Lacey Henderson running all the way to London

Cancer survivor and amputee Lacey Henderson has a berth on the U.S. Paralympic team for the London Games in 2012. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post )
Often, someone who doesn't know Lacey Henderson will spot the prosthesis replacing much of her right leg and blurt: "What happened to your leg?"

"I had cancer," Henderson routinely answers.

"Oh, that's horrible! I'm so sorry."

Henderson smiles and responds, "I'm not. I get great parking."

Three weeks short of her 22nd birthday, Henderson is on the verge of graduating from the University of Denver, where she majored in Spanish and minored in French and international health. Shortly after finishing four years on the Pioneers' cheerleading squad, she searched for a new athletic challenge this spring and last weekend locked up a berth on the U.S. team for the 2012 Paralympics in London.

The Denver native and graduate of Regis Jesuit High School needed to crack 20 seconds in the 100 meters in an official timing format to qualify for the U.S. team in the women's "T42" Paralympic classification, for athletes with single-leg amputations above the knee. She did so at the state high school track and field meet in Lakewood last weekend.

At Jeffco Stadium on Friday, she ran in the Paralympic exhibition 100 meters, but clipped her "racing" prosthetic with that of the boy in the next lane. After falling, Lacey got up and finished. The next day, she tried again in the Special Olympics 100 at the same meet. Her time was 19.98 seconds — two one-hundredths under what she needed.

It was symbolic. When she gets knocked down, she gets back up.

"I don't really have time for the cancer to come back at this point, so I'm feeling pretty confident," she said at DU's Driscoll Student Center. "It really wouldn't work with my schedule."

"Tired of being sick"

When Lacey was in the fourth grade, the diagnoses were that she had baker's cysts or, simply, "growing pains." Doctors then detected a tumor in her right knee. It was a soft-tissue synovial sarcoma, rare and found mostly in adult men. The survival rate is considered low, but it's so rare there isn't a huge sample. The most famous victim was actor Robert Urich, who died at age 55 in 2002.

Chemotherapy made Lacey violently ill and didn't seem to be working on the sarcoma. As doctors discussed the options with her and her parents — Linda and T.J., a longtime area high school track coach — the major one was amputation.

"I just wanted to be a normal person again and go back to school and I was tired of being sick," Lacey said. "So I said, 'Take it, I don't want it.' "

The amputation came in the spring of 1999. She also had a spot on her lung, but the chemotherapy zapped that.

"May 19 was my 12-year anniversary of being cancer free — and one-legged," she said. "I've been lucky. It has brought so many amazing things into my life, it has given me so many opportunities and so many gifts."

In early 2003, though, she was the target of harassment in her eighth-grade year at Hill Middle School. Some of it was vile or threatening online postings. Some of it was direct taunting about her prosthetic.

"It started off as people pretty sure just being uncomfortable with the leg," she said. "Towards the end, it was girls that just didn't like me."

In biology class, several girls placed remains of dissected frogs in her backpack.

Her parents moved her to Dora Moore School. The next year, she uneasily started at the girls division of Regis Jesuit, but discovered she loved it. "It was like going to camp for four years and you become close to your classmates," she said.

She was a cheerleader at Regis Jesuit, then at DU, doing all the athletic and acrobatic stunts. "I would have to watch for a while to see how people did (new routines)," she said, "and then I'd say, 'OK, this leg of mine might make me take a little bit longer, but I'm going to figure out how to do this if it kills me.' "

Denver attorney Julie Warren was DU's cheerleading coach during Lacey's stint on the squad. She admitted she wondered before Lacey's tryout about her physical capability and safety. "Then, probably within 10 minutes, I knew it was a nonissue," Warren said. "She had been so physically active during her youth and high school years, and prepared herself to do these physically challenging moves, she fit right in. That inspiration happened from Day One of meeting her.

"It was never a question of her not being able to do something the other girls did. That was incredibly impressive and a credit to her mental power and tenacity."

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Man who lost leg embarks on 700-mile bike ride

Written by
Steve Kemme

GREEN TWP. - A year ago, Scott Lane lay in a hospital bed, trying to cope with the loss of the lower half of his left leg in a traffic accident.

Saturday, he embarks on a 700-mile bike ride to raise money to send amputee children to a summer camp in Warren County.

