Quadriplegics

Fetal pig cells were injected into the spine of a 50-year-old quadriplegic man in Albany in an experimental procedure that hospital officials say was the first of its kind. If it works, the cells will grow as they would in a developing pig and create a new connection in Charles Dederick's spine, damaged in a 1997 motorcycle accident. If electric impulses can again flow from his brain, they could send signals to the muscles and possibly allow him to walk again.

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes, in the hubbub of Washington, it takes a personal story to grab government officials' attention. Enter Patrick Ivison, an 18-year-old USC freshman who was left a quadriplegic as a toddler when a neighbor accidentally backed a car over him. He was at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, telling his story in an effort to persuade federal regulators to complete work on a requirement for back-up cameras in new cars. He was joined at a news conference by parents who held up pictures of their children killed in back-over accidents.

Just five weeks ago, Ronnie Moore could not do what most people take for granted -- cough to clear his lungs. Now Moore, a quadriplegic, coughs by pressing a button on a control box on his wheelchair. Moore's cough was the first performed electronically by a quadriplegic, said his doctor, Anthony F. DiMarco of Cleveland's MetroHealth Medical Center. Not being able to cough made Moore susceptible to respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

On the orders of a San Diego appeals court, California prison officials have agreed to release a bedridden inmate whom court officials describe as "an angry, repulsive person. " The quadriplegic inmate, Steven Martinez, was the first in 2011 to apply and then be denied release under California's then-new medical parole law allowing the release of inmates who require 24-hour nursing care. The program was designed to save the state money by moving California's costliest prisoners into community hospitals and nursing centers, where the federal government will pay half the bill for their care.

Six months after he broke his neck trying to save a suicidal woman, Conrad Buchanan smiled a lot and even cracked a few jokes as he left the hospital Tuesday facing life as a quadriplegic. The 26-year-old former mall security guard and father of two daughters was released from Northridge Hospital Medical Center after a grueling stay that included several operations and intense rehabilitation.

It's been a tough eight years for Harold Leon Bostick. The aspiring lawyer and lifelong athlete became a quadriplegic when weightlifting equipment at his gym crashed down onto his neck. Seven years of litigation ended last week with Bostick $18.6 million richer, but no less relieved. No amount of money, the 39-year-old Pennsylvania native says, would give him the life he had before the evening of Jan. 4, 2001. "It's kind of like a mini-death," Bostick said Wednesday outside U.S.

Aided by a tiny chip implanted in his brain, a 25-year-old quadriplegic played video games, controlled a television and operated a mechanical arm using only his thoughts, researchers said Wednesday. The technology, reported in the journal Nature, is the latest step toward enabling people paralyzed by stroke, spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, to control their wheelchairs or feed themselves simply by thinking about those actions.

When Keith Lawson broke his neck tackling a quarterback 12 years ago, the football player in him didn't die with the use of his legs. He missed the clips and hits--the contact--of the gridiron. Then Lawson, 33, of Irvine, found quad rugby, an extreme sport for the disabled that draws rules from basketball, hockey and rugby--and inspiration from a tough night at the roller derby.

As defending champions of the unlimited division, Gimps R Us had plenty at stake. But in the third and final inning of their second game, the Gimps were down 3-0 with two men out, and they'd already lost their first game. "All right, this is it, a two-out rally," Jerry Newman shouted to teammate Rick Rehhaut, who settled deeper into his wheelchair and brandished a fat plastic bat. "Need three runs. We gotta get five hits."

Steven Martinez lies in bed in a small, bare room, day after day, month after month. He can blink, speak, swallow and turn his head. Nurses must help him with everything else. They bathe him, turn his body every two hours and spoon-feed him three meals a day. When he wants to make a phone call, a staff member dials the number and holds the receiver to his ear. His care comes courtesy of the California penal system.

The midnight car chase that opens the odd-couple buddy picture"The Intouchables"is fresh and unpredictable - qualities that the movie, unfortunately, never quite achieves again, although it isn't without its charms. A smart hook, that introductory sequence piques curiosity about the two men in the speeding Maserati, a seemingly mismatched duo whose bond clearly runs deep. In this sentimental feel-good saga of an ultra-wealthy quadriplegic and the petty criminal who becomes his caretaker, the chemistry between the two lead actors goes a considerable way toward elevating the broad-strokes culture clash.

