Bob Eilbott · Roslyn, NY
An emergency cervical laminectomy left Bob unable to use his arms or legs at 74. Two years on, he walks every morning by himself.
“I go out for a walk every morning by myself. I don’t need a shadow.” Two years earlier, Bob was 74 and could not use his arms or his legs. An infection in his cervical spine had sent him into emergency surgery, and when he finally came home he could not get out of bed without help, so the first physical therapy he had was the kind that came to him. This is what happened in between.
The full interview, 40 minutes. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.
In April 2024, Bob was a 74-year-old community activist who walked, skied and played soccer. For about two weeks he had neck pain, headaches and backaches. Nothing that would send most people to a hospital. Then, around April 12th, his temperature climbed from 98 to above 102 in a matter of minutes.
His wife Denise drove him to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn. By the time he arrived, he had lost control of his arms and legs. An MRI with contrast found an infection in the cervical spine, and a surgeon performed an emergency cervical laminectomy within hours. The procedure removes part of the vertebral bone to take pressure off the spinal cord.
The surgery saved his life. It did not restore his movement. He came home after three and a half weeks of inpatient rehab across two hospitals, unable to use his arms or legs, and for several months he could not get out of bed without help. He was, in his own word, a quadriplegic.
His surgeon offered no assurance that he would regain independence. If you are reading this because someone in your family has just been given that kind of non-answer, the rest of this page is the part nobody could tell Bob either.
The first weeks were about survival rather than recovery. An infection kept his blood pressure around 85 over 60, too low for meaningful physical therapy. An antibiotic delivered through a PICC line triggered C. diff, which put him in isolation and back in hospital. He lost 35 pounds in five weeks, and a stretch without eating or sleeping sent him back a second time.
Recovery began properly in June 2024, once he was home. Denise describes the turn plainly: they stopped waiting for a facility to do it and built a team.
At its peak that team included two physical therapists, an occupational therapist, a myofascial release therapist, two aides working around the clock, and a physical therapist friend coordinating the whole plan. Bob was doing roughly four hours of therapy a day.
The first stretch of it had to happen where he was. Bob could not get out of bed without physical assistance, which rules out a clinic entirely, so his earliest therapy was delivered at home. Only once he could be moved did outpatient become possible at all.
On June 17th he began outpatient physical therapy with Dr. Said Haschemi. He arrived in a wheelchair and needed physical assistance to get out of it. A physical therapist would record that as two-person maximum assist, a step from fully dependent.
Volume mattered. Bob was doing roughly four hours a day, at a level Dr. Haschemi describes as unique across his caseload.
There was a clinical reason to keep going. His neurologist had warned that if muscle stops making contact with nerve, the nerve dies. With nerve damage, nobody could say in advance how much function would return. The honest answer, as Dr. Haschemi gave it, was to work for two or three weeks and then measure what had actually changed.
Aquatic therapy came from an aide who had spent 20 years working with people with ALS. Bob started in the pool on a lift. Within a week that was gone, replaced by an adjusted life jacket that let him stand and take steps in the water. Within months he was walking in the pool with nothing at all. He still swims four or five times a week.
Alongside it: myofascial release, corticosteroid injections into both shoulders from a physiatrist, and nerve-building supplements. Having several therapists trained in different eras turned out to be an advantage. He could, as he puts it, pick and choose a little from each.
Denise became his caregiver overnight, after 47 years of marriage. She researched equipment at two in the morning, managed a rota of therapists and aides, and pushed him on the days he did not want to be pushed. Bob is clear that this landed on her harder than it landed on him.
His myofascial therapist, whose own spouse had become a paraplegic, worked on the psychological side before anything else, because Bob had decided early that he was not going to accept being a quadriplegic. One month after coming home, still unable to use his legs, he had a therapist come at one in the morning simply to move him from the bed to a recliner. Asked why, he says he was tired of being dependent.
“You are the only person I have ever told to back off. People think taking a step back is the thing to do with an injury, when really you have to take ten steps forward. You took a hundred.”
Nothing about this recovery happened in a single visit. It happened because care was close enough, and frequent enough, to be relentless.
Bob had physical therapy prescribed twice a week and did it four times a week. He was in the pool another four or five. He worked his hands for half an hour every morning after breakfast. Add it up and that is eight or nine appointments in a week, every week, for the better part of a year.
Now picture doing that from Massapequa or Oyster Bay in February, with someone who cannot yet get out of a chair unaided, who has to be transferred into a car and out of it again at the other end. The therapy is the easy part. The logistics are what end it. A family does three weeks of that and then the visits quietly drop to one.
It is the same reasoning behind Strength Works PT operating as an in-home physical therapy practice across Nassau County, including Roslyn, where Bob lives. Travel is the quiet reason people stop going, and people who stop going stop improving. For patients recovering from spinal surgery, a fall, or a joint replacement, removing the journey is often what makes the frequency achievable at all.
Bob's own warning is worth repeating, because it is the part of this story that is not inspiring:
“It is going to be an expensive journey… If I were a poor person, in any of the poor neighborhoods I have done advocacy work in, you would be in a wheelchair.”
Two years and three months after the surgery, Bob rates his legs at 100% and his arms and hands at 80 to 90%.
He walks alone every morning. No shadow, as he puts it, and that is the thing he names first, before the golf or the travelling. He hits a golf ball straighter than he did before. He plays lacrosse with his grandson. He can shuffle a deck of cards, which his occupational therapist had spent months working toward. In February he jumped off a boat in the Cayman Islands to snorkel with his grandchildren. He leaves for three weeks in Europe on Tuesday.
Keeping that ground is its own piece of work, and it is what in-home training for older adults is for: the sit-to-stand, the walking speed and the single-leg balance that decide whether someone keeps doing their own stairs.
