The Liz Fust Community Fund
Hope for a Brighter Future for People with Spinal Cord Injuries

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.  Christopher Reeve Click here to Make a Gift

Liz Fust awoke one morning in January 2006, to breathtaking pain in her back. She got out of bed and collapsed on the floor. “My legs just went hot and numb,” she says. “I couldn’t move.” Fust, an active 38-year-old attorney, had suffered a spinal cord stroke—a sudden loss of blood to the spinal cord—that left her paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. “You learn what life is really all about,” she says. “It’s about intangibles:  it’s about finding some grace in the face of adversity, otherwise your happiness depends on everything going right.  It’s about finding some purpose for your life that is generous because who you are doesn’t depend on what you have, but what you give.”

The Aftermath of Spinal Cord Injury

“Spinal cord injuries are catastrophic. You lose control of so much of your body; you can no longer independently do even the most basic things, like dress and go to the bathroom, which were a seamless and forgettable part of your life before the injury,” said Liz. These injuries also lead to life-threatening secondary health problems such as respiratory disease, heart disease, hypertension, and infections related to the urinary tract and to pressure sores on the skin. Liz explained, “I scoured the nation and the world for therapies that might help me not only walk again, but would improve my health and help me regain basic life functions and independence even if I couldn’t walk.”

A New Rehabilitation Program at Frazier Rehab Institute

For Liz and thousands of people living with the devastating aftermath of spinal cord injury, there is hope for a better future thanks to a new rehabilitation program at Frazier Rehab Institute. Through a partnership with the University of Louisville and its Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, people who have been paralyzed by injury or accident are regaining physical abilities that dramatically improve their quality of life. And some are even walking again.

Susan Harkema, Ph.D., a researcher recruited through Bucks for Brains to UofL, is at the frontier of medical innovation that is giving people with spinal cord injuries new hope for the future. Using a therapy called locomotor training, this groundbreaking program at Frazier Rehab is one of just a handful in the United States and the lead center nationally for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation’s NeuroRecovery Network, established to fuel breakthroughs in spinal cord treatment.

To help the program achieve its full potential, Liz is leading a campaign to raise philanthropic support. She established the Liz Fust Community Fund with the Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s Foundation to expand the capacity of the program to serve more people by adding equipment, space, and developing staff proficiency in the specialized techniques of locomotor training.