The meteoric performance of"The Avengers"has been the buzz of Hollywood in recent weeks, with the superhero film zooming to more than $1 billion in worldwide receipts in just 19 days. But the real box-office shocker of the season features no comic book crusaders, aliens or computerized special effects. In fact, it isn't even in English. "The Intouchables,"a French comedy about a quadriplegic, white Parisian millionaire who hires a black Senegalese troublemaker as his attendant, has taken in $339 million outside the United States since its release six months ago, according to Rentrak, an entertainment data service.

Mind-reading robots? It's not as scary as it sounds. Researchers in Switzerland are developing a robot that can respond to human thoughts, and may one day help immobile people better interact with the external world. On Tuesday, scientists from Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne marked a milestone in this research, when they demonstrated that a partially paralyzed man could control the movements of a 1-foot-tall robot from more than 62 miles away, the Associated Press reported.

Following a jury's verdict that Los Angeles police officers were wrong to shoot a man they believed was armed, the City Council now must decide whether to approve a controversial $4.5-million settlement payout to the paralyzed man. The case stems from a night in September 2005, when several officers on patrol in South L.A. responded to a report of a nearby shooting. Witnesses pointed to a white van leaving the scene, saying people inside had unloaded a volley of gunfire while driving by. After a brief pursuit, the three men inside the van jumped out and scattered.

In a busy lab at Duke University, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is merging brain science with engineering in a bid to create something fantastical: a full-body prosthetic device that would allow those immobilized by injury to walk again. On Wednesday, Nicolelis and an international group of collaborators declared that they had cleared a key hurdle on the path toward that goal, demonstrating they could bypass the body's complex network of nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains of monkeys.

When he was in high school, Frederick A. Fay would shoot baskets for hours in his Bethesda, Md., backyard. Then, before heading inside, he might execute a routine of flips on a trapeze. That was his intention one day toward the end of his junior year in 1961. Hands slick with sweat from shooting hoops, he jumped up to grab the trapeze and completed two flips. Then he lost his grip and fell 10 feet, uttering a profanity as he went down. He swore all the way to the hospital, where he learned that he had broken his neck in two places.

They bumped into one another as they tried to hit their marks. Their wheels became entangled during a group scene. One of them missed her cue because a prop blocked her path. Things like that happen when a cast of wheelchair-bound actors takes the stage for the first time to rehearse a play that shines a spotlight on the challenges that the physically disabled face every day.

Sometime this morning, between the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" and the conferring of degrees, the 9,352 students graduating from USC will rise from their chairs to applaud one man who can't rise from his. Class valedictorian Kemal Demirciler is a quadriplegic who was paralyzed in a diving accident three weeks before his freshman year was to begin. Subsequent surgeries and rehabilitation took seven years. But the Cyprus-born Demirciler never lost his determination to study at USC.

The reasoning seemed disarmingly simple: In a time of fiscal crisis and over-crowded prisons, why should California spend hundreds of millions of dollars retaining prisoners so sick, aged, paralyzed or otherwise infirm that they are no longer a threat to the public? And so the Legislature passed a bill to permit medical paroles as both a humanitarian gesture and a way to save money for the state. But theory has collided with the reality that prosecutors will fight vigorously to keep even incapacitated prisoners behind bars, that the parole board can be a highly skeptical body and that some prisoners committed heinously brutal acts before they fell victim to the medical problems that rendered them "safe.

Jamie Merrett, paralyzed from the neck down, was so worried about the quality of nursing care he was receiving at home that he had a camera set up in his room to monitor the activity around him. The Englishman's worst fears were realized when the camera recorded his nurse switching off his life-support system, apparently by accident, then fumbling to revive him while he lay helpless in bed. Merrett, 37, is now brain-damaged. On Monday, that grainy footage was broadcast on national television, shocking Britons and adding to the catalog of medical horror stories that have left many here bemoaning the state of the nation's vaunted National Health Service, or NHS. Health officials have apologized to Merrett's family for the incident, which occurred in January 2009 but was not publicized until the BBC aired the disturbing video Monday.