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Kit Bond was getting ready for bed when his friend came by, wanting to go out to the bars.
Bond had just finished a full day’s work with his grandfather on the farm and was pretty tired, but he decided to give in to his friend’s request and got dressed.
It was early into the night, probably about 11 p.m.
He had been at the bar for about an hour when he got sleepy and went out to his friend’s 2001 Chevy Silverado to take a nap while his friend stayed inside.
A sleeping Bond didn’t notice when his friend came out of the bar and started the truck.
When Bond woke up, his leg was on fire and he couldn’t feel anything below his waist.
The truck had rolled three times, and he couldn’t move to escape the wreckage.
His friend pulled him from the debris — and that’s where things start to get hazy.
“The last thing I remember before passing out was just like knowing I was going to die and feeling a complete sense of peace and looking up at the stars and saying a prayer,” Bond said.
Emergency responders revived Bond on the scene and rushed him to the hospital.
Bond is a biology and biochemistry senior who has lived his life as a quadriplegic since that accident Aug. 2, 2003.
Six years later, Bond has taken quite a different approach to his rehabilitation.
He has traveled to Portugal and most recently China to receive adult stem cells inserted into his body.
He cannot receive the treatment in the United States because it has not yet been approved.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first phase of research on humans for multiple companies to begin types of stem cell treatments nationwide, said Paul Kincade, head of the Immunology and Cancer Research Program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.
This past Monday, for example, the FDA approved Neuralstem, a company based in Maryland, to use spinal cord stem cells in a Phase I trial to treat patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to the company’s Web site.
Kincade, who regularly works with stem cells, said the research is where some of the most promising scientific discoveries are happening.
Although the research is progressing rather quickly by scientific standards, it can be agonizingly slow for a patient waiting for a certain type of stem cell treatment to be approved, he said.
“In this country, especially, we’re very careful of doing treatments that could be helpful until we’ve done clinical trials,” Kincade said.
Bond went through with stem cell injections because of the reparative qualities that stem cells possess.
With Bond’s treatments, doctors place stem cells in a specific location — in this case, the spinal cord — in hopes those stem cells will work to repair the region.
Kincade said the goal is to put stem cells into a tissue where they will regenerate what’s needed, listening to the environmental cues to allow them to do what they’re placed there to do.
One clarification that Bond and his family make is that Bond is not receiving embryonic stem cells — a topic that has spawned an ongoing political debate.
A conservative family from Hugoton, Kan., none of them agrees Bond should ever receive embryonic stem cells — and neither does Bond.
Before the accident, Bond stood at 6 feet 6 inches tall, weighing 220 pounds with about 8 percent body fat. After the accident, he dropped to 135 pounds in about three weeks.
He completed Army Basic training in the summer of 2000 before his senior year of high school. With a full-ride scholarship to Kansas State University through the Army, he had plans to enroll in the Army ROTC program, graduate and have a career in the military, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a WWII veteran.
Meanwhile, his unit was expected to be deployed to Iraq. A couple of months into school, he would have gone to Camp Anaconda, a large U.S. base near Balad, Iraq, for 13 months.
When the accident happened, Bond was about five days from moving to Manhattan, Kan., to start his freshman year at Kansas State.
But all that changed.
Bond enrolled at OSU in 2004 — primarily because he wanted to get his life in order and OSU was the most accessible campus he and his family toured.
In December 2004, Bond found out, thanks to some Internet research, about a stem cell program in Portugal.
He and his family flew to Portugal for his first treatment May 2005.
While there, doctors took olfactory tissue, the tissue that controls sense of smell, from Bond’s nasal cavity — rich in stem cells — and harvested the stem cells from the tissue.
Next, they implanted the stem cells into the spinal cord.
The surgery was more painful than Bond expected.
“Basically, they opened me up from my neck to the shoulder blades, pulled everything aside and got into the spinal cord,” Bond said.
Bond was the 54th person in the world to have the procedure done.
Although he knew it was risky, he said it was worth it.
Immediately after the surgery, Bond’s body regained the ability to regulate temperature. Before that moment, Bond had a problem where he always felt cold — a common problem among quadriplegics.
“It was the best feeling in the world,” Bond said. “I felt a cold breeze and thought, ‘Oh, this is OK.’”
After the procedure, Bond moved to Atlanta to participate in therapy specialized for spinal cord injuries. After a year in Atlanta, Bond moved back to Stillwater to finish school.
In December 2007, Bond found out about Beike Biotechnology, a company based in China that focuses on adult stem cell technologies, according to its Web site.
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