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Ben Allsup’s Goal Becomes a Reality

Spinergy: Release Your Energy!

Some people see a glass that is filled to the middle with water as half full, while others may see the glass as being half empty. And then there are those special few who will see the glass, see the water, and then figure out the best way to use both. This is how Ben Allsup views his water glass of life.

Sometimes, this same glass of water will fall and shatter into dozens of pieces, becoming a pile of sharp-jagged parts sitting in a puddle of water. Most people would mourn over what once was and what now doesn’t work, slowing picking up the pieces and blotting away the life-refreshing water, to never be able to use the glass or taste the water again. Ben Allsup is not your average person. When his glass fell and broke, he decided to get some glue and put the pieces back together again and refill his glass. Even though the glass may have been missing a piece or two, it still held water. But, Ben then took it further still, and showed others how to fix their own broken glasses, and helped them get started again by sharing some of his water to pour into their glasses.

Life is not static, it is always moving and grooving to different situations and what-is-happening-now, going up and down, left and right, looking for laughter and feeling pain. No man is an island, and even if he thinks he is, an island still finds itself subjected to the sun and storm, of the waves and wind. Things happen, people fall in love, people fall down, but something is always happening and sometimes what happens is unexpected and unwanted.

Ben Allsup is very much like any other middle-aged American male, yet like everyone, he is also different. He was raised in the Carolinas by foster, than adoptive parents. He went to school, became active with school activities, got good grades, made friends and played on the high school football team. After he graduated from high school, like many other young men and women, he joined the Army where he became a Combat Medic and Non-Commissioned-Officer. After serving his tour in the Army, Ben acquired a job as a Certified Nursing Assistant, got married and had three beautiful children. Being a married man with more responsibilities, he found a better paying job at a warehouse where he soon became the warehouse manager. One day at work, he went to assist some workers to pull some work orders before his shift was over.

A bit of Ben’s history should be pointed out that when Ben went into the Army, he didn’t carry a gun, but a first aid kit. The job that Ben chose after the Army was to attend to people’s needs and physical comfort. Also, while Ben was a warehouse manager, he put down his paperwork to go up onto a 15 foot-high platform to help his fellow workers pull their work order so they could get done and go home for the evening to be with their families. As usual, Ben was looking at the glass and the water and always finding out the best way to use both.

As Ben was pulling an order from a top shelf in the warehouse, he took a step backward on the raised platform. While holding the pulled order and realizing too late that he just stepped past the platform’s edge, Ben fell fifteen feet straight down onto a cement floor where he found himself lying on his back, his legs tangled and worried faces looking down on him from above his prone body. Ben wanted to get up but he didn’t understand why his legs wouldn’t untangle. Looking down at his legs and then at the faces of his co-workers, he didn’t know what to say or do. Next thing he knew he was being taken into an ambulance and his next memory was from about a week later, waking up in a hospital in a morphine haze.

While in the hospital, he learned that his accident had severed his T7/8 vertebrae in his spine and he was paralyzed from his waist down. After being transported to a rehabilitation center in Atlanta, Georgia, and while still recovering and learning to live life in an alternate way, he began to share his story and started to mentor other patients. Once again, Ben was just being Ben, seeing the glass and water and putting them together in his own way to help others refill their own glasses with hope and life.

After his rehab period, Ben went back to his home in North Carolina with his wife and three children. Going home, Ben found himself facing reality in a form that took three people to get him into his home. Due to the fact that Ben was now a paraplegic in a manual wheelchair, and there were no exterior or interior home modifications, he mostly remained in his living room for the next couple of years. During this period, the only times that Ben left the house were to go to doctor appointments, and for multiple hospital visits for infections, pressure sores and other health problems. During this same time frame, other areas of his life were ignored, such as paying his bills, attending to his family duties and attending his childrens’ school and play activities.

Ben had to do something so that the measure of time didn’t become a timeless vacuum, leading him to sit in the living room, looking out the window with a thousand-yard stare and dark thoughts swirling around in his head. So he took up model building. Models of ships, planes, and cars, doing something to focus on, putting each piece of the models together with care and determination. A perfect hobby for a man who likes to put things together, who likes taking something in many pieces and putting it into something that is whole and functional.

Still, as time slowly moved forward, Ben became depressed. There was much pressure on his family; therefore there was much self-made pressure on Ben. The time was difficult for everybody; and with his loving wife becoming his caretaker, her life was becoming much more like round the clock work. Marriage, under the best of circumstances, has hills of happiness and valleys of discontent. A sudden and drastic change in a relationship can, at times, become very difficult to overcome for the best of people. Ben’s marriage, like his legs on that cement floor years ago, had also become tangled up and confused. With much amicability from both parties, Ben and his wife decided to divorce. But they remain friends with each other and both continue to share the light of their lives, their children, and she also helps run the Spinergy caregiver group.

Ben, now divorced from his wife and missing his children, not working or feeling very productive anymore, feeling somewhat shut-away from society, sits in his living room, surrounded by his models. He looks around and finally says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

And his future became the present.

Ben had, and still has a great support system from his family and friends. And at that time they were starting to worry about Ben, often commenting among themselves that as each day passed they were losing a little bit more of the fun-loving Ben that they knew and loved. When they heard those five words of “I can’t do this anymore” they saw that the time to start the wheels of change had begun.

