‘I’m so happy to be back’: rollover victim

Jessica Frotten is determined to walk, and it seems all of Whitehorse is determined to help her.

Jessica Frotten is determined to walk, and it seems all of Whitehorse is determined to help her.

Ever since the 21-year-old woman’s return home from the Edmonton hospital where she was sent following a rollover on the Alaska Highway, the community has been working to raise funds, and Frotten’s spirits, to get her on her feet again.

On Dec. 14, while driving west out of Whitehorse, the car Frotten was travelling in went off the road just before the Takhini River Bridge.

Frotten was thrown from the vehicle and suffered a broken spine, fractured ribs, a punctured lung and a torn heart.

“I don’t remember a thing, which is good, I think,” Frotten said of the crash, which also sent one of the other passengers to hospital with less severe injuries. Frotten was medevaced to Edmonton, where she stayed for a month and a half, until she was strong enough to make the trip home.

“I’m so happy to be back,” Frotten told the Star Thursday from her room at Whitehorse General Hospital. She will stay there until there is space for her at the Glenrose Rehabilitation hospital in Edmonton.

“You never realize how much you miss the place until you’re gone 47 days.”

And it seems Whitehorse missed her. Already since the young woman’s return, two events have been held to raise money for her “mobility fund”, so named by Frotten’s friend and colleague Darcy Laliberty.

On Wednesday, employees of the Yukon’s Department of Environment raised money at their weekly lunchtime hockey game, held at the little rink behind the Environment building.

Frotten’s mom, Shelagh Boyle-Frotten, is a property and equipment officer for the department and was clearly moved by the show of support from her colleagues during Wednesday’s game, which raised $1,325.

“You guys are incredible,” she said, hugging one of her co-workers who had come out to play.

“I can’t believe this town,” Frotten said. “It’s amazing.”

Not to be outdone, Frotten’s colleagues from the Yukon Brewing Company threw a fund-raiser at The Old Fire Hall on Thursday.

Laliberty, the company’s top sales representative, was the mind and muscle behind last night’s fund-raiser, which attracted more than 1,000 people between 3 and 10 p.m., Boyle-Frotten said today.

“Darcy’s my ambassador,” Frotten said with a laugh.

Frotten was being fitted for a new wheelchair when she spoke to the Star yesterday. She is unable to move her legs but is working on her upper body right now, building the strength to get herself in and out of the chair.

She recalled the day she found out the doctors’ assessment that she was paralyzed from the bellybutton down.

“I was crushed. At the time, I couldn’t talk – I was still on a breathing tube, and I’d just come off the painkillers – so I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘I can’t feel my legs.’

“That’s when my mom told me. I had to lay back and close my eyes when I heard it. That was a really hard day; the hardest day.”

But she has recovered from the blow and is determined to prove the doctors wrong. She will begin physical rehabilitation as soon as there is space for her at the Edmonton hospital. If that doesn’t get her back on her feet, she said, she is considering experimental treatments.

“I’ve been looking into stem cells – they’re pretty expensive – so if I can’t fix this by myself, I might be going to Germany,” she said.

Researchers have found some evidence that injecting adult stems cells into the spine of a paralyzed patient can restore some feeling and movement to the affected areas.

Science Daily reported last year that the body actually increases production of stem cells after a spinal cord injury and that those cells, when extracted and transplanted, could possibly be used to repair the damage by remaking the broken connection between spine and brain.

Another study showed that rats injected with their own stem cells within two weeks of a spinal cord injury were able to walk again.

A private clinic in Cologne, Germany advertises adult stem cell therapy (as opposed to the controversial embryonic stem cells taken from aborted fetuses) for a number of conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Testimonials on the clinic’s website all tell a similar story. After months, sometimes years, of intensive physical rehabilitation, people reach a permanent plateau in their recovery, usually with some feeling and movement in the limbs but very little control.

After being injected with stem cells, usually taken from the fecund area between the patients brain and sinuses, those featured on the website reported increased control, feeling and movement.