A person’s life can change in an instant when an accident or a surgery gone awry causes paralysis.

We cover the news when it happens and now are following up with four of the people we’ve written about over the years to see how their lives have unfolded, how they are adapting to their new reality.

Paul Gait of Altamont continues to run a company that designs, manufactures, and sells lacrosse equipment. Christopher Lysogorski had a snowmobiling accident on New Year’s Day, 2020, when he was 22. Susan Albright became paralyzed as the result of a surgery, in August 2023.

Jim Ambrose was extremely active in the Guilderland school district community while dealing with quadriplegia.

Ambrose has been living with paralysis the longest, at four decades, after a swimming accident. Both he and Christopher Lysogorski are paralyzed from the chest down and have some use of their arms.

With the help of family and friends, all four have been able to make accommodations that allow them to keep living at home. Gait is still working, and Ambrose continued working for many years after he was paralyzed.

Lysogorski was not able to continue his work as a diesel mechanic, but thinks about possibly going back to school for psychology and becoming a counselor. Susan Albright’s injury was the most recent, occurring less than a year ago. She was retired from teaching at the time.

Timothy Beutler, a neurosurgeon and neurointensivist at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, said that the less severe a spinal cord injury, the more likely a patient is to have full recovery. Making improvements in motor or sensory function is easier when a patient has not suffered a total loss of motion or feeling below the level of injury. But in all cases, the goal is always to help patients improve their motor and sensory functions. 

The main interventions developed to date are keeping blood pressure high and doing surgery early, Beutler said. There are many new ideas for treating spinal-cord injuries when they first happen or as the patient is recovering, but most of these are still in the research or design phase or in clinical trials. Advances have been made in terms of preventing additional injuries and infections, he said.

Beutler also noted that it takes significant impact for a young person to sustain a spinal injury, while for an older person with brittle bones, even a fall from standing can cause significant spinal-cord damage. 

Sunnyview Rehabilitation Center in Schenectady offers a monthly support group for people with paralysis, which three of the four people we interviewed, all but Ambrose, attend.

Kristin Seaburg, who is the executive director of patient therapy services for St. Peter’s Health Partners, which includes Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital, said that there are both inpatient and outpatient support groups for people with spinal cord injuries. The outpatient group is open to anyone who wishes to join, and not just to people who have been treated at Sunnyview. 

Seaburg called the group “sacred” and a safe space for discussing uncomfortable topics with others who will understand. These might include subjects like how to approach intimacy with a partner, prepare to re-enter the workforce, or find a “new normal” with friends or family.

The group also provides, Seaburg said, a lot of information to participants about how they can get back into the community and into the activities they love, with accommodations. 

 

Jim Ambrose: 40 years quadriplegic

Jim Ambrose, who is 78, has been living with quadriplegia for about 40 years. “Forty-and-a-half, but who’s counting,” he added with a dark sense of humor.

He was lucky, he says, that his accident came after he had already established a career and a family.

He dove into a neighbor’s swimming pool that had no depth markings and wasn’t as deep as he expected. His own family had had a swimming pool in the backyard when he grew up, and their deep end was 10 feet. The neighbor’s, however, was not even five-and-a-half.

He remembers diving in, and coming up and realizing that he was unable to swim.

He managed to make his way over to the shallow end, where his wife and children were, by wriggling his shoulders. In hindsight, he says, this may have damaged his spinal cord more. His wife held up his head until first responders arrived.

He remembers seeing the shiny black shoes of the police officer who stood beside the pool, taking off his holster, preparing to jump in to help. Ambrose remembers thinking at that moment, “He’s never going to get those shoes polished again.”

He emerged with the ability to move his arms, but no finger function. He has some internal sensations. He can sense when his legs are stiff from sitting in the chair all day, and he can tap on his legs to cause spasms that release the tension.

He and his family were living in New Jersey at the time, in a house that was not at all suited to life in a wheelchair. A few years later, they moved to Guilderland (his wife, Kris, was originally from Schenectady) and built their own accessible home, with no steps to the front door and no need for a ramp.

They put in a roll-in shower. They made a study for Ambrose, with an L-shaped desk with no drawers beneath it and room for his wheelchair to slide under. All the hallways in the home were wide enough for him to turn his wheelchair around.

