It has been almost two years since the grand opening of the Natalie Barnhard Center for Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation and Recovery in Cheektowaga.
For Mary Lynn and Natalie Barnhard, that is cause for celebration.
From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Chiro First Wellness Center will sponsor a fundraiser for the center Natalie Barnhard created. The event, called “9/9 for the Spine,” will showcase the center and its state-of-the-art equipment, while also featuring a variety of vendors, some of whom are associated with providing care and services to those who have suffered spinal cord injuries.
“We’re just trying to get people aware of the specialized equipment and the specialized rehabilitation that we offer here that is so unique to this area,” said Mary Lynn Barnhard, Natalie’s mother and vice president of the Motion Project Foundation. “There is nothing in and around the whole city with the equipment that we have and the type of rehabilitation that we do here.”
Natalie Barnhard was a 24-year-old physical therapy assistant and licensed massage therapist in 2004 when a 608-pound Cybex leg extension machine fell on her while she helped a client stretch. The impact shattered a disc in her lower neck and damaged another beneath it, leaving her without movement or feeling in all parts of her body below them.
“I don’t think I’d be doing as well as I am today if I didn’t have the specialized rehabilitation,” she said from inside her 6,000-square-foot gym.
“I call it a gym because even though we do rehabilitation, we treat it like a gym and we treat everyone like clients. Just because somebody had an injury doesn’t make them a patient for the rest of the life. We help people with spinal cord injuries, strokes (and) MS (multiple sclerosis),” she said.
Natalie Barnhard left Buffalo for Atlanta 19 years ago and spent nearly a decade getting one-on-one physical therapy at least three times a week at the…
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