Customer Stories & Experiences

Customer Stories & Experiences

Our customers tell you their experiences with our products, and how that product has helped or made a difference in their lives or new things that has allowed them to do. Share your story with us!

Comfort Carrier made going to Portugal for Stem Cell Surgery Possible!

Elanie Link (for son John), Illinois, USA

Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 11:20 PM

Mark - We returned home from Portugal yesterday. The surgery went very well. Now John will have extended physical therapy and any gains he may have from the stem cell graft may show up over the next months and years. The Comfort Carry worked very well moving John between wheelchair and airplane seat. My husband and I did the transfers with a helper from the airline quickly moving the Roho seat cushion from one seat to another. My husband lifted John's torso using the middle set of hand loops. I lifted his legs. The main difficulty was that my husband is 6'5" and he doesn't really fit into the space on the plane -- lifting John into place in the seat from husband's position behind the seat. I'm not describing that very well, but it was all fairly awkward. [yes, airplane aisles have tight quarters to maneuver in. It will help to have an available person from the airline positioned on the middle seat next to where you are transferring to, assist the person such as your husband lifting over the airplane seat backrest] However, I cannot imagine how we would have accomplished the moves without the carrier. It was especially necessary on the way home when my son had a big incision on the back of his neck and we had to be extra careful. John still had a long, uncomfortable ride home and had to use his pain medication several times. Anyway, I was extremely thankful that I had come across a link to your site and your product before the trip. It was not even in the question to get any photographs of the move, so I can't forward any pictures to you right now.

A team of ten doctors performed the surgery on April 11. John's lesion was occupied by a fluid-filled cyst with a length of 2.5 cm, so it was a simpler procedure to empty the lesion than in those patients with fibrous scar tissue. The doctors cleared the lesion and measured how much material it would take to fill the space. Then they removed that amount of tissue from the olfactory center, only taking tissue from one side so John retains his sense of smell. The tissue is supposed to regenerate over the next few months so his olfactory center will be restored. Dr. Lima sorted the tissue microscopically, removing any fibers, blood cells, and other parts that were not to be included in the graft. Then they packed the remaining cells into the space in John's spinal cord and sealed everything up. The whole surgery took a little less than five hours. We saw John in the intensive care section and he was awake and talking. Two visiting doctors had asked permission to observe the surgery, and we talked with one of them. He was from Croatia, but had studied at Oxford and was now at Cambridge. He said that the British surgeons were not even close to ready to perform surgery this complicated and requiring the level of skill he had observed. We asked Dr. Lima if he anticipated working in the United States any time in the future. He replied that it took all ten doctors on his team and that we didn't have anyone trained to do this sort of surgery.

Incidentally, we paid the doctors in advance of the travel ... $35,000 Euros which is $56,000. To our surprise, there were no further charges. Portugal has public health, so their people do not pay for hospital stays and so on. John's hospital stay cost us nothing, his medicines and supplies during the stay cost us nothing, and there was absolutely no further charge beyond what we paid the doctors. Dr. Lima had arranged transportation to and from the airport, so when we arrived at the airport on April 8 there was an ambulance with two attendants to take all of us and our luggage straight to the hospital. Since we had arrived on the morning of the 8th and the surgery was on the 11th Dr. Lima let us keep John with us at the hotel until the evening of the 10th. He had tests every day at the hospital ... some preliminary tests and then blood tests to see how his clotting time was since John takes Coumadin to avoid blood clots. Each day John was transported by ambulance or by a medical transport with a lift - always with two attendants who took John right up to the 6th floor of the hospital and to his room. I could not believe it. Our hotel was just a 10-minute walk from the hospital so it wasn't a long trip, but the weather was windy and often rainy and the sidewalks were rough so it would have been a nasty commute by manual wheelchair.

Two days after the surgery John was warm. He has not been able to regulate his temperature since his accident and he has been cold for the last three years. Dr. Lima said that every patient has had the same experience of feeling warm. He said that some patients have arrived bundled up "like they were coming from the North Pole" and that a couple of days after the surgery they felt warm again. If that is the only thing John gets from this procedure, it is a positive outcome. I really hope this effect lasts. I know that he is sitting in his room at home today with the temperature at 75 degrees. It's 75 because it's very warm outside in Illinois. He needed 78 or 79 all winter in order to keep from shivering. At 75 he would definitely have been shivering.

That's it so far. Thanks for your great invention in the Comfort Carrier. We practiced with it at home a couple of times before we took off, and it definitely made all our lives easier during the transfers. One fellow in the Newark airport was helping us with the wheelchair and remarked, "Didn't you guys come through here a week or so ago?" He just remembered us using the carrier to lift John ourselves. In every airport they looked at us with disbelief when we said we would be moving John by ourselves. The airline sent four or five people to help us at each stop, but we really did everything ourselves. John doesn't weigh much at all, but he is 6'4". My husband has had back surgery and I'm a 56-year-old woman with a pacemaker, but we could handle the job.

With sincere thanks,

Elaine Link