Before the accident, Ambrose worked in financial analysis with a firm in midtown Manhattan. Afterward, he met someone who had suffered a stroke and who had then started his own consulting firm. He began working for him, consulting with clients about data management.

Ambrose says he has good wrist ability. He would type using a device that fit over several fingers and held one peg facing downward from each hand. “I had always been a two-fingered typist, and I wasn’t that much slower than I was before,” he said. Nowadays, he uses speech-recognition software.

Ambrose’s children all attended Guilderland schools, and Ambrose learned that one of his daughters was being bullied at Lynnwood Elementary School because he was in a wheelchair. He contacted the school and asked to be allowed to speak to students about living with a disability. Students came into the library to hear him, and were allowed to ask him anything. 

His talk, he said, also included a tour of his van specially outfitted for him to drive while sitting in his wheelchair. Once, one of the students at a talk was a girl who was herself severely disabled and who used a wheelchair. Instead of just showing her the van, they slid her, in her chair, behind the steering wheel, he said, and her face lit up. “I think it suddenly dawned on her that maybe there were possibilities,” he said.

His daughter stopped being teased, he says.

He soon became very involved with the school district, attending board meetings regularly. At the time, in the late 1980s, these were held in the district offices, located inside a set of trailers in front of Farnsworth Middle School, in a small meeting room. The meetings were moved to the cafeteria at Westmere Elementary School, which was accessible.

Ambrose became president of the school district’s PTA Council, started and ran math and computer clubs at the middle school, helped out in Farnsworth’s computer lab, and spoke to elementary-school classes about the steps involved in teaching a computer to do a simple task. He even ran once for the board of education.

“He was a phenomenal citizen-soldier,” said Barbara Fraterrigo, who served on the school board for many years. “He really kept up with the news and knew what was happening, particularly with the school district.”

Ambrose stopped working about five years ago, and stopped driving — “reluctantly,” he says — a couple of years ago. He and his wife now live in Shushan, New York, near their grandchildren.

His injury has been harder on his wife than on him, he says. “You see someone who’s disabled and you concentrate on them, but really the person being taken care of has the good end of it. I don’t think caregivers get nearly enough support,” he said.

After his injury, he spent four-and-a-half months in rehab before he was sent home. When he was discharged, his wife got only two hours of training in how to care for him, “which is totally inadequate,” he said. Ideally, they would send an aid home with the patient for three or four days, he said, and wean the aid off and the caregiver on.

“Over time, it takes a real toll on the caregiver,” he said.  

The health-insurance industry, Ambrose said, is geared almost entirely toward “short-term traumatic disability: you break your arm, break your leg, and then it goes away.” It’s not geared toward caring for people with any long-term conditions, including paralysis, multiple sclerosis, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), or cerebral palsy.

One of the aids who comes occasionally to help him cannot afford insurance, he said. The aid makes too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private insurance. “The healthcare industry needs to come up with a different paradigm,” Ambrose said.

“My wife has been my primary caregiver for 40 years,” he said, adding that she gave up most of her life to take care of him and their children. “I’m very fortunate. My wife is still with me. That’s not a very common occurrence.”

 

Chris Lysogorski: Love of speed and motors

“I’d like to be able to drive again someday,” said Chris Lysogorski. A snowmobiling accident on New Year’s Day in 2020, when he was 22, left him with quadriplegia.

He lives in Guilderland with his parents, Ralph and Sue Lysogorski, in the same home off of Schoolhouse Road where he grew up.

“My parents have been my caregivers 24 hours a day. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be in a nursing home,” Chris Lysogorski said.

His mother then said, “And we’d do it all over again.”

Lysogorski was working as a diesel engineer at the time of his accident. “I was never one to sit behind a desk,” he said, “but put me under a truck, I was good.”

He has always been very physically active and has loved anything involving speed and a motor. He raced cars at Lebanon Valley Speedway from the time he was 13.

He and a friend were snowmobiling in the Tug Hill region. Lysogorski was the lead sled, and a log was lying across the trail, hidden by a recent snow squall. He was thrown from the snowmobile and shattered his vertebrae at the C6-C7 level, which is the same level as Jim Ambrose’s fracture.

