By STACY SMITH
The Leaf-Chronicle
When Greg Minow says, “Honey, will you run to the grocery and get some milk?”
it’s not because he’s too lazy to do it himself.
“I’m the running-into-the-store one,” says Alicia Minow, Greg’s 28-year-old
wife.
Greg would love nothing more than to jump up and trot on in, but he can’t. He
can roll himself into the store, and even drive himself there, using a modified
truck with a crane to lift and load his wheelchair. But for the past year and a
half, Greg hasn’t walked a step.
Always athletic, Greg enjoyed the physical challenges of being in the Army
almost as much as the mental ones. He went to
“I could feel the tension of 11 months in
“It also left me feeling depressed. When your mind gets used to being in a
heightened state of awareness and your body gets used to double the normal
amount of adrenaline pumping through your veins and that is taken away —”
despondence is the inevitable result.
Greg also felt guilty that he was coming home while so many soldiers at
Soon,
Greg found a way to brighten his days and channel his considerable energy.
“I bought a motorcycle,” Greg writes. “Not just any motorcycle; a 2004 Yamaha
YZ450F race dirt bike. This thing was one huge, rear tire spinning, front tire
lofting, arm jerking behemoth loaded with more power than should be legal.”
Alicia wasn’t surprised by Greg’s new toy.
“He’s been riding bikes since he was little,” she says.
Greg, then 27, found a dirt motocross track in
He had found his adrenaline rush.
The thrill came to a crashing halt Nov. 6, 2004. Despite a wet track, Greg took
to the dirt. He was doing fine until the triple jump, when something as small
as one too many upshifts caused the flight of the bike to go awry. From a
height of 10 feet, Greg and his motorcycle hurtled downward. Greg hit head
first, and his motorcycle landed on top of him.
“You see the earth coming up,” Greg says. “My visor was ripped off, my helmet
hit the ground, and I was knocked unconscious.”
The next thing Greg remembers is lying on the track with his head on the track
owner’s lap and his friend standing over him, concerned. Greg’s foot was turned
the opposite direction of his leg, indicating a pretty severe leg injury. It
occurred to Greg how strange it was that he felt little pain.
“At that point I thought I was just in shock and that any moment waves of pain
were going to come flooding over me,” Greg writes.
He soon knew something was very wrong.
“I started touching my stomach and couldn’t feel it,” he says. “I kept losing
consciousness off and on.”
LifeFlight arrived and took Greg to
There, doctors worked on his knee, took X-rays, a CT scan, several magnetic
resonance images and did other tests. They finally took him to his room at 1:30
a.m. Sunday morning, more than 12 hours after his accident.
When
the sun rose, Greg awoke to a roomful of doctors standing over him. They told
him he had a crushed vertebra, broken ribs and three torn ligaments in his
knee. Those injuries, bad as they are, were nothing compared to the big news:
He was a T7 complete paraplegic.
“They told me I was paralyzed, and I probably wouldn’t ever walk again,” Greg
says. “They told me they were forming a team, and they were going to operate.”
The operation fixed Greg’s knee, removed one rib that was severely damaged and
put a humerus bone from a cadaver around his spine to protect it from further
injury. A second surgery installed titanium plates around the donor bone,
screwed into Greg’s T6 and T10 vertebra to support his upper body weight. The
surgery was designed to help Greg cope with being paralyzed but had no aim of
repairing his damaged spinal cord.
“I have no sensation or motor control beyond the bottom of my rib cage,” says
Greg, who uses a wheelchair to get around.
From that point began a long and challenging recovery, with heavy emphasis on
learning to live in a world made for people who can walk.
Although
the realities of daily life are challenging, Greg and Alicia say Greg’s time in
rehab made him realize how much worse his injury could have been.
“He was so much better off than half the people in that hospital,” Alicia says.
“It gave him a really good perspective on life, I think.”
“It makes you feel lucky for what you do have,” Greg says. “You don’t
concentrate on the negatives. You focus on the positives, basically.”
Greg says he wanted to work to regain sensation in the lower half of his body,
but his doctor wouldn’t prescribe that kind of rehab, and his insurance
wouldn’t pay for it.
“I wanted to do active rehab right out of the hospital,” he says.
He calls his rehab nurses “Negative Nancys” because they gave him no hope of improving.
“Their job is to teach you to use the abilities you have to the best of your
ability,” and nothing more, Greg says.
But Greg isn’t content to sit in a chair forever. Since the accident, Greg has
been medically retired from the Army, an organization to which he had planned
to devote 20 years. He is making plans to have an experimental surgery that may
allow his spinal cord to regenerate.
Alicia is right by his side and will move with him to
“It’s almost lucky being as young as he is to have this happen to him,” Alicia
says. “He has the motivation to do what he needs to do to get better.”
Stacy Smith Segovia is a features writer for The Leaf-Chronicle. She can
be reached at 245-0237 or by e-mail at stacysegovia@theleafchronicle.com.
Greg Minow’s website, Legs 4 Greg: http://www.legs4greg.com
TO HELP
People who would like to donate may do so on Greg’s website. Donors’ names
will be listed on the website unless they request otherwise.
Greg Minow
local man awaiting
surgery to repair
his damaged spinal cord
By STACY SMITH
The Leaf-Chronicle
A former
On Nov. 6, 2004, Greg had a dirt bike accident that damaged his spinal cord,
making him a T7 complete paraplegic. He and his wife, Alicia, 28, are
determined to raise the $66,000 it will cost for Greg to have spinal cord
decompression surgery and stem cell injection therapy. They are moving next
month to
Injured people can qualify for the surgery if their spinal cord has not been
completely severed and the dura sac surrounding the spinal cord is intact,
allowing for flow of spinal fluid along the full length of the spinal cord.
Greg meets both criteria, with approximately 30 percent of his neural fibers
intact across the span of his spinal injury.
“When these two essential conditions are met, the healing program offered by
the ISCRC is the most successful in the world today,” says the center’s website.
The
surgery remodels the spinal canal, then uses injections of umbilical stem cells
from the umbilical cords of babies to facilitate spinal regeneration.
“I found out about it through my oldest sister, who is an R.N.,” Greg says.
His sister, Shelley Zastoupil, was working on a term paper and noticed a
reference to the International Spinal Cord Regeneration Center in a friend’s
paper. Greg has since flown to
“The results are very encouraging,” says the ISCRC website. “A number of our
paraplegic patients are now walking. The quadriplegic patients treated to date
are each making substantial progress. Patients in earlier stages of recovery
are regaining sensation and control of bodily function.”
Greg says even if the surgery doesn’t allow him to walk again, he hopes to
regain feeling in his torso.
“For him to get the smallest amount of function back, even to his bladder,
would make a huge difference in his daily life,” Alicia says.
“Being in a wheelchair isn’t bad,” Greg says. “It’s the bowel and bladder
that’s bad.”
Greg has to catheterize himself every three to four hours, and must wake up at
2 a.m. daily for as much as two hours of bowel care, using laxatives and
stimulation to encourage elimination.
Regaining feeling in his lower torso could restore Greg to normal bowel and
bladder function.
After his surgery, Greg will
have four hours per day of rehabilitation and repeated injections, at $8,000
each, of umbilical stem cells.
“I love working out, the physical, the rehab. I can handle the pain,” Greg
says. “The only obstacle facing us is the money.”
Although he is leaving for
When it was pointed out to him that if every person in
“Wouldn’t that be cool?” he said.
Stacy Smith Segovia is a features writer for The Leaf-Chronicle. She can
be reached at 245-0237 or by e-mail at stacysegovia@theleafchronicle.com.