After A Traumatic Neck Injury, Intense Physical Therapy Helps A Teenager Move Again.
July 24, 2019: a grayish, unremarkable day on the beach at Ocean Grove. Lifeguard Sam Jarmer, 16, dives into the water to cool down, but hits a hidden sandbar.
Soon after, Sam’s mom, Jessica, sitting on the beach several blocks away, sees a call from Sam’s boss come in on her phone. “I immediately knew not only that he was injured; I could feel that it was bad,” she remembers.
When he hit the sandbar, Sam suffered a burst fracture in the C6 vertebra near the base of the neck and lost the ability to move his arms and legs. A fellow lifeguard jumped in to lift his head above the water, and a trauma team was dispatched from a nearby hospital. Sam was strapped to a backboard, and six of his fellow lifeguards carried him to a waiting ambulance.
“He kept saying, ‘I’m so sorry, Mom,’ because we were supposed to go on vacation the next day,” Jessica remembers.
Sam was in surgery for six hours while the burst vertebra was replaced with a titanium cage. He spent the next five days recovering at the hospital. At that point, he could occasionally raise his arms a bit, but nothing more.
It was time for intensive inpatient rehabilitation and therapy at Children’s Specialized Hospital (CSH) in New Brunswick. “I remember feeling that this would be the place that would make it all better,” Jessica says.
Making Progress
The first piece of good news came from Michele Fantasia, MD, Director of the Spinal Cord Injury Program at CSH. Her evaluation determined that Sam’s injury was “incomplete,” meaning that Sam still had some motor and sensory function below the level of injury. “As I say with all incomplete injuries, ‘The sky’s the limit,’” Dr. Fantasia told Jessica.
Four months of recreational, physical and occupational therapies followed. “The occupational therapists made modifications for everything,” Jessica remembers. “They kept constructing things in some kind of magical workshop they had.” There was a special fork to help Sam relearn how to feed himself, a device to help him brush his teeth and more.
“Everyone at Children’s really helped me when I was at one of the lowest points in my life with my injury,” says Sam. “They just showed compassion in all of the support and love that they gave me.” On November 19, Sam was discharged from CSH.
Today, Sam continues with a rigorous program of outpatient physical therapy. During the COVID-19 lockdown, he did his exercises via telemedicine for a few weeks. His older brother, home from college, was there to help.
Sam continues to work on his core muscles, arms and fingers. He now has muscle control in all parts of his legs and continues to work on walking independently. “I’m staying positive,” he says. “I know it will take time and I’ll be back to where I was, but for now I’ve just got to keep pushing forward.”
You can learn more about Children’s Specialized Hospital here.