The ride represents the culmination of a journey for Lane that can't be measured in miles.

He conceived of the idea for the 700-mile bike ride before he ever climbed onto an exercise bike at the Clippard YMCA branch in Green Township, as part of his recovery.

"The first day I got on the exercise bike, I could only ride two miles," said Lane, 41, of Green Township. "I thought, 'Is this going to be more than I can handle?' The second day, I rode it five miles. After that, I never had a doubt. I knew I could do it."

Lane and seven others will leave Saturday morning from Camp Joy in Clarksville in Warren County, the site of the camp for youths who have lost limbs, and arrive in Kansas City, Mo., a few days before the start of the Amputee Coalition of America's 2011 National Conference on June 7. The organization is a nonprofit group based in Knoxville, Tenn.

The annual Paddy Rossbach Youth Camp at Camp Joy, has hosted more than 500 children from 42 states and three foreign countries. It includes such activities as swimming, fishing and canoeing, dancing, archery, basketball, wall-climbing and arts and crafts.

Lane and three other bicyclists in his travel group have prosthetic legs. A van carrying their suitcases and other necessities will accompany them.

So far, the group has raised $20,000 in donations and believe they can reach $30,000 by the end of their 700-mile bike ride.

"Hopefully, we'll get a lot of media attention along the way," Lane said. "We're trying to raise awareness of the needs of amputees as well as raise money."

All donations not used for the bike ride's expenses will go to the Paddy Ross Summer Camp. Tax-deductible donations can be made by going to the website, www.amputee-coalition.org/ready. Non-tax-deductible donations can be made to the "I'm Ready Ride" fund at any US Bank branch.

Lane said it's important for children who have lost limbs to meet others facing the same challenges.

"The camp can lighten their burden and give the kids an opportunity to be around other people like them," he said. "Sometimes, it's hard enough just being a kid, much less being a kid with an amputation."

Lane lives with his wife, Nicole, and their son and two daughters from his previous marriage.

On May 6 of last year, Lane was riding his motorcycle when a car driven by a 24-year-old mother of three went left of center on Old Colerain Road in Colerain Township and struck him. Toxicology reports indicated that the woman had illegal drugs in her system.

Although the accident cost him the lower part of his left leg, Lane asked the judge not to send the woman to prison because he didn't want her children to be without their mother. She received five years' probation and was ordered to enter a drug-rehabilitation program.

Lane, a plumber, has been unable to return to work.

"There's no way I can stand on that leg for eight hours or carry a water heater down the steps with a dolly," he said. "Cycling doesn't bother it because it doesn't put that much pressure on it."

Initially, learning to walk with a prosthetic leg was more difficult than Lane thought it would be.

"The first week, I was like a baby trying to walk," he said. "It was a struggle."

Lane has come a long way from those initial steps on his prosthetic leg. The months and months of hard work have paid off.

Camp Joy is a fitting name for the starting point of his 700-mile bike ride to Kansas City.

Young athlete overcomes physical challenges

Posted: 05/17/2011
Last Updated: 17 hours and 4 minutes ago


By: Jason Pugh
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. - It's usually the parent that tries to inspire and motivate their children, but every now and then it's the other way around.

11-year-old Mikey Stolzenberg isn't the best player on his lacrosse team, however everyone would agree, he's the most courageous.

Three years ago, Mikey suffered from a rare immune disease that nearly took his life. During his seven week battle, doctors had to amputate both of his hands, and both feet.

"Now that he's growing every six months, he needs to get new sockets," says Mikey's dad, Keith Stolzenberg. "He doesn't wear arm prosthetics because they are too heavy and frankly the technology is not as good as what he can do with his arms as it is. He writes, he eats, he does just about everything."

This past weekend, the Pockets and Sockets Lacrosse Tournament took place to benefit the Mikey Stolzenberg trust, which will allow Mikey's family to purchase superior prosthetics so he can continue to participate in physical activities.

"His smile, his happiness, he doesn't let anything stop him," says event organizer Jennifer Bolger.

"This is great, I really liked it," says Mikey. "I thanked everybody for coming and I even get to play in my own tournament."

He even gave fans another reason to cheer. He scored a goal.

"I had a couple of misses, wasn't sure what to do, but then I got the hang of it and I scored," Mikey said.