Lysogorski went by ambulance to Upstate Medical in Syracuse. He had two collapsed lungs and spent several days on a heart-and-lung bypass machine. He had lengthy spinal surgeries and a spine cage implanted that replaces his shattered vertebrae and keeps his spine from collapsing or his head from tipping over.

Lysogorski loves to take a shower and heat up the metal cage, his father said, because it warms him from the inside. Particularly in the winter, it’s hard for him to warm up, Ralph Lysogorski said.

Lysogorski spent two weeks at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he had state-of-the-art surgery that took nerves and tendons from his legs and transplanted them into his arms, which has given him more arm movement than doctors ever expected.

He can touch the top of his head and stretch his arms out to both sides. He also has movement in one of his thumbs, and can open and close it like a claw, his father said.

Initially, doctors thought he would always need a tracheostomy tube and a feeding tube, but Lysogorski proved them wrong. “Now he eats anything and everything — Five Guys, cheesy fries,” his father said.

The stay at Mass General was followed by three months in Spaulding Rehabilitation, also in Boston. His father accompanied him there and, when the pandemic hit, doctors told him that, if he left he would not be allowed back in, so he stayed for two months on a couch in his son’s room. Spaulding has an aggressive respiratory therapy program that the family credits with weaning Lysogorski off a respirator.

Lysogorski has Fidelis Care, Medicaid, and Medicare, his father said.

During the interview, his mother made Lysogorski a fried-egg sandwich and held it for him as he ate. “The sandwich is too heavy for him to grip,” she said.  

With help from friends and family, the Lysogorskis put in a first-floor addition, with a bedroom, roll-in shower, and a washer and dryer.

Lysogorski is an avid remote-control car enthusiast, and has a tall cabinet in his room devoted to them.  

In the living room, Lysogorski has a standing frame that allows him to become vertical, instead of always sitting or lying.

He also has a hand cycle and a lat pulldown machine for strengthening his upper body, back, arms, and hands.

In the garage, he has an all-terrain Action Trackchair, with tank-like treads that allow him to go over rough terrain.

He looks forward to getting a QuadStick, a game controller for quadriplegics, to help him play video games.

An aid comes to the home to help out every weekday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Lysogorski has been doing a lot of adaptive kayaking through a program of the Northeast Disabled Athletic Association, and he recently received a grant from the Kelly Brush Foundation to help get him his own adaptive kayak.  

Asked if there is anything else he still needs, Lysogorski smiled and said softly,  “A girlfriend.”

 

 

Paul Gait: Lacrosse legend

“I’m just lucky,” says Paul Gait, a college lacrosse legend who lives in Altamont and designs, manufactures, and sells lacrosse equipment. A fall less than a year-and-a-half ago left him in a wheelchair.

He is lucky, he said recently at his office on Dunnsville Road in Altamont, to have the resources to be able to continue the job he loves and to make accommodations to keep himself as independent as possible, which prevents him from getting too down about his injury. 

“Being able to keep your job,” said Gait, who is 57, “is one thing that really keeps you whole. It keeps you confident.”

On Nov. 3, 2022, Gait was doing some work at a building next-door to the office, pulling insulation out of the attic and throwing it downstairs, when he stepped onto a weak piece of plywood and fell 20 feet to the concrete floor below.

As he fell, he hit his head on the opposing truss and was knocked unconscious, unable to block his own fall. He hit a sawhorse on the way down, breaking six ribs, four vertebrae, and his spinal cord, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. 

After his injury, he spent six weeks in Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital and felt badly for some of his neighbors there, he said, who had greater challenges than him: people who had to go onto disability, who lived in a second-floor walk-up, or who could not afford to upgrade from the manual wheelchair that was all their insurance would cover.

Gait hopes to form a not-for-profit that would help provide people who cannot afford them with power wheelchairs, perhaps by organizing charity lacrosse or golf events. He estimated that a power wheelchair can cost between $5,000 and $50,000.

Gait never had a really dark period, he said. He knew what the challenges might be, and knew he could live with them. His life didn’t revolve around playing sports any more.

He played some golf before his accident, but that was a love-hate relationship anyway. His business has been doing well for years. He has a loving family. He only took about 10 days off before he began working from rehab.

