When you’ve been through ten years of immeasurable pain and suffering from multiple cellular schwannomas (tumors) on your spine and abdomen; when you’ve had surgery to realign your legs so that you can learn to walk again; and when you’ve met the goals of physical therapy and occupational therapy and are back in school again—wouldn’t you just want to relax during the summer?
Maybe hang with your friends and play some video games, like a regular 16 year-old.
Not if you’re Roderick Ball, Jr.
When you have a condition so rare and undergo surgery so daring that Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore makes a YouTube video about you—you’re going to keep moving forward. Especially if you have the full support of your parents, a one-of-a-kind program like Beyond Therapy® at Shepherd Center and financial assistance from Andee’s Army, a non-profit organization inspired by Andee Poulos, another remarkable young patient recovering from brain injury.
In June, Ball began Beyond Therapy, an intense activity-based therapy program designed by Shepherd Center to help people with neurological disorders, including spinal cord and brain injuries, improve their lifelong health. He’s exercising and pushing beyond his limits for three hours, three times a week—and smiling.
“When you take a kid at seven, eight, nine years old who is very athletic and you turn his life inside out with medical problems, it not only hurts physically. It kills the psyche mentally and emotionally,” said Roderick Ball, Sr. “What I hope this program will do is to help him realize the potential his body has. We expect it to increase his overall functionality, strength and wellness.”
He’s watching his son bond with his exercise therapists and other clients. He’s hearing about the possibility of playing sports again on one of Shepherd’s teams someday. “He’s seeing people in wheel chairs and crutches, people with more limitations and some with less and realizing he’s not isolated,” said Ball, Sr.
Shepherd Center designed Beyond Therapy as a blend of physical therapy and exercise physiology eight years ago for patients who had reached their physical therapy goals after an injury or disability, but wanted to do more. They started with four clients and within seven months had 11 and a waiting list of 30. Today they maintain a census of about 50 people, who come from all over the world.
Therapy is a part of the rehabilitation process of many illnesses and disabilities, but when clients plateau, insurers won’t pay for therapy anymore, said Rebecca Washburn, MS, wellness manager at Shepherd Center.
“Beyond Therapy, which is unique to our facility, is a holistic approach to promoting lifelong wellness by working on what a client needs and wants in order to be more competent and independent,” she said. “The treatment is individually customized to meet the needs and goals of each participant.”
With trained staff, clients exercise and undergo interventions with state-of-the-art technology, (like Lokomat, a Robotic assisted treadmill trainer or neuromuscular electrical stimulation) to strengthen their core and weaker muscles. Beyond Therapy uses the concepts from athletic training and neuroplasticity, which is the belief that the spinal cord can adjust itself functionally by reorganizing neural maps and allowing some recovery of lost abilities.
“It’s 50 to 70 percent more intense than regular therapy and costs $100 an hour,” said Washburn. Clients workout nine hours a week for 12 weeks, and may continue longer if they are making progress. “We can be more comprehensive in strengthening and conditioning because we have more time with our clients, and all our interventions are evidence-based,” said Washburn.
