Less than three years after she underwent surgery to remove a tumor in her spinal cord, Morgan Dunnigan has made remarkable strides toward recovery. Although she was paralyzed immediately after her surgery, Morgan now walks laps around the track at Martinsville High School.
By JENNIFER BEELER - Bulletin Intern
Among the cross country runners and driver education students one early morning at the Martinsville High School track, Morgan Dunnigan smiled as she used her crutches to walk a mile.
Walking is no small feat for Morgan, 8, who underwent surgery to remove 98 percent of a tumor in her spinal cord in December 2005. After finding the tumor from an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) on Dec. 8, Morgan’s condition worsened over the next few days until she lost feeling and movement of her extremities the night before the surgery, according to her father, Colin Dunnigan.
After the surgery, Morgan was completely paralyzed, and doctors did not believe she would walk again, Dunnigan said. But now, after two and a half years of therapy and rehabilitation, Morgan has walked a mile around the track — twice.
“On my worst days, I didn’t think she’d ever get out of a chair or a bed,” her father recalled. “But as time went on, I thought she had a good chance.”
Three weeks after the surgery, there was very slight movement in her leg, and later in her arms and shoulders. “We knew then we needed to be aggressive in her rehabilitation,” Dunnigan said.
“We had fun proving them wrong, didn’t we, Morgan?” asked Morgan’s mother, Laura, while motivating her to keep walking around the track. “You don’t make assumptions about a child,” she added.
When she took her first step after her surgery, Morgan said, “it felt pretty good.” After walking her first mile in early July, she said, “I was sort of too exhausted to be proud.”
“The effort it takes her to do this, we can’t comprehend,” said Laura, who compared Morgan walking a mile to a healthy adult walking up a steep hill 18 times in a row.
The goal for her therapy, which the family incorporates into daily activities, is to strengthen her hips, legs and core muscles, Dunnigan said.
Morgan said she has “gotten sort of used to (therapy),” which is “only boring when we don’t talk.”
Therapy is fun some of the times, Morgan said, such as when she gets to go horseback riding or swimming, or when she goes to the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore for rehabilitation with her favorite therapist.
It is difficult to do much outdoor therapy because Morgan lost the ability to sweat with her surgery. As a result, her body cannot regulate her temperature, resulting in fevers and a loss of energy, Laura Dunnigan said.
At 7:30 on a recent Monday morning, Morgan was at the track ready to walk her four laps in cool, 67-degree weather. “I’d like to do it at night so I could sleep in,” Morgan said.
She later told her younger brother, Connor, 3, “I wish I could be you,” referring not to him running along the track beside her and throwing a football but to him getting to sleep in later than she does.
Connor, who does not remember his sister before the surgery, likes to help out some of the time, his dad said, by pushing Morgan’s wheelchair, getting her crutches or spraying her and his parents with water to help her cool during her exercises.
Her inspiration for her early morning workouts is the prospect of doughnuts from Tasty Creme afterward. Morgan chanted “doughnut, doughnut” as she walked around the track, resting after every lap and drinking some water before trying the next lap with only one crutch.
Morgan constantly wears leg braces and a back brace to prevent scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, and uses crutches when she is out of the house for extra support. When she gets home, though, Laura Dunnigan said you can hear her crutches crash to the floor and she’s off. “Sometimes she uses them as weapons with Connor,” Laura joked. “We have to take them away.”
Since Morgan is still unsteady on her feet, she said she has “maybe a trip a day, but I basically get back up and go.” She added that unlike herself and other children, “adults look at what they can’t do and not what they can do.”
Morgan received just as much support from her friends and the community as she did from her immediate family.
The Dunnigans moved to Martinsville in June 2003, and after only two and a half years here, “people were standing ready and were wanting and willing to help” when Morgan became ill, Laura recalled. “When something happens like this to your child, it’s devastating, but we never felt alone.”
Carlisle School, Morgan’s school and also where Colin served as upper division director, helped the Dunnigan family during this time. Colin was able to travel with Morgan and Laura to Baltimore for rehabilitation while the staff at Carlisle assumed his duties.
“Carlisle was an amazing place because we had an employer who said, ‘Do what you have to do,’” Laura said, adding, “we could not have done it. I needed Colin there; Morgan needed Colin there.”
Carlisle also held fundraisers for Morgan, including four basketball games where all proceeds went toward a fund to help with her rehabilitation. In one night, $15,000 was raised from admission charges, T-shirt sales and concession stand sales, according to Bulletin reports.
Morgan’s friends also rallied behind her after her surgery.
“It was great,” she said. “I mean seriously, my friends were writing to me every day.”
“The best part,” Colin Dunnigan recalled, while fighting back tears, “was being in that airplane and seeing this crowd of adults and children with pompoms” cheering for Morgan when they returned from five months of rehabilitation in Baltimore.
“That was a special, special day because we never believed she would be gone for five months when Laura drove her to the hospital” for her surgery, Dunnigan said.
Morgan hopes to be a neurosurgeon one day, even though she did not know what that means before before her illness, she said. She added that she would like to design clothes that are more adaptable for children with injuries, such as magnets that look like buttons on clothes. “I could see myself helping kids with injuries,” she added.
This month, the Dunnigans are moving to Dayton, Ohio, where Colin is taking a position as director of college counseling at Miami Valley School.
“The biggest fear about leaving,” Laura said, is that people will look at Morgan and assume she has a cognitive problem. Her mom joked that Morgan probably has a higher IQ than she does.
“Losing the community feel,” Laura added, is also a concern.
But as Morgan said, “there’s always a connection to Martinsville.”
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