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One Step at a Time
One moment Paul Schauble was enjoying a bicycle ride; the next he was staring at the sky.
Schauble, a professor and licensed psychologist at the University of Florida’s Counseling Center, was riding his bicycle in his Gainesville neighborhood in March 2001 when a dog darted into his path. Schauble’s feet were strapped into the pedals and he flew over the handlebars.
“I lay there stunned and kept trying to move and when I couldn’t, I realized that I was paralyzed,” Schauble says.
Initially unable to move anything but his lips to speak, Schauble slowly regained some degree of motor function during weeks of hospitalization and rehabilitation, but his ability to walk was severely limited.
A research program on UF’s campus helped Schauble get moving again.
Led by Andrea Behrman, an associate professor of physical therapy at the College of Public Health and Health Professions, the locomotor training program helps retrain the legs of patients who still have some function below the level of their spinal cord injury. As they walk on the treadmill, patients are partially supported by a specially designed harness. Therapists guide patients’ legs and ensure proper gait.
The intensive training helped Schauble go from a shuffling gait with the assistance of a walker to independent walking with the help of a cane for longer distances.
“The therapists basically retrained me to walk,” he says. Schauble is now back doing many of the things he enjoyed before the injury, including spending time with his grandchildren, even getting up and down from the floor unassisted to join them in play.
“My wife and I often talk about what a lucky break this has been for me,” he says. “If I had experienced this injury 20 years ago or I lived in a place where the therapy wasn’t available, I would have a much different quality of life than I do now.”
