Spine surgery ‘miracle’ seen

Press, 5 December 1989, Page 5

Spine surgery ‘miracle’ seen

PA Auckland An Auckland paraplegic, Mr Paul Glover, says even if he does not walk again, he has witnessed the miracle of the spine surgery that could cure other paralysed people.

Mr Glover, aged 24, is back from Moscow where he had special spine reconstruction surgery at First Sechenov Medical Institute. Doctors there have a reputation for curing disabling spine injuries.

A Swedish man in the hospital had gained scm of feeling after five days and another man had gained leg movement within a week. Both had been in wheelchairs for more than a year. “If it doesn’t work on me it will work on someone else,” Mr Glover said.

“The doctors here don’t believe they can do it. But if they try to tell me otherwise I will laugh in their faces because I have seen it.

“The only problem is the risk involved but every operation has its risks. It is up to the individual,” Mr Glover said. Soviet doctors said the extensive three-year rehabilitation therapy Mr Glover was seeking would be the telling factor in his recovery.

Professor Georgy Yumachev, who pioneered the operation, said postoperation therapy was necessary for growth of nerve cells in the spine’s motor centre. They grow a millimetre a day. Initially, Professor Yu-

machev gave Mr Glover a 12 per cent recovery rate but raised this to 20 per cent when he discovered the spine was scarred and not, as post-accident reports claimed, severed in three places after the car smash that paralysed him three years ago in Australia.

Immediately after the three-hour surgery, in which doctors removed scar tissue from Mr Glover’s spine and freed passages for cerebrospinal fluid, he said he had felt his stomach muscles begin to move and muscle spasms in his legs had stopped. Those signs had since disappeared and Mr Glover was philosophical about the fact only time would tell if he walked again.

“The operation does work,” he said. “But just not on everyone. That is just the chance you have to take.” The most important thing for him now was to gain access to a rehabilitation centre, then make therapy a total way of life for six months.

Right now, all he wants to do is eat hamburgers and relish in the joys of real Kiwi food, he said. He had lost a lot of weight when at first in Moscow because he could not stomach heavy Soviet food.

He said he was thankful to the mother of a man recovering next to him in hospital. She introduced him to the delights of borscht — Russian soup made from beetroot and red cabbage.