Woman overcomes partial paralysis
She wants to guide people who ‘have no idea where to turn’
Jessica Harthcock was a competitive diver, swimmer and dancer when she broke her neck and back at age 17 in a gymnastics injury.
She was paralyzed from the chest down, and her doctor told her she would not walk again.
“I honestly thought that after surgery I would just be fixed,” said Harthcock, now 27. “My family and I, we were so naive.”
Six years later, and after traveling to more than 10 neurological facilities across the U.S. to find treatments, she proved her doctor wrong. She progressed from sitting up to taking a step to using a walker to walking unassisted.
Today, after a decade of overcoming her paralysis, Harthcock is on to her next challenge. She is building a company that she hopes will help others address their own neurological disabilities. Through Nashvillebased Utilize Health, Harthcock seeks to connect patients with the therapies and facilities that have the most potential to help them and confront the information gap that currently exists for those patients.
Harthcock had been swimming and dancing in Evansville, Ind., since she was a child. Whenshe was a freshman on the high school’s swim team, she saw the dive team practicing and told the coach she wanted to try
With her dancing background, she had the grace and the flexibility needed and quickly joined the varsity team. During the summer before her senior year, she was cross-training in a gym on a Monday night, diving into a pool made of foam blocks to work on a complex dive: a front double tuck with a layout twist. On about the 20th attempt, she didn’t get enough bounce and landed on her head, hitting it on the side of the pit. The impact cracked her skull, and her spinal cord was severely damaged.
“I knew the second I landed that I was paralyzed. I felt it. I heard it,” she said. “Immediately my body went completely numb.”
She had surgery in Cincinnati, where the hospital staff explained that the injury meant long-term paralysis.
But from the beginning, Harthcock, then Jessica Greenfield, did not listen when doctors tried to temper her expectations.
“The entire time I was like, ‘I’ll just walk out of here,’ ” she said. “‘I’ll do rehab, and I’ll learn to walk again, and I’ll be fine.’ Everyone was like, ‘Well, it’s not that easy.’ ”
In the first year of her injury, she visited Vanderbilt University, hospitals in Cincinnati and Chicago — and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where a year after her injury, a doctor told her it was time to let go of her dream of walking.
“Their exact words were, ‘You should accept your lot in life and move on,’ ” she said. “I was so crushed by that.”
On the 10-hour drive home, she decided she was still not convinced.
Jessica’s mom, Krista Greenfield, continued to spend hours each week researching treatments and investigating insurance, and she and her husband, Dennis, continued to travel with Harthcock to find treatment.
At the Miami Project, a spinal cord injury research project that was offering gait training therapy, Harthcock finally heard the words she had been waiting for.
Her doctor there said he wasn’t going to tell her she couldn’t walk again, but she eventually might meet criteria for Lokomat therapy, a robot-assisted walking device that had been gaining traction as a viable treatment option, and she should keep trying.
The Greenfields began researching facilities that offered Lokomat therapy, and she be- gan gait training at Frazier Rehab Institute in Louisville, Ky., that was similar to the Lokomat therapy. Harthcock was able to take online classes at the University of Southern Indiana while living in a hotel for several months. She spent five or six hours each day in therapy and took classes in her remaining time.
At Frazier, she learned to sit up by herself and to stand, both enormous milestones in her recovery.
She then moved to Chicago, where at treatment center NextSteps she was able to work on a Lokomat, on which patients are supported in a harness above a treadmill while a device moves their legs through a gait pattern. There she learned trigger movements in her hip flexors, began to work with leg braces and three years into treatment, she eventually accomplished a step.
About a year into Harthcock’s recovery, she met athletic and personal trainer Adam Harthcock.
“She has such a conviction in what she wants to do.
“You can do nothing but support her in doing that and believe that she is going to do everything she can do to will it to happen,” he said.
When Jessica had accomplished her first steps and could walk with a walker, she decided it was time for her to experience college on campus. She moved to Baton Rouge, La., where she attended Louisiana State University, while Adam pursued a graduate degree there. She took classes, joined a sorority and graduated three years later, with walking becoming increasingly less difficult. When she and Adam married in 2010, she walked down the cathedral aisle unassisted.
They next moved to Nashville when she decided to pursue a master’s degree at Vanderbilt in organizational leadership.
“Over the course of the last eight years, people would hear about the strides I would make,” she said. “They would call me and say, ‘You don’t know me, but I heard about you. Can you help me get the same type of therapies that you’ve done?’ ”
She would help direct them to facilities or tell them about therapies she knew about. She and her husband talked about launching a website or company to address that need, and she began talking to business mentors about the possibility.
While at Vanderbilt, Harthcock began interning at the Entrepreneur Center. After graduating, she began developing her concept, quickly learning that starting a business was just as complicated as everyone had said and she realized she needed more resources.
She applied to Jumpstart Foundry, the business accelerator program at the Entrepreneur Center, and was accepted into the 2013 summer program, receiving $15,000 to help her build the business and getting access to area business leaders and health care executives who could help her better develop her company.