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Experimental treatment returns use of arms after traffic accident
After experimental treatment, Lucas Lindner is back in the game. From his wheelchair, he will throw out the first pitch at Sunday’s Brewers game at Miller Park.
Lucas Lindner still can’t believe it. From his wheelchair, he will throw out the first pitch at Sunday’s Brewers game at Miller Park.
“I’m blown away by the fact that I can pitch a ball again,” he said.
Lucas is back in the game. Not bad for a guy who had no movement below his neck and upper arms following a traffic accident last year. The word that his doctors used then was terrifying: quadriplegic.
An article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last September told how Lucas, who is 23 and lives in the Fond du Lac County community of Eden, received an experimental treatment at Froedtert Hospital for patients with spinal cord injuries.
Lucas was injected with 10 million nervous system cells from a line of embryonic stem cells created 19 years ago. The therapy was created by Asterias Biotherapeutics Inc. and has been used in a dozen patients nationwide, including three in Milwaukee.
Lucas suffered his injury in May 2016 when he crashed his truck while trying to avoid a deer in the road. His cervical spinal cord was injured, though not severed. And nerve cells lost their insulation and became dormant and unable to conduct electrical impulses to make body parts work. The injected cells restored the protective coating these nerves need to function.
His doctor in the clinical trial, Shekar Kurpad, director of the spinal cord injury program at Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, said this is the kind of stuff he was told in medical school was impossible.
“I think the excitement regarding the viability of this to restore function has grown in the last year. I don’t know if it’s the definitive treatment yet, but not just Lucas but other people who have had transplants since a year ago have uniformly done well,” he said.
What’s crucial is that the transplant of cells, known as AST-OPC1, is done within two months of the injury, the doctor said. It’s a tall order that Lucas would someday walk again, but he and Kurpad hold out hope. “With more research,” Lucas said, “there’s no reason that should be off the table.”
Lucas has regained the use of both arms, hands and all of his fingers. He can cook, feed and dress himself, write with a pen, type on a keyboard, lift heavy objects and pull himself up from his wheelchair. He hopes to find work, begin driving and move into his own place in the next two years.
Now he lives with Dave and Karen Long, his maternal grandparents who raised him. When Lucas was 1, his father and other grandfather were killed in a plane crash, and his mother was very young. So his grandparents stepped up.
Dave has become Lucas’ pitching coach during the past few weeks, right out there in the front yard and driveway.
“He actually throws the ball quite hard. He bears off to the right a little bit, but it’s amazing he can throw it that hard,” Dave said. “I think it’s a great opportunity for him to go out and display what our medical field is capable of doing nowadays and how he has improved.”
Lucas, who admits to being a bit nervous like anyone who faces this task in front of a big crowd, thinks he’ll probably throw the ceremonial pitch from in front of the pitcher’s mound. That puts home plate a little under 60 feet away.
His family, friends and medical team will be watching. Then they will enjoy the game in a skybox. Froedtert was able to set up the first pitch opportunity.
Lucas knows he has already gone well beyond what he thought his life and abilities were going to be after his accident.
“I never dreamed in a million years of being able to do this when my situation was unraveling. Thanks to absolutely cutting edge medicine, I’ve got an unbelievable amount of my life back.”