Gait did need to rely on others to drive him around for about a year while he waited for his van to be outfitted for use with a wheelchair, but now he is able to drive himself and get himself in and out of his vehicle.

In addition to his van, Gait sometimes uses the Tesla he had retrofitted with hand controls. But there is no room for his wheelchair so, whenever he does use it, he has to bring a disassembled manual chair and put it back together when he arrives, which is cumbersome. 

He would like to design a three-wheeled motorcycle that he could drive up onto in his chair. “My wife is opposed to it,” he said. “It’s also something that could be developed as a business down the road,” he added.       

Gait was previously the exclusive licensee for Under Armour lacrosse products, but that arrangement ended soon after the pandemic hit, he said, when Under Armour decided to stop producing lacrosse equipment.

Gait Lacrosse now produces high-end equipment for women and men and for different positions and situations. The company produces less quantity than before, at a higher price point, and is able to spend more time on research and development of features that help players perform better.

Gait calls his products “aspirational” and says that some have been so effective that he has been forced by the lacrosse rules committees to modify them several times.

Being someone who designs products for a living is helpful in his situation. He designed a frame to go around his bed that enables him to lift himself in and out without help.  

Gait has a houseboat on Sacandaga Lake that he designed and built. He now hopes to sell it and design one that will be accessible.

This month, Gait will begin training on exoskeleton legs, which will allow him, with great difficulty, to stand and walk. “It’s good to be standing and walking, good for the body,” he said.

Thirty hours of training are required before he can even bring the legs home. Insurance would have paid for him to use them at a rehab center if his injury meant that he had a chance of ever walking again, he said.

But since there is no chance of that, his only option was to buy them. Asked how much they cost, he answered, “More than we would like.”

On April 20, Gait will head back to The Dome at Syracuse University for a ceremony retiring his jersey, No. 19. The jersey belonging to his twin brother, Gary Gait, was retired two years ago, in a ceremony at which Paul Gait spoke, calling his brother “the greatest of all time.”

The two brothers played together and brought Syracuse great success. Gary Gait is now the men’s coach at Syracuse.

About three months into his rehabilitation, Paul Gait regained some feeling at the level of his injury, around the inner layer of his abdominal and back muscles and was able to develop some muscles in his abdomen.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” he said of the area of regained feeling, because it also brought constant pain. The pain is in a nerve that runs 360 degrees around his injury and his body and always hurts, and “limits how long I can go before I need to get out of a chair and go horizontal.”

  

 

 

Susan Albright: Adjusting, slowly

“I used to get up and call for my cats, and go out into the garden,” says Susan Albright, who lives with her husband, Tim, in their small, historic home at the corner of Meadowdale and the Altamont-Voorheesville roads.

The couple’s home has been outfitted with ramps, a wheelchair lift, and accessible kitchen appliances, after an aortic repair in August 2023 left Susan Albright paralyzed from the waist down.

The Albrights are both retired, he as a farm manager at Indian Ladder Farms, and she as an elementary school teacher. Before the operation, they had enough money to live frugally but comfortably, making about $42,000 a year.   

The condition that led to Susan’s surgery was years in the making. She had an aortic aneurysm, or a bulging weak spot in her aorta. Doctors monitored it as it grew, until last year they warned it was near the point of rupture and that rupture would mean an “ugly death.”

They were warned there was a small chance of organ damage or paralysis but they weighed their options and decided to take their chances. Tim says he wishes the surgeon had encouraged them to think soberly about how their lives would change if the surgery did not turn out as they hoped.

The couple relies on Medicaid rather than private insurance and has found it hard to navigate the intricacies of the medical system. 

They have yet to receive a shower chair that Medicaid was supposed to provide. Tim Albright called Medicaid for months to ask about it, and it was not until February that they told him Sunnyview had sent its prescription to a vendor who was not on the Albrights’ list of approved vendors.

Medicaid said it could not just send the prescription to an approved vendor. Instead, the couple had to go back to Sunnyview and get Susan re-evaluated and get a new prescription. Now Tim uses a Hoyer lift to get Susan into a manual wheelchair in the shower.

A shower chair would have arms that lift out of the way, so he could get her in using just a slide board. The chair also has a commode, which would make it much easier to manage Susan’s bowel program, since she could sit up instead of doing it while lying in bed. He hopes the chair will come soon.