Carol Forshaw's fight to get new right leg

Comments (4)Recommend (8) HER leg was ripped off during a horrific motorcycle accident.

But three years later Carol Forshaw is battling to buy herself a prosthetic replacement after claiming the NHS hasn’t provided her with an appropriate one.

The 35-year-old lost her right leg when she was involved in a car crash in Northumberland.

And she has spent the last three years fighting to get a properly-fitted prosthetic limb that will allow her to get on with her life.

Carol, of Stakeford, Northumberland, says the NHS have been unable to help her and she has decided to try and raise £26,000 to privately buy a leg.

She said: “If somebody told me that I would still be trying to get a prosthetic limb three years after my accident I wouldn’t have believed them.

“It’s just really frustrating. I work and I want to continue working but it’s really difficult when you don’t have a leg that fits properly.

“You have to carry kit around with you all the time and I have had a number of broken bones because the limbs don’t fit correctly.

“Because of the ill fitting leg I fell over. I’m a really determined character and all I want is to live a normal life and get my life back on track. The NHS are really under staffed and it’s difficult for amputees to make any progress.”

Carol’s life was changed forever when she lost control of her bike on a hillside in July 2008.

Careering into the path of an oncoming car, she was unable to get out the way quickly enough to stop the vehicle slicing through her leg, removing all the skin and tissue down to the bone.

She was left fighting for life on the roadside at Cragside, near Rothbury, as the blood drained from her body.

Had it not been for a crew from the Great North Air Ambulance, which flew her to Newcastle General Hospital in time for a life-saving total blood transfusion, she believes she would not have survived.

But now Carol needs to raise £26,000 for a private prosthetic limb. She has already managed to raise £13,000 through savings and fundraisers in hope to get on with her life.

A spokesperson for The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Foundation Trust said: “Miss Forshaw is seen regularly at our Disablement Services Centre. We have not previously been made aware of these concerns and our team would be more than happy to discuss these with her, at her next attendance at the centre.”

Carol said: “When I lost my leg I remember thinking life was all about glamour and looking good. But now all I want is to get from A to B.

“I have already managed to raise half of the money through saving and various fundraisers.

“My colleagues and friends are now trying their best to help me raise the rest of the cash.”

A team of 11 friends of will now cycle from Whitehaven to Sunderland between May 20 and May 22 to help Carol reach her target.

Anyone wishing to help can email Carol at carolforshaw@hotmail.com


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Veterans Compete For Gold At Warrior Games

Nicholas Gibbons, a single amputee with the British Royal Marines team, takes off from the blocks during practice Feb. 21 in Camp Pendleton, Calif., for the inaugural Marine Corps Trials. Fifty athletes were chosen as members of the All-Marine team for the Warrior Games.

Michael Goulding/AP Nicholas Gibbons, a single amputee with the British Royal Marines team, takes off from the blocks during practice Feb. 21 in Camp Pendleton, Calif., for the inaugural Marine Corps Trials. Fifty athletes were chosen as members of the All-Marine team for the Warrior Games.
text size A A A May 17, 2011 The U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs is hosting 220 servicemen and women who are wounded, injured or ill this week for the second annual Warrior Games.

"We have the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the Coast Guard and Special Operations Command all participating," says Charlie Huebner, chief of paralympics for the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Huebner says a primary goal of the games is to encourage people with disabilities to be physically active.

Some of the athletes are soldiers you've heard a lot about — injured by a roadside bomb or another combat-related injury. Others are accident victims or suffering from an illness.

Participants compete in seven sports: archery, cycling, basketball, shooting, swimming, track and field, and sitting volleyball. They are chosen proportionately from the various service branches.

In sitting volleyball, the net is low so that it touches the ground. And the players don't use wheelchairs, like in basketball — they sit on the floor and propel themselves however they can.

"Everybody's got different injuries," says Savage Margraf, 24, with the Marine Corps sitting volleyball team. "Some of the guys are double amputees, some are single amputees below the waist.

This is actually a sport where having legs is a disadvantage because they get in the way.

- Savage Margraf, a member of the Marine Corps sitting volleyball team
"This is actually a sport where having legs is a disadvantage because they get in the way," Margraf says. She is one of the few team members who still has both arms and legs.

