Spinal Cord

Chris Mason-Hale vividly remembers the football play that changed his life. The scene rolls through his mind with the same detail as the action movies he watches on his portable DVD player at Kernan Hospital. A senior linebacker for Western Tech in Catonsville, Mason-Hale went for a routine tackle in the final scrimmage of the preseason, Aug. 29 at Northeast. "It was a dive," Mason-Hale said of the common short-yardage play. "They gave the running back the ball, and he came through the one hole.

No. 1 McDonogh played the spoiler on senior night at No. 2 Archbishop Spalding's gym Friday, waiting until the final two bouts to pull out an emotional, 42-33 victory. The match completes the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association regular season for both teams, with McDonogh retaining the top spot with an 8-0 A Conference record and a 19-3 mark overall. Spalding, last season's champion, finishes 7-1 in the conference and 20-6 overall. "They're the No. 1 team in the state," Spalding coach Mike Laidley said.

A national drag-racing league announced yesterday that it has donated $60,000 worth of tickets to the Kennedy Krieger Institute's spinal cord injury center to help the Baltimore facility raise money. The American Drag Racing League gave 2,000 tickets to the International Center for Spinal Cord Injury for the league's July 25-26 event at Maryland International Raceway in Mechanicsville. The tickets typically sell for $30, but the spinal cord center is selling them for $10. Dr. John W. McDonald, director of the center, said in a statement that such private donations are "critically important" to help the center develop therapies to help people recover from paralysis.

In May, Chris Mason-Hale posted a photo on his Facebook page of himself standing during a break from therapy at the International Center for Spinal Cord Injury at Kennedy Krieger Institute. Looking all of his 6 feet 4 with arms crossed and head slightly back, his body language and proud grin seemed to exude a so-you-thought-I'd-never-walk-again dare. After the former Western Tech linebacker suffered a paralyzing spinal cord injury in a scrimmage nearly three years ago, walking under even a little of his own power was never a certainty.

Chris Mason-Hale vividly remembers the football play that changed his life. The scene rolls through his mind with the same detail as the action movies he watches on his portable DVD player at Kernan Hospital. A senior linebacker for Western Tech in Catonsville, Mason-Hale went for a routine tackle in the final scrimmage of the preseason, Aug. 29 at Northeast. "It was a dive," Mason-Hale said of the common short-yardage play. "They gave the running back the ball, and he came through the one hole.

Strong safety Dawan Landry was released from Maryland Shock Trauma Center and is expected to return to the field this season after suffering a spinal cord concussion in the second quarter of Sunday's 28-10 win against the Cleveland Browns. "His stability tests are all normal," coach John Harbaugh said. "He will be in a cervical collar for at least a week, and then they'll evaluate him further and then we'll just take it from there. He'll be playing in some number of weeks, and it won't be too many weeks."

A magnetic resonance imaging exam has revealed that Ravens offensive lineman Herman Arvie suffered a small contusion on his spinal cord in the closing moments of Sunday's 21-14 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals.Ravens trainer Bill Tessendorf said Arvie will have another MRI on Friday, and added that he is not expected to play against the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. Arvie could be out for the rest of the season."We're in a wait-and-see mode as far as the rest of the season for him, but everything is normal.

LOS ANGELES - Al Lucas, a lineman for the Los Angeles Avengers, died yesterday afternoon after suffering an apparent spinal cord injury while trying to make a tackle early in the Arena Football League team's game at Staples Center, officials said. Lucas, 26, was injured on a kickoff return five minutes into the game against the New York Dragons. He was pronounced dead at California Hospital after attempts to revive him at the arena and hospital failed. He is the first player in the Arena Football League's 20-year history to die during a game.

Of all the injuries Earl Moncrieff suffered in the terrible, head-on car collision, the trauma to his left hand was the worst. The throbbing, constant pain often crescendoed without warning, as if someone had suddenly banged his hand with a sledgehammer. Years after the crash, he would cry out and drop to his knees in the middle of the supermarket.But there was one problem that prevented doctors from treating him: Moncrieff no longer had a left hand.Along with much of his left arm, it had been all but severed in the accident.

