In Pic :Left: The Ekso Bionics bionic suit weighs about 20 kilos. Right: Using the suit, Amy Paradis walks for the first time since 2009.
The first thing Amy Paradis did Monday morning was stand up. Then her lip began to tremble and she cried, and then her Mom and her trainer and everybody else in the room cried. They just broke right down. Sobbing. Heaving. Leaking out tears of crazy joy and wonder and relief and, well, wouldn’t you know it — simply standing on her own two feet and crying her eyes out wasn’t good enough for Amy Paradis.
So she took a step. Then another, and 336 in total over the next several hours, once the tears had dried, so that by the end of it all she was utterly, achingly, mentally and physically exhausted. Too wiped out to even lift her head off the table to speak with me, much, when I called her up in Windsor, N.S., at Footprints SCI-Recovery, the not-for-profit spinal cord recovery centre she co-founded and runs with her Mom, Marlene Belliveau.
All Amy Paradis could muster for me, which was plenty, thanks, was to whisper a few beautiful words about what taking her first steps in four years meant to someone who was in a horrible car wreck at age 16 and told by doctors she would never walk or have much of an independent life again.
“I don’t know how to put today into words,” she said. “I was stunned by it.”
Stunned because walking was not supposed to happen, though Ms. Paradis always promised everybody, including herself, that it would, and stunned because every step she took Monday belonged to her, and her hard work, though required a wee boost in the form of her brand new bionic suit. A Sci-fi gizmo originally dreamed up in a robotics lab at the University of California and one of only two of its kind in Canada and 75 worldwide. Yes. Amy Paradis, the bone-tired Atlantic Canadian, is a bona fide bionic woman.
Her mother explained.
On Boxing Day 2009, Amy went for a coffee with a friend. She told her Mom she would be back in 10 minutes. Thirty-five minutes later the hospital called. There had been an accident. A car had flipped. Amy’s upper spine was crushed.
“I remember standing in a hospital hallway in Halifax and the spinal surgeon telling me about how [physically] limited Amy’s life would be and I said, “No, you don’t know my daughter,” Ms. Belliveau says.
“And it wasn’t denial so much as, ‘We are going to make it.’ And I remember Amy lying in bed with tubes in her mouth and mouthing the words at me — ‘I am going to walk again, Mom’ — and she thought she was going to walk out of that hospital.”
“What they say at rehab is: ‘Here is your wheelchair, this is where you are going to spend the rest of your life, learn to use your upper body strength.’ What they should be saying is, ‘Here is your wheelchair, but concentrate on your body as a whole and strengthen it as a whole, because you never know.’ ”
You never know what technology is going to serve up next in a world of driverless cars, hand-held supercomputers and skyrocketing survival rates for diseases once thought incurable. You never know when a robotics team at Berkeley funded by the United States Defence Department will invent an exoskeleton suit to enable military personnel to heft hundreds of pounds of gear over long distances and then adapt their research to the civilian marketplace to get people in wheelchairs, who are never supposed to walk again, walking, standing, reaching out and hugging the people they love most, while looking them in the eye.
The Ekso Bionics bionic suit weighs about 20 kilos, is powered by lithium batteries, has small motors at the hips and knees, plus body sensors and a small computer. The user straps it to their back and legs. Shifting their body weight, as a walker would — minus their actual flesh and blood legs — activates the suit and away they walk, for three hours per battery charge.
Of course, miracles don’t come cheap. The suit costs about $100,000, a price tag the entire community of Windsor has endeavoured to meet by holding fundraising breakfasts, potluck dinners, used clothing sales and more (and more ongoing). Ms. Paradis’ role, as the would-be bionic woman, was simple: get herself in crackerjack shape. Check.
The bionic woman, now that she is walking, won’t be sitting down anytime soon. She wants more. She wants to walk, all by herself, no suit. Then she wants to run. But first come the baby steps — 336 to be exact.
“Three hundred and thirty-six,” Marlene Belliveau says, her voice sounding happy and full and deep. “Three hundred and thirty-six.”
And Amy Paradis isn’t done yet.
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