation of spinal cord patients willing to share their lives, their accidents, their dreams, their fears and their intense work. We asked them to tell us everything, to help explain to readers the obvious and the hidden limitations of the paralyzed — the neuropathic pain lingering in immobile legs, the frustrations of bowel movements, the loss of skin tone, the terror of hanging upside down in a seat belt without being able to move. We brought notebooks, cameras, video cameras and every other tool, and they let us in. The results are science plucked from the abstract and planted in the humane. We also needed the nation’s leading scientists to explain and assess the desire vs. the reality of “walking again.” How does locomotor work? Does it work? When will we know if it works? If it doesn’t work, are there other good reasons for patients to do it? How much does it cost, and can anyone afford it? Synapse by synapse, neurologists and kinesiologists from the Mayo Clinic to Ohio State to Johns Hopkins to Craig Hospital taught our readers how we walk, and how that can be re-learned. In striking, emotional photographs, in complex documentary videos based on hours of on-camera interviews, in detailed graphics and in rich storytelling, The Denver Post in 2013 showed its readers how to step realistically toward hope.