Margraf suffers from traumatic brain injury (TBI). She says doctors attribute her TBI to two bad falls she took while serving in Iraq. One was from a watch tower on the Syrian border.

"I was helping get a 50-[caliber] barrel down — it's a machine gun," Margraf explains. "We had to change out the barrels because there was a sand storm. As I was coming down the stair, the second stair from the top broke and I fell."

Now Margraf says she has trouble with her vision. She was medically retired from the military in 2008 at 21 years old. Many of those participating in the Warrior Games are young.

Teammate Jese Schag, 21, had his right leg amputated after a motorcycle accident in 2009. He played sitting volleyball in the first Warrior Games last year.

"It's all about speed, and you've got to have good hands," Schag says. "You've got to be able to react — put your hands on the floor and then bring them up to get the ball."

Margraf says the competition is fun, but she's really here for inspiration.

"We have a swimmer who is a double amputee and blind," Margraf says. "How can you not come to this and leave with some sort of motivation and know that there are people that are way worse than you and they are trying?"

The Defense Department and the U.S. Olympic Committee organize the Warrior Games. Opening ceremonies were Monday. The sitting volleyball finals will wrap up the competition Saturday.

A double amputee who scaled summit of Everest

Dibeyendu Ganguly, May 6, 2011, 12.57am ISTTags:Mark Inglis|ICICI Bank Ltd.

Four o'clock in the afternoon on a hot summer's day and I'm to meet Mark Inglis — wine maker, motivational speaker, author, first double amputee to climb Mount Everest — at the Café Coffee Day on Bandra's Carter Road sea face. I arrive early, optimistic of finding a table in the air conditioned interior, but that's not to be. When Mark arrives ten minutes later, with his agent in tow, I'm seated all hot and bothered outside, under a garden umbrella, fanning myself with a menu.

One of the advantages of coming early is that I'm positioned with maximum umbrella coverage, while the two New Zealanders have the sun on their faces. "It's so hot," I say by way of a conversation starter, adding "but an adventurer like you is probably used to it." "I'm more used to the cold actually," says Inglis, with a grin.

For those who don't know the story, Inglis was trapped in a cave for eleven days while attempting to climb Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He was eventually rescued, but both his legs were so badly frostbitten that they had to be amputated below the knee. Twenty years later, at the age of 43, Inglis returned to Mount Cook and conquered the summit. The climb was documented in a film titled No Mean Feat: The Mark Inglis Story. Four years later, he went on to climb Mount Everest, and this time the dramatic and somewhat controversial (more on that later) event was captured in a documentary titled Everest: Beyond The Limit.

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A neuro-engineer’s call to arms

Our prosthetics aren’t quite as good as Luke Skywalker’s — but they’re getting there [Image Credit AdamSelwood]

By Katie Palmer | Posted April 22, 2011
Posted in: Physical Science

Attached at the hip, your body and you do everything together, silently communicating with only the slightest misunderstandings. You and your body make tacit agreements to type on a keyboard, jerk away from a hot stove or reach toward a light switch in the dark, and recognition of your teamwork comes only as an afterthought. It’s likely the closest relationship you’ll ever have.
But sometimes that relationship goes sour. Like a two-timing boyfriend, your body can be supremely deceitful. Things fall apart: With loss of limb, paths of communication get shut down, and what was once a strong partnership can turn into a daily battle against pain from an imaginary appendage. Healthy bodies can deceive too. The “rubber hand illusion,” in which your hand, hidden behind a screen, and a visible rubber hand are stroked simultaneously, convinces able-bodied people that an inanimate hunk of rubber belongs to them. When a hammer aims to strike the rubber appendage, subjects recoil as if their own fingers were in danger.

We usually think about our physical identity in terms of where our body starts and ends, says Shaun Gallagher, a cognitive scientist at the University of Central Florida and author of the book How the Body Shapes the Mind. “But it turns out that it’s very fragile, that sense of identity, and you can do all sorts of interesting things with it.”

One of those interesting things is happening at Northwestern University, where advances in prosthetic limbs have demonstrated the enormous flexibility of the connection between brain and body — and how that flexibility can be manipulated to create the next generation of motorized prosthetics. Their thought-controlled prosthetics challenge the conventional sense of “me,” asking where the boundaries of human embodiment truly lie. Are we simply flesh and bone, or are we what we interact with?

