Dixfield sled racer still fighting to overcome paralysis

DIXFIELD — Ten months after suffering a spinal cord injury during a snowmobile race up a Rumford mountain, Nate Clark continues to fight paralysis.

He’s made tremendous strides and has gone from being paralyzed from the waist down to from the knees down. But it’s been a lot of hard work.

“Things have come a long ways, that’s for sure, a real long ways,” Clark, 29, said early Monday evening at his Bradley Street home.

He was sitting in a wheelchair in his living room, wearing a metal foot-to-knee upright brace on each leg under his jeans. They allow him to walk using arm crutches.

“Still not perfect, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to that point, but it’s a heck of a lot better than they ever said it would be, so I’ll take it,” he said.

Clark, a longtime sled racer, was paralyzed from the waist down on Jan. 11 when the then 28-year-old suffered a spinal cord injury during a hill climb race at Black Mountain ski area. He broke four ribs, fractured his sternum and burst-fractured a vertebra when he flipped off the back of his sled as it traveled at more than 100 mph up the course.

After the accident, the 2002 Dirigo High School graduate said he was simply riding too fast of a sled that night on too short of a hill-climb course — and without the upper-body protection offered by a safety vest.

He said he’d worn the vest at a race in Epping, N.H., but never used them for hill climbs or trail riding.

“Looking back on it, I don’t think it would have helped,” Clark said. “It certainly would have saved the ribs and the sternum, but I don’t think it would have saved my back.”

He was told he would never walk again.

“That was the prognosis,” Clark said. “That gives you motivation, that’s for sure.”

Determined to prove the doctors wrong — and to walk and ride snowmobiles again — Clark underwent a grueling, six-week therapy regimen at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta. He had to wear a body brace for many weeks, whenever he was sitting up or out of bed.

“When I went to Georgia, I could twitch my right quad,” he said. “That’s all I could do. Now they give me a 5 in both quads, which are normal strengths. I went from a twitch to a 5, which is pretty good.”

Since he wasn’t walking while doing rehab in Georgia, he worked on strengthening and wheelchair exercises after getting acclimated to the chair and learned to descend stairs in it.

That’s all he did for six hours a day.

He returned home in March to find that his father and carpenter Tim Gallant, with help from Twin Rivers Lumber in Dixfield, had built a wheelchair ramp into his house. They also built a ramp for him into the home of his girlfriend, Michelle Perry Bernard of Rumford.

Additionally, friends, family and the community held a fundraiser “that was just amazing to see,” Clark said.

“That was awesome,” he said. “It meant a lot.”

Clark also began physical therapy with the New England Rehabilitation Hospital of Portland. He described it as being more intense than the Georgia therapy, because he’s walking and pushing his muscles — different muscles.

“I’m trying to walk with what I have,” he said. “A lot of muscles still don’t work that I need to walk functionally, so I’ve got to recruit different things, recruit different muscles, kind of retrain my body and learn to ambulate myself.”

He can now stand with a walker or get up using arm crutches.

“I can walk, you know, I can move around no problem, but I can’t stand up,” Clark said. “I don’t have the muscles. I don’t have the glutes (gluteal or butt muscles). Everything from my knee down is essentially dead.”

Both legs are paralyzed below the knee, his spinal cord is damaged and four vertebrae are fused. One leg isn’t very strong, but the other is extremely weak. He also lost 35 pounds during the ordeal, but has gained 15 of it back.

When he started therapy in Portland, it was two days a week. But trying to fit that in with his day job as a finishing superintendent with Rumford’s NewPage paper mill was too much. Now he does three hours of strengthening and gait training once a week.

He credits his physical therapist, Sophie Herr, with helping him learn to walk again.

“She’s really been pushing me to try and increase my pace, get me to walk a little bit faster, really just the functioning part of it,” Clark said. “New England Rehab has been excellent.”

“If you look at where I started when I came back in March, I had full leg braces that came up to (his waist) … and now it’s all I can do to stand with a walker.”

His lower back gets sore.

“The first three months of it were awful,” Clark said. “I would come home from work and that was it. It was all I could do to get in the house. Now I take Tylenol throughout the day, and it’s manageable. So it’s only going to get better … When you sit down for 12 hours a day, anyone’s back can get a little sore. That’s just what I fight on a day-to-day basis.”

Clark said his Jeep is outfitted with two rods hooked to the accelerator and the brake. He uses his thumb for the gas and his hand for the brake. He drives himself to work and therapy and has been driving to Ohio for work training and meetings.

He also has a driver now for his three racing sleds and a professional racing business, Clark Racing & Performance, that he and two friends run.

And he also rode a snowmobile in August in the pits at a Waldoboro race, but not competitively.

“I was ecstatic,” Clark said, “because at that point, I realized I could do it pretty easily knowing it was only seven months at that time; how really effortlessly it came to me, and I said, ‘This really isn’t going to be an issue at all.'”

He said he’s grateful just to be alive and able to ride snowmobiles on trails this winter, but wishes he’d listened to his girlfriend on Jan. 11.

“She warned me that night not to go up that,” Clark said. “She didn’t have a feeling (that something bad would happen). She wanted to go out to dinner instead. Wish I would have listened to her.

“Every day, you wake up and say, ‘I wish it wasn’t like this.’ But it is, and you move on,” he said. “It’s definitely slowed me down in certain ways, but it hasn’t stopped me from doing anything. I’d say, if anything, it’s probably motivated me to do what I want.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

: Nate Clark of Dixfield works with his physical therapist, Sophie Herr, at the New England Rehabilitation Hospital of Portland. Clark suffered a spinal cord injury during a snowmobile hill climb race at Black Mountain ski area on Jan. 11. He is able to use his legs, but not nearly to the extent that he could before the accident. “Nate has to teach his brain to use his legs in a different way,” Herr said. Clark has physical therapy once a week.

: Nate Clark of Dixfield suffered a spinal cord injury during a snowmobile hill climb race at Black Mountain ski area on Jan. 11. Despite his injury, the 2002 Dirigo High School graduate still runs his own sled racing team, “Clark Racing & Performance.”

: Nate Clark of Dixfield works with his physical therapist, Sophie Herr, at the New England Rehabilitation Hospital of Portland. Clark suffered a spinal cord injury during a snowmobile hill climb race at Black Mountain ski area on Jan. 11. He is able to use his legs, but not nearly to the extent that he could before the accident. He has physical therapy once a week.