Ricci Kilgore Article

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http://www.journalnet.com/articles/2005 ... orts01.txt

Uphill Climb
By Mason Kelley - Journal Writer


Ricci Kilgore reaches the top of a cliff at Upper Ross Park with Jessica McAleese (unseen) belaying for her. Kilgore, a former ISU athlete, regained use of her legs following an automobile accident five years ago. Journal photo by Bill Schaefer



The woman who doctors said would never walk again hangs from a cliff.

Ricci Kilgore straddles an outcropping of rock and hoists herself about three feet using nothing but her upper body.


Her biceps are flexed and the taut muscles on her tan back ripple. Her blond hair is tied up in a bun, and her legs - clad in plastic braces from the knees down - dangle.

After she pulls herself over the ledge, she swings her right leg to pull her foot up to a ledge. Once she does the same thing with her left leg, she can rest.

On this climbing wall in Upper Ross Park, Kilgore is doing something few can. She is paralyzed from the knees down, and 80 percent of her climbing strength comes from her upper body.

If she had listened to her neurosurgeon, she would be spending her life sitting in a wheelchair.

But Kilgore is stubborn.

It's why she took up hippotherapy - riding horses to help get circulation flowing in her legs. It's why she decided to get embryonic stem cell treatments. It's why she's hiking, biking and fire dancing. It's why she is scaling this cliff.

Just before she reaches the top, her right leg tires and she needs to come down. Once back on the ground, Kilgore takes a seat on a rock and gives good friend Jessica McAleese a high-five.

Kilgore is smiling. She seems content.

Ricci Kilgore and Dakota, her constant companion. Journal photo by Bill Schaefer

This 25-year-old former pole vaulter at Idaho State is doing anything she can to make her life fulfilling, including thrusting herself into the controversy surrounding embryonic stem cell treatments. Because of her unwavering resolve and determination, she is walking again.

"I think being an athlete prepares you for this journey," Kilgore says. "I'm still very motivated and determined to become who I was again. I finally know that I'm not going to be the person that I was, but I've definitely changed for the better."

Kilgore's "journey" began in 2000, during her freshman year at ISU. On the way back from a track meet in Reno, Nev., a van carrying Kilgore, Nick Herald and Paul Litchfield hit a patch of black ice.

Kilgore, asleep in the passenger seat, woke up to the surreal feeling of the van spinning. Then it started to roll. Kilgore was thrown 65 feet from the van and suffered a broken back.

"It was really peaceful," Kilgore said of the accident. "It wasn't traumatic for me. I really believe I had angels with me. I didn't get any road rash or brain damage."

A truck driver who witnessed the accident stopped to help. He diverted traffic and put flares around Kilgore. She still doesn't know the trucker's name, and said she wants to find him and thank him.

Kilgore was flown to the Washoe Medical Center in Reno. Her mother, Valerie, was alerted of accident when her sister, Earlene Forsythe, arrived at her front door after midnight.

"She said, 'I have some really bad news.' I was very devastated," Valerie said.

Valerie immediately shifted her thoughts to an accident 17 years prior, an accident that claimed the life of her husband, Rick.

After a vacation in Reno, the family was driving back to their home in Missoula, Mont. Rick fell asleep at the wheel. Somehow, Rick grabbed Ricci as the car started to roll. With his arms wrapped around the 2-year-old, Rick saved his daughter's life.

"It was a real miracle that she was alive after that," Valerie said.

Ricci spent a month in intensive care after the first accident.

"To go through it once is bad enough," Valerie said. "To go through it a second time, it rehashes all the memories."

But bad memories don't stop the Kilgores. If anything, Ricci used the memories as motivation. Instead of hiding from the tragedies of her past, she embraced them and moved forward. Eight months after breaking her back, Ricci started hippotherapy. Marv Davis, a good friend, gave her a horse, Troy, and she started riding as much as her body allowed. Sometimes she spent just 10 minutes on the horse before the pain became unbearable.

But each ride proved to be therapeutic.

"He brought him to the hospital," Ricci said of the first time she met Troy. "I wheeled out in my wheelchair. He stopped and brought him out of the trailer. He knew exactly what was going on. He came up to me. He put his head down, and started breathing at me. It went all the way up my face. It gave me the chills, and then I started crying."

The hippotherapy helped with circulation, but Kilgore still wanted to get feeling in her legs. She began to investigate other medical procedures that would help her be more self-sufficient.

Then her uncle, Dr. James Forsythe, heard about stem cell treatments. Ricci was apprehensive, but she agreed to meet with specialists, Dr. Albert Scheller, from Germany and Dr. William Rader, who works in Malibu, Calif.

"I'm really picky about doctors, because they think they can play God," Ricci said.

Rader and Scheller put her at ease quickly.

"Their presence was just really calming," Ricci said of Scheller and Rader. "They weren't really trying to persuade me. They just gave me the facts. Dr. Scheller told me he worked with rats. He would sever their spinal cords and inject embryonic stem cells in their back, and within four months, they'd have full use of their legs."

She decided to give it a try.

"I really wanted to make a difference for people in my situation," Ricci said. "I figured, if nobody else is going to do it, I might as well stand up and make a difference."

Before signing up for the treatment, which costs $25,000, Ricci and Valerie needed to weigh the pros and cons. Embryonic stem cell research is controversial, with the argument centering on the question: Are the embryos used in the treatments living beings?

