Medical Marvel

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Possibilities for the Impossible

In 1974, Pat Rummerfield was paralyzed in a car accident. After 17 years of therapy, he regained his ability to walk. Today, Pat serves as a role model and research subject at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institue, where other quadriplegics and paraplegics are undergoing intensive experimental therapies. Medical Marvel, (Post Magazine, Jan. 27, 2008)

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They must pause periodically. Farmer's internal gyroscope is still out of whack. His ears sometimes feel as if they're filling with water, a dizzying sensation he refers to as "hearing the fan."

"It's because your blood pressure's down so low," Rummerfield tells him. "Whenever you first stand up, it shocks the system."

Rummerfield has been through this body-brace phase, adding that it took him eight months of rehabilitation before he could stand without getting queasy. Normal increments of time don't apply to spinal cord therapy. Extraordinary patience is required. "You have to reeducate the body. The process can wear you down," says Rummerfield. "You've got to look at yourself like you're training for the Olympics."

Every day Farmer tells himself, "I know I'm gonna walk." He believes it because Rummerfield walks. For now, however, he would be content to have his crutches carry him as far as the soda machine down the hall, a distance of roughly 50 feet.

Farmer inches along, step by labored step. Lagonera follows close behind. He's wearing a blue Kennedy Krieger staff polo shirt. The back is emblazoned with a one-word motto printed in bright, white letters in about a dozen languages.

Esperanca . . . Esper . . . Espoir . . . Hoop . . .

Hope.

Rummerfield never made it through the Gobi. A freak rainstorm turned the desert floor into leg-sucking goo; the struggle was compounded by 60 mph sandstorms. After finishing the 27-mile opening stage, Rummerfield dropped out with what X-rays later revealed were fractured ankles. He'd thought they were just bad sprains.

Some of Rummerfield's stoicism and iron determination comes from his childhood. He is a native Californian. His birth name: Duke Stover, which sounds like the hero of a 1920s young-adult novel. It was an abusive household. Duke's arm was broken by his father when he was a toddler. All five Stover children wound up in an orphanage in Boise, Idaho. They were placed with separate families and lost touch.

Duke was adopted at age 7 and renamed Patrick by Tom Rummerfield, a childless, gimpy-legged, middle-age divorc¿ who lived outside the small mining town of Kellogg, about a half-hour from Coeur d'Alene in Idaho's northern panhandle.

Most Kellogg men worked, and sometimes died, in the nearby lead and silver mines. The town was full of rugged folk who knew hard times. Tom Rummerfield had his adopted son actually sign a contract stating they would care for each other till death. He was a proud, compassionate, resourceful, somewhat eccentric coot -- a onetime amateur boxer turned miner turned air-conditioning repairman who wrote poetry and hunted elk.

The elder Rummerfield loved baseball and believed his boy was destined to become a big league pitcher. Every day, he had Pat throw dozens of balls through a tire slung from a backyard tree and jump rope to build his legs. He regularly timed Pat in grade school as he ran a two-mile stretch of hills behind their house.