On a mid-tour break, he did a back flip while doing gymnastics that propelled him head forward inside the foam pit. The top of his head collided with the concrete wall inside the foam pit splitting his head open and paralyzing him by bursting his sixth cervical vertebra.
He is a survivor of a C-6 injury, a traumatic brain injury, and Brown-Sequard Syndrome, a rare incomplete lesion to one side of the spinal cord that results in impaired or loss of movement to the injured side.
A neurosurgeon told him he would never walk again without full prosthetics, but several months later he was walking short distances with only a cane. And two years later he was walking without any help. Lynda Burke, his mom, shared this inspiring story about her oldest son with brainandspinalcord.org.
“I believe that the spinal cord area along with the body as a whole is still a mystery and that what works for one person may not work for another,” Lynda wrote in an Oct. 4 email where she was asked her feelings about hope for recovery from spinal cord injuries.
When asked what the key was to her son’s recovery, she wrote: “Fighting every day to make something work, to make something move, to stay healthy and strong.”
Mindset was a critical part of this fight. “I believe the patients mental outlook has the most to do with them recovering, I say this because my son did not want to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, and thus he pushed himself every day and every moment to try to get something to move. We did not wait for therapy to come work with him, I stretched his hands, arms, legs and feet several times during the day . . . and he mentally knew he did not want to spend his whole life in a wheelchair.”
Lynda added: “Christopher’s hand therapist wrote his hand off in December 2010, but we were not happy with that, both of us refused to give up, and we continued to try to stimulate that hand and although it is still not back a 100 percent to what it was before his injury and may never be, he has more use of his hand than the therapist thought he would ever get and can hold a cup in it now.”
Christopher got his rehabilitation therapy on base at Fort Riley, KS. His therapy included pool therapy, twice a week, physical therapy, three times per week, occupational therapy, twice a week, and hand therapy, three times per week then twice per week until December when hand therapy ended.
He was in the U.S. Army since Aug. 2007, and he was medically discharged in May 2012. Since he’s been out of the Army he has moved to California with plans of beginning college this coming year at California State University, Northridge. In the meantime, he continues to rebuild the physical strength he lost from his injuries through physical therapy exercises to strengthen his left leg and work with flexibility and range of motion in his left hand. When asked how he’s doing today, Lynda wrote: “Amazingly well. He is walking full time now which is a true miracle. He still has bad days, but all in all he is doing wonderful.”
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