The couple has not been able to get aids to come to their rural home to provide hands-on help. Sunnyview gave them a list of nurses who could come to the house, but Tim Albright said they charged about $40 an hour and had no one available.

A home health aid came once for an afternoon, but she called her agency as soon as she left and told them she did not want to come back. Her agency had not told the aid that Susan was paralyzed, Tim said. Albany Visiting Nurses has come several times, but only to check that he is caring for Susan correctly.

Susan spent a total of about five weeks at Sunnyview Rehabilitation Center and still goes there for physical and occupational therapy as well as for the monthly support group for people with paralysis. “It’s a great place,” Tim Albright said.

When a patient is in rehab, he said, in addition to the doctors and nurses who care for them, there are people to coordinate their medications, manage their bowel program, bathe them, clean their room, cook their food, and do their laundry.

“Now I’m all that,” he said.

The couple has made many accommodations already, to help them deal with Susan’s new reality, and plan to make more.

Their close friend, Leslie Anderson, started a GoFundMe for them that has raised more than $51,000 to date.

The Albrights put approximately $40,000 of that toward a $62,000 used wheelchair van, and also sold Susan’s car to help offset the cost. This was life-changing, Tim said, because, before, it was a challenge to maneuver her from her chair into their small sedan.

The Altamont Legion Riders of Post 977 and the New Scotland Volunteers with the town’s senior outreach program put in ramps to their home’s two entrances, on the ground floor and first floor, Tim said. It was important to him to have exits on both, in case of an emergency.

They initially had only a manual wheelchair, and Susan lacked the upper-body strength to push it. A friend of hers got an electric wheelchair donated by the Burnt Hills Methodist Church, which Tim says was a godsend.

It took time to get the power wheelchair that Susan now has, which was prescribed by Sunnyview, Tim said, explaining that these are custom-made to suit the individual’s size, strength, and disability. He still keeps the donated power chair charged up and ready to use as a backup, in case something happens to her main wheelchair.

Susan and Tim were able to put in a $7,500 vertical platform lift for wheelchairs, using donated funds.

Their kitchen now has an oven with the stovetop controls at the front, where she can reach them, and a sink with open space for the chair below it. 

Their entire bathroom was remodeled.

Tim still plans to put in a window above Susan’s bed that she will be able to open and look out of.

In addition to the loss of Susan’s mobility, the couple is also living through the worst experience any parent can suffer: the death of their child.

While they were still trying to reshape their lives around her injury, on Jan. 15, 2024, their only child, Jacob Albright, died suddenly. They are now waiting on the medical examiner’s report to learn the cause of his death. A collage of photos of him throughout his life hangs in their kitchen.

“I can’t talk about Jacob,” Susan said of the couple’s only child. “I will start crying.”

She added quietly, “I hear Tim weeping at night.”

Tim’s father, Joseph Albright, died two weeks after Jacob, in early February.

“It’s been like punches in the head,” Tim Albright said of the successive shocks the couple has endured. “You hope it will stop soon.”

This all happened as the seasons were turning to fall and winter, Tim said, which may have amplified their sense of darkness.

The couple is not sure what will happen to their land and the gardens they planted together over years. They meant for the land to go to their son, whose ashes they will bury in the stone circle they call Helderhenge, which they built behind their home. Reminiscent of Stonehenge, it features 12 large pieces of limestone from the Helderbergs, set upright in a large circle.

“I don’t know how I am going to be able to keep this place up without Susan,” Tim said of their two-acre property. “We both cared for it full-time. Now without her to help and with the amount of time I need to devote to her, a lot of this will probably get neglected. But that’s OK.”

With his wife by his side, Tim asked, “If we knew how it was going to turn out, would we have gone ahead with the surgery? Or would we have said to ourselves, let’s see about just going on this way and seeing how much time she has. Maybe she would have had, you know, three years or something, and relatively healthy, not like this.”

Susan answered his rhetorical question, saying, “I would have stayed the way I was and not had the surgery, in hindsight.”

“But we’re accepting it,” Tim said.

“We’re adjusting,” Susan added.

“It’s because we have to. We don’t have a choice,” Tim said. “It’s tough, but we’re making the best of it.”