Paralyzed veteran raises money for therapy center in Tampa

TAMPA

Twice a week, Gabriela Camargo and her husband, Romulo, get up before dawn to get him dressed, settled in his wheelchair and ready for the two-hour trip to Longwood, near Orlando, for the kind of intense, long-term physical therapy they hope will one day get him walking again.

After Romulo undergoes three hours of guided workouts on advanced exercise machines at Project Walk a therapy center unlike any in the Tampa Bay area, they say they fight the traffic back.

"I-4 is crazy!'' says Gabriela, adding that the couple usually arrives back home in New Tampa about 3:30 p.m.

After about a year of the routine, Gaby, as she's called, decided that she and "Romy'' should open a nonprofit intensive therapy center in Tampa.

"I thought it was a crazy idea,'' said Romy, an Army Special Forces officer who was shot in the neck and paralyzed from the shoulders down during an ambush in Afghanistan in 2008.

But the more he thought about it, the more he liked the plan.

They seem to be on their way, having collected about $216,000 in corporate and individual donations toward the $750,000 they figure they'll need for two years of operating expenses. They hope to open the StayInStep spinal cord injury therapy center in north Tampa in the fall.

Romy, a chief warrant officer 3, remains on active duty until his retirement next spring after 20 years in the service.

In 2011, Dr. Carlos Lima of Portugal, a pioneer in the use of stem cell surgery to stimulate nerve regeneration in spinal cord injury patients, operated on Romy, taking stem cells from tissue inside Romy's nose and transferring them to site of the injury.

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Paralyzed veteran raises money for therapy center in Tampa