In February, Northwestern’s Todd Kuiken described a process called targeted reinnervation at a symposium for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Kuiken, the director of the Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, pioneered the process, which allows amputees to control their prosthetic arms with amazing dexterity. You can watch videos of Kuiken’s patients moving heavy hammers and picking up crackers without leaving a crumbly mess. What’s more, the patients achieve this mastery of their artificial arms merely by thinking about moving them.

To accomplish this feat, a doctor first severs the nerves leading to the patient’s chest muscles, or another nearby muscle set. Then, the nerves that previously led to the patient’s arm — the ones that now are truncated at the arm’s stump — are redirected and attached to the chest muscles. These nerves are still capable of sending signals. When a patient thinks about bending his elbow, the nerves to those muscles still fire, but instead of finding themselves at a dead end, they wind up in the chest, stimulating electrodes implanted above their pruned ends. The electrodes control the movement of the motorized prosthesis strapped to the patient’s torso, and the artificial elbow bends.

While this is a remarkable advance in itself, it still leaves amputees unable to feel what they touch; targeted reinnervation patients have to watch their prosthetic arm carefully in order to make sure that it’s actually grasping an object. That may be about to change, though.

Recently, Kuiken’s team has found that sensory nerves for the arm (in addition to the original motor nerves) can be redirected to skin elsewhere on the body. A rig can be devised in which touch sensors on the prosthetic arm send signals to a motorized device that crawls across the reinnervated skin. The device pokes the appropriate sensory nerves with a plunger, allowing the patient to feel what he — or the prosthetic arm — is touching. And just like in the rubber hand illusion, that sense of touch can trick amputees into embodying the external limb.

This development points toward prostheses that are ever more like natural, biological limbs. Depending on your generation’s brand of fantasy, it’s now reasonable to imagine amputees walking around with prosthetic hands like Luke Skywalker or Peter Pettigrew. But there are still several steps to be taken before these fictions become a reality, before amputees can truly become one with their artificial limbs.

One of the remaining barriers to total integration of prosthetic limbs is the seemingly simple ability to know our bodies, a phenomenon known as proprioception. “Right now, amputees have to depend entirely on their vision to know where their limb is,” says neuroscientist Paul Marasco, one of Todd Kuiken’s collaborators at Northwestern. “Vision is not really a sense that’s set up for that.”

Proprioception is an innate sense — of the angle of a quizzically cocked head, the speed of fluttering jazz hands, or the bend of our knees climbing stairs in the dark. Experts separate our proprioceptive sense into two categories: the kinesthetic (the motion of our bodies) and the positional (the location of our body parts). It’s one of the most profoundly under appreciated aspects of our consciousness. And it is precisely because we take proprioception for granted that it is so difficult to untangle.

“Proprioception is really not so well understood — how it’s operating, what it’s doing,” says Marasco. His current research is teasing apart how our sense of limb position and movement is organized in our brains, starting with mapping those neural connections in mice.

It’s difficult to segment proprioception into its component neural parts when the position and motion of our bodies seem so fluid. Somehow, our brains compile information about the length of a muscle, the stretching of skin or the angle of a joint and translate it into a comprehensive sense of being.

That difficulty is compounded by the sheer number of positions that our body can assume. There are 27 points of articulation in an arm, notes Amy Blank, a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University who has done experiments to determine just how essential proprioception is to the functioning of a prosthetic limb. Understanding feedback on the position and movement of all those points will be an extremely challenging task. “In some ways I feel fortunate that I’m not working on the biology side as much,” said Blank, whose research focuses on robotics.

As a better biological understanding of proprioception emerges, researchers hope to develop prosthetic limbs that can stimulate nerves to restore a sense of position and movement — and thereby become increasingly united with the wearer’s self image. And if amputees can call a prosthesis part of their bodies, what’s limiting the rest of us to our heads, shoulders, knees and toes? Weirdly, the cars that we drive or the computers that we use could be as much a part of our bodies as these prostheses soon will be.

Our bodies will certainly be able to adapt to proprioceptive prosthetics, says Marasco, who is continually astounded by patients’ accommodation of the new limbs. “But our ability to build a machine that can do all the things that our hand can do is a different story,” he says. The next generation of prostheses will be limited not by our bodies’ nearly infinite plasticity, but by our engineering capabilities.