"When you have tried everything else, and nothing else will work," Valerie said, "why not take the chance to have their life a little bit easier or get to the point that they were before the accident?

"I really didn't have any problem in making the decision."

Before Ricci flew to the Dominican Republic for her first treatment, she appeared on a radio talk-show in Reno. Callers said she was too young to be making the decision to have the treatments.

Some even went so far as to call Ricci a murderer. The accusations didn't dissuade her.

"If someone tells me, 'No, you shouldn't do it,' it makes me want to do it even more," Kilgore said.

She didn't know what to expect when she got there. On the day of the treatment, she arrived at what she described as an abandoned hospital. She wondered if protesters might greet her at the hospital.

"I think people were still practicing there, but hardly anybody was there," Ricci said. "It was just a really small room, the size of a bathroom."

Ricci added that she noticed cracks in the walls as she lay on the hospital bed. She was hooked up to an IV into which fetal pluripotent hematopoietic stem cells were injected. She also received an injection of fetal neuronal stem cells in her stomach.

The procedure took about an hour, and Ricci turned the rest of the trip into a vacation: sitting on the beach, skeet shooting and horseback riding.

Within four weeks, she started getting feeling in her legs. She gained muscle in her quads and felt more stamina. After a second stem cell treatment, she noticed an improvement in just two weeks.

"To have someone like Ricci gives me great pleasure because she pushes the envelope," said Dr. Rader in a phone interview from his office.

"I'm not surprised at (her improvement). This is what we see. This is what we do. Of course it's impressive. She has that great spirit. I do give her a lot of credit."

Now the feeling is back in the upper half of her legs. She has partial feeling in her right leg from the knees down now. The first time she noticed the feeling was while sitting down to dinner with her mother.

"A fly landed on my leg," Ricci said. "I thought, 'This is really weird. What's going on?' I looked down and there's a fly crawling up my leg."

After the treatment, Ricci said the recovery process was difficult.

"There was a lot of pain involved when your nerves regenerate," Ricci said. "It's like a burning sensation. It's almost like a third-degree burn. Every once in a while I'll get them in my legs. I describe them as shooting stars going down my leg."

But the slow, steady restoration of feeling made the treatments worthwhile.

The first time Ricci walked on her own again was at a park across the street from her mother's house after her first stem cell treatment. Two friends encouraged her.

"'We know you can do it,'" Ricci remembers them saying. "'We've seen you walk a little bit. Let's go try it.'"

She made it about 100 feet. Her friends carried her home.

Valerie was at work at the time, but the first time she saw her daughter walk again is still etched into her memory.

"I was just crying," Valerie said. "It was very touching. It was a total miracle."

It gave the family hope. In fact, Ricci is planning a third trip for a stem cell treatment around Thanksgiving.

The past five years of Ricci's life spun around so fast she felt like a dervish. If you see her in Pocatello one day, she'll be back in Reno the next. If she's rock climbing one day, she's hiking two days later.

"We see ability, not disability," said Jessica McAleese. "I just see Ricci."

Ricci is set to finish her degree at University of Nevada, Reno in December, and plans to work with large animals. She does so much, there's little time for anything else. But she is also beginning to give motivational speeches.

ISU track coach Dave Nielsen said Ricci's personality is made for the motivational speaking circuit.

"Ricci's quite a character," Nielsen said. "She's quite a lot of fun. It was really a pleasure to have her on the team."

Ricci's first speech came in June, when she spoke to Douglas High School in Carson City, Nev.

"After I gave that speech, it felt like a load off," Ricci said. "I think it's time, but I've always wanted to tell my story."

Rest isn't something Ricci gets much of. Back at Upper Ross Park, she is sitting on a rock and talking to McAleese about the climb. Ricci's dog, an Alaskan Malamute-wolf mix named Dakota, is watching. Like Ricci, Dakota is an explorer, but for now he's relaxing with his head resting on his paws.

One day, Ricci still hopes to get all of the feeling back in her legs. Every now and then, when she looks in the mirror and sees her toned upper body, she thinks she can still pole vault.

"Oh yeah, I still have the urge," Ricci says. "When people ask me, 'Are you still interested in track?' I'm like, 'Heck yeah. Give me a pole, and see if you could put a skateboard underneath me.' I still want it. I truly believe, if I can get this far and achieve this much, what am I going to do in another five years? Who knows? I could be pole vaulting again."

After her rest, she heads back to her truck with Nevada license plates. Her wheelchair sits in the bed. She doesn't need it much now.

Paralympics next for Kilgore?

Ricci Kilgore is attempting to qualify for the U.S. Paralympic Ski team, which will compete at the 2006 Paralympic Games in Torino, Italy. She'll have to do well in competitions in New Zealand, Korea, Japan and Switzerland to qualify.

She's also finishing her degree at the University of Nevada, Reno, flying back to the Dominican Republic for another stem cell treatment and, at some point, planning her wedding. Throw in all the time she spends climbing and fire dancing, and it's amazing she gets any time to relax.

For Kilgore, that's just the way life goes.

If you would like to make a donation to help Kilgore qualify for the Paralympics, contact her at 775-224-0879 or e-mail her at goldentrout5@hotmail.com.