Leading the way was Ben’s sister-in-law, who wholeheartedly agreed that Ben couldn’t continue to watch his life slowly stream down like sand falling within an hourglass, sitting around putting model parts together. Now was the time to roll forward, putting his own scattered parts of his life together and do what he did before, adapt and move forward, making the best out of every situation and in the process, be able to help others in the same predicament.

They immediately started to search for a local spinal cord injury support group and to their disappointment, the closest support group was two hours away. Being unrealistic to attend a meeting so far away, they continued their search and found that a local spinal cord injury rehabilitation center had once had a support group, but it had fizzled out. There was talk of it starting up again in early January of 2012, but Ben decided to be proactive and he and his sister-in-law spent much time and effort contacting and visiting other support groups to ask questions, view procedures, and to identify what worked or didn’t work and to receive any suggestions that would be useful in starting up their own support group. Ben would also approach other individuals who he saw in wheelchairs while in malls, restaurants, or stores, and ask them if they would be interested in joining a local spinal cord injury support group if one were to form within the community.

These efforts and support group research, which also included reaching out to the National Spinal Cord Association, the Christopher Reeve Foundation, and other local resources that work with spinal cord injury individuals, led to the August 2012 grand opening of the ‘Spinergy.org, Release Your Energy!’ support group for living with spinal cord injuries.

With the help of Andy Arnette, a 20 + year quadriplegic, to assist with the start-up efforts, Spinergy.org was finally a realization to Ben, and a much needed and well received community organization that helps to improve the quality of life for those with new, existing, and future challenges that are impacted by a spinal cord injury within the North Carolina counties of Mecklenburg, Catawba, Iredell, Lincoln, and Gaston.

It was determined then that Ben and Andy would be the co-founders, combining their shared passion of helping others, to move forward and work to help and support spinal cord injury individuals and their caregivers. In September 2012, they had a pilot meeting which consisted of 15 – 20 spinal cord injured individuals, male and female, of all ages and different levels of injury, to ask what they would like out of a support group.

From the information collected in the original pilot meeting they secured a conference room from a local hospital in Charlotte which had free parking, easy access, plenty of handicapped parking, and which was not located in a high traffic area, for the monthly meeting and socials. Also, due to much diligence and research, Ben and Andy were able to find vendors who would provide refreshments at all the meetings, while they also received support from a local mobility van company who provided transportation to and from the meetings at no charge.

Plans began for holding ‘socials’ which would include basketball games and activities at spinal cord injury facilities such as the “Race To Walk”, a facility which has been designed for individuals with spinal cord injuries, on the first Tuesday of each month between 2:00pm – 4:00 pm. Oftentimes at these social meetings, there will be a special guest speaker who will provide information and support to the members attending the meeting. The big day for Spinergy's real launch into the public was the first Tuesday of October 2012, when their first official monthly social meeting took place for spinal cord injury individuals, their caregivers, family members and other individuals who represented different organizations and companies that assisted members with their daily challenges.

Ben and the Spinergy steering committee were pleasantly shocked to see over 75 people attending their first social group meeting. All of the work and effort seemed to be paying off, and this was only the first meeting. Never one to be satisfied, and always looking for ways to improve the situation, Ben decided to add a social meeting that would be held on the Saturday of the last month of each quarter to allow those who work or go to school during the weekdays to be able to attend and enjoy the benefits of the meetings. At the August 2013 meeting, less than a year after their first meeting, Spinergy now has over 175 members and they are continuing to grow at a rapid speed.

Spinergy.org, the idea that arose from a person sitting at home building models to mark the passing time of his life, is now a viable and robust nonprofit organization whose mission statement is to focus on awareness, advocate, and educate the community on spinal cord injuries by offering mentoring, socialization, recreational activities, sports, arts, and events that are available to all individuals with spinal cord injuries.

Some facts about Spinergy.org is that 100% of the money collected through donations and grants goes directly into the Spinergy program. There are no paid employees, and many companies and organizations also help by supplying or offering various assistance or services to the group. Goodwill is one of these organizations that help to find jobs for handicapped individuals. Doctors also volunteer their time by performing in-service talks at the meetings and offering advice.

One organization, The Christopher Reeve Foundation, has been a great help in supplying the educational materials and classes for people to become mentors. A mentor is a person who is willing to talk and empathize with anyone who needs to discuss the stresses involved with having a spinal cord injury. To become a national certified mentor, an interested individual must go through an eight hour class to fully understand the concept of being a mentor. Sometimes a member will call to talk to a mentor, sometimes a person will be referred by a doctor.

Ben says that he has a lot to be proud of in his life. His first pride and joy are his three kids. Starting Spinergy.org is another very proud moment in his life, and he is also shamelessly proud of his wheelchair basketball play-making ability on the basketball court. His goal for Spinergy.org is to have it become the largest non-profit spinal cord injury organization in North Carolina, and to help reach that goal, Ben now has business cards that he hands out to the people in wheelchairs that he still goes up and talks to wherever he encounters them.

In the life of Ben Allsup, the glass is neither half empty nor half full. Instead, it is reshaped and redefined, not as a container to hold something but as a cup that runs over with hope, faith, honesty, and love, the things that Ben will gladly pour from his cup into the dented and scarred cups of others, bringing them into the light and warmth of knowledge and support from others who care and understand. For no man is an island.

For more information or to donate money or services to Spinergy.org, check out the Spinergy.com Facebook page, or call 704-774-6250.

Bill Stock
Executive Editor,
Content & Social Media Services
Rehabmart. com