Sponsored by
Real-life bionic woman to take on London Marathon
FIVE years ago Claire Lomas lay paralysed from the chest down and suffering from pneumonia at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. She had been airlifted from the Osberton horse trials after a freak accident, in which her horse Rolled Oats had clipped his shoulder on a tree as the pair made their way around the cross-country course in the three-day event.
Claire, then 27, was thrown to the ground, breaking her back. She knew she’d done something serious – an injury worse than the broken pelvis and ribs she had suffered in another fall three years earlier. She was in intensive care and when the doctors told her it was unlikely she would ever walk again, she responded with: “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
A few years later, the former chiropractor is up out of her chair and training for the London Marathon, the first person in the UK to be fitted with a robotic ‘suit’ or ‘skeleton’, which means she can stand upright and walk. Eventually she will even be able to use it to climb stairs. She travels to train with this revolutionary system every week to Cyclone Technologies at Ottringham near Hull, a company which specialises in hi-tech customised wheelchairs and other equipment for people who have suffered paralysis.
While Claire carries the eight-hour power pack and computer control equiment on her back, the four motors strapped to her hips, knees and ankles do the walking for her, moving first one leg then the other and placing her feet as she tilts forward and shifts her crutches. Motion sensors around her waist and on the soles of her feet detect changes in balance.
The Rewalk system can’t cure her paralysis, but it means that she can lead a much fuller life and take part in the London Marathon on April 17, which she will be walking in aid of spinal research. Four-star equestrian events like Burghley Horse Trials, which had competed at for the first time not long before her accident, are off the cards but Claire says her thirst for a challenge is unquenched.
Five weeks into training twice a week with this cutting-edge technology developed in Israel, Claire’s becoming well accustomed to the system and likens it to Wallace and Gromit’s ‘wrong trousers’. She is able to cross a large room unaided, once she gets into her stride. As she completes one lap of the room she refuses to sit down, but swivels and heads off towards the opposite wall, her balance and gait closely observed by former Army fitness instructor Les Tobbell, engineer Ian Cornwall and physiotherapist Matt White. She is absolutely determined to complete the 26 miles, however long it takes. The Rewalk system can operate at 3km an hour, but no-one knows yet what distance Claire will be capable of in one session, and she could be on the road for two to three weeks.
“It’s hard work and exhausting and I’m not having a particularly good day today,” she says. “But hopefully tomorrow I’ll be better and get on faster. It can be very frustrating when you’re used to being good at physical challenges. I have never accepted that I wouldn’t walk again, so even before this I tried to keep as fit as possible.”
Claire was moved for rehabilitation in the spinal injuries unit at Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital, but found the regime frustratingly slow. After eight week she discharged herself to her parents’ home in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire and took control of her own rehabilitation, starting with a week of intensive work with a physiotherapist at the Project Walk Centre in California, before returning to a daily programme of exercise.
She was anxious to stop her leg muscles from wasting and, with the help of family, friends and a great number of people in the equestrian world, was able to install a special treadmill with a hoist and harness above to hold her in place in a frame as her legs are put through exercises. She also has a special exercise bike developed by the Christopher Reeve Foundation in California, which involves standing upright in a frame while electrical pads on her legs stimulate her muscles to move the pedals.
The same kind people (including a donation of £10k from the foundation set up by Matt Hampson, the former English rugby union prop who was paralysed by a scrum accident in 2005) have helped to raise £43,000 so that Claire will soon have her own custom-built version of the Rewalk system to take home. The equipment she’s currently using is adjustable to the needs of different users, and hundreds of people around the UK who have been paralysed are queueing up to travel to East Yorkshire to learn how to use it and potentially buy their own ‘bionic’ system.
The system Claire is currently using at Cyclone Technologies is the only robotic suit to be used commercially in the world. CT have the sole UK and Eire licence for the equipment and expect that demand will see their current £1.5m turnover double. They’re planning to offer future customers training courses at Ottringham with live-in accommodation provided nearby.
While Claire sweats it out, grappling with mastery of her robotic external skeleton, she’s watched closely by her mother Joyce – herself a former top-level equestrian – and Claire’s lively one-year-old daughter Maisie. “I know I seem a very ‘up’ and optimistic person,” says Claire, “but there have been really difficult, depressing days. Yet I’ve never felt down since I had Maisie – she just completes our lives.”
At the time of the accident Claire had been with the same boyfriend for a long time. “But I sensed afterwards that he only stayed with me out of pity and that actually made my life very difficult, so I ended it. About six weeks after that I said to myself ‘I wonder is there anyone out there who is willing to take on a woman in a wheelchair?’ I signed up with an online dating agency and in a couple of days Dan Spincer, who’s a research scientist, replied. He seemed to like me being outgoing and that I had skydived and had had flying lessons. He has a pilot’s licence. Ten months later we were married, after he proposed while we were on a skiing holiday.”
Claire took up skiing after her accident, and made such staggering progress that she was invited to join a development squad for the national paralympic squad. But by then she was pregnant.
“I had spent a while in my chair feeling ugly and unwanted, wondering if I would have a love life again. You want to feel attractive, like any youngish woman. I am extremly lucky. I do believe that you can experience a stroke of luck but you can also make your own luck, and I signed up with the dating agency – even though I was fully expecting that no-one would be interested.”
The word “lucky” crops up a lot in conversation with Claire Lomas. “There are so many people much worse off than me. In the spinal unit I saw a lot of people with many more problems. Spinal research is making improvements all the time and giving people hope, but the scientists can’t get there unless those who can raise money get out there and do it. I don’t care how long it takes – I will finish that marathon.”
To sponsor Claire go to www.get-claire-walking.co.uk
sheena.hastings@ypn.co.uk
Email to a friend
Print this page- Leeds lose Ward to Palace: Is there anyone they can afford now?
- Sheffield Wednesday leaving it late to hijack Leeds United over Ward
- As Snodgrass dithers over Leeds, Warnock throws a lifeline
- Ball is in Leeds United’s court over contract - Snodgrass
- Police turning blind eye to Asian voter fraud, says MP
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: East
Your view
Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.