Van Brooks Jr. remembers just about everything about the toughest day of his life. For some, purging the memory of something as traumatic as being paralyzed making a tackle might be first on a to-do list, but every detail of that warm fall day is burnished on Brooks' mind. "I remember everything," Brooks said the other day. "I remember making the tackle. I remember laying there and not being able to feel anything. I remember talking to the trainer, who was asking me different questions.

Dr. Kenneth F. Spence Jr., a highly regarded Baltimore orthopedic surgeon who was a Vietnam War veteran, died Monday of leukemia at Hooper House Hospice in Forest Hill. The former longtime Columbia resident was 79. The son of a civil engineer and a homemaker, Dr. Spence was born and raised in Hagerstown, where he was a 1949 graduate of Hagerstown High School. After graduating from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., in 1953, he enrolled at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he earned a medical degree in 1957.

Archbishop Spalding junior first baseman Nick Freeberger sits on a dugout bench. The evening sun is shining on his boyish face, and he smiles. It has been a good day. He helped his No. 2 Cavaliers to victory with a three-run home run. That would be enough to make most high school baseball players grin, but there is more behind this display of happiness than a single game. To look at him now, no one would suspect that a little more than a month ago, screws were ground into his head for a halo to support a broken neck, and that the chances of his playing baseball this season or perhaps ever were in doubt.

Louise B. McKnew, a lawyer who was a champion of spinal cord injury patients and founder of the National Research Institute for Neural Injury, died Tuesday from complications of pneumonia at Baltimore Washington Medical Center. The Pasadena resident was 71. Louise Bouscaren was born in Greenwich, Conn., and raised in Baltimore and Ruxton. She was a 1956 graduate of Garrison Forest School and attended Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., until she left to get married. After raising her family, Mrs. McKnew returned to college and earned a bachelor's degree in 1975 from American University.

- Tight end has never been an easy position for NFL scouts to evaluate. The skills required to play it at a high level simply don't mesh that often in one body. There are scores of big, tall guys with soft hands who can't block, and plenty of lumbering, rhinoceros-size blockers who simply can't run or catch. And finding one with the right blend of the two strengths has become that much harder in recent years because fewer and fewer high school and college teams are using tight ends in their spread offenses.

By her late 20s, Perneita Farrar seemed to have overcome many of her life's earlier struggles. An unwed mother at 16, Farrar went on to graduate from the University of Maryland with a degree in public health and a minor in biology. She was working at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney, managing the health education and community outreach departments. On the side, Farrar worked as a health educator for Kaiser Permanente. But for Farrar, neither her educational background nor her professional experience prepared her for what has become a life-changing battle with lupus.

He'll be 51 next week, but the gift that Randy McMillan wants most, no one else can bestow. "I want to be able to walk under my own power," said McMillan, a former fullback for the Baltimore Colts. "Maybe not 100 percent. But doctors say I'm capable, and I've got to be able to do that." Injured seven years ago in a car crash that damaged his spine, McMillan, the Colts' No. 1 draft pick in 1981, uses crutches to get around his condo in Towson. Next month, he'll receive steroid injections in an effort to kick-start the healing process that has slowed of late.

In 1987, neurologist Hannelore Ehrenreich noticed something odd in anemic patents being treated with a drug called erythropoietin. After taking the drug for just a few days, they seemed mentally sharper and more alert. After several years studying the drug's effect on brain cells, she had an inspiration: Maybe the anemia drug could also heal brain damage caused by strokes. Among colleagues, her theory was not a hit. "People laughed at me. They said I was crazy," remembers Ehrenreich, a researcher at the University of Gottingen in Germany.

With summer in full swing and many families headed to the pool and beach, we're reminded that diving accidents are a common cause of spinal cord injuries. Males between the ages of 15 and 25 are the most common victims of diving injuries, 90 percent of which result in paralysis. Dr. Cristina Sadowsky of the International Center for Spinal Cord Injury at Kennedy Krieger Institute offers ways to prevent diving injuries with five things to keep in mind before you dive in and cool off this summer.