He cannot drive, which has changed how he does the community work he spent 25 years on. He still has neck discomfort late in the day from a six-inch incision. He is still in the pool several times a week.
“I go out for a walk every morning by myself. I don’t need a shadow. To me that has made all the difference. Independence is everything.”
Asked where he goes from here, his answer is a question: what will the next year be?
If someone in your family is at the start of something like this across Nassau County, the first conversation costs nothing. Call (516) 357-4247 or get in touch, and read other patient stories as they are published.
Dr. Said Haschemi: This is a series where people who have experienced surgeries or injuries that affected their day-to-day lives share their experiences. We dive into their stories, talk about what they endured, and see where they are now. My name is Said Haschemi, doctor of physical therapy and founder of Strength Works. I am here today with Bob Eilbott, a community activist who had an emergency cervical laminectomy that affected his arms and legs. Tell me about it, Bob. From the beginning. How did it start?
Bob: It started in April of 2024. For a couple of weeks I had pain in my neck, headaches, backaches. It culminated around April 12th. My body temperature went from 98 to about 102 or 103 within a matter of several minutes. My wife rushed me to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, where I lost control of my arms and legs. The surgeon did an MRI with contrast and found an infection in the cervical area of my spine. He did lifesaving surgery within a couple of hours.
At that point the surgeon was unsure what lay ahead, but he told my wife I would need a lot of physical, occupational and other forms of therapy. After three and a half to four weeks of rehab in two hospitals, I was able to come home. But coming home was an ordeal, because I came home without the ability to use my arms and legs, and for several months I could not get out of bed without physical assistance. I had therapy at home for two or three months, and then I was able to do outpatient physical therapy and occupational therapy as well.
Dr. Haschemi: It has been about two years since then?
Bob: Two years, three months.
Dr. Haschemi: You went from a point where you could not use your arms and legs at all. Where are you now?
Bob: My legs are 100% better. My arms and hands are maybe 80 to 90% better. I am pretty independent as far as my life goes. I have certain limitations. I cannot drive a car, which as a community activist I had to be able to do. So my activism changed radically.
Dr. Haschemi: What were you told you would be capable of, right after the surgery?
Bob: The surgeon did not give me any hope of regaining my total independence. I was 74 when I got my health issue. I did not know what the future held for me, or for my family.
Dr. Haschemi: Where were you mentally?
Bob: I was very depressed, that much I can say. I had been active all the time. I could walk, run around, do basically what I wanted. And this affected my wife to the largest extent, because she became my caregiver. I have been married 47 years. When you get married, I do not think you go in with the idea that you are going to be the caregiver for your spouse.
Dr. Haschemi: How long from the first symptoms to the surgery?
Bob: I got the surgery right away. The symptoms came very quickly. My life changed radically within a matter of hours. When you go through something like this you do not know where you will be four months later, or six months, or a year. You hope you will get some of your independence back. Without therapy, without the frequency of therapy, would I have been in this form of recovery? The answer is no. I would not have.
Dr. Haschemi: How did your family respond?
Bob: They were so supportive from day one. I have two adult children and four grandchildren. My grandchildren were very young at the time, seven, six, five, four and three, and they treated me like I was grandpa.
Dr. Haschemi: And Denise?
Bob: She did everything. She was on the internet trying to figure out what she could do and what she could buy to make my recovery easier.
Dr. Haschemi: How was the initial rehab?
Bob: The problem was that I had an infection in the body as well, so my blood pressure was too low to do any physical therapy. At one point my blood pressure was something like 85 over 60.
Denise: At the first rehab there was a problem, because Bob could not really participate. He was too weak, and he had C. diff. C. diff is terrible. It is severe diarrhea you cannot control, and you have to be isolated because it is contagious. So he was in a private room and could not really work. Then we transferred to another facility and the help was not great there either. So we came home, and we hired wonderful people to work with us. The recovery really started in June of 2024.
Dr. Haschemi: So recovery started once you got home. Everything before that was more about stabilizing you.
Bob: I had two physical therapists. I had an occupational therapist. About six months in, I had a myofascial release therapist. And swimming. Any therapy we could get, we had.
Dr. Haschemi: That is when you came to me.
Bob: June 17th. I started outpatient therapy in a clinic, and I was still in a wheelchair. I needed physical assistance to get out of it.
Dr. Haschemi: How were you getting in and out of bed at that point?
Bob: With two gentlemen who worked around the clock, 24 hours, seven days a week. We had a Hoyer lift, but we did not use it for long because I had two very strong men who could help me out of bed.
Dr. Haschemi: In physical therapy we would classify that as two-person maximum assist. That is two people at maximal effort to get you moving. That is close to fully dependent.
Bob: I was totally dependent for everything. For feeding, for my activities of daily living. Everything had to be done by somebody else.
Dr. Haschemi: You are one of the rare cases that goes from fully dependent back to independent. The scary thing with nerve damage is you never really know how much you are going to get back. You asked me many times how much better you would get, and the answer I gave you, the same answer I give any patient with a nerve complication, is that there is no way to know. Give it two or three weeks, do our best, see how much change we make, and measure the outlook from there.
Within the first few visits it was like seeing a different person walk through that door every time. Denise showed me a video of you practicing standing. Then one day we tried it and you got up.
Bob: A lot of screaming, a lot of nerves. But I did it. With every improvement I said, well, what is next? I never said that is good enough. It was: how do we get to step two?
I remember going from the wheelchair to the walker, and I hated the walker with a passion. You said once, if you do not like the walker, do not use it. And I walked into the clinic one day and I thought you were going to have a heart attack, because I walked in walking. I felt that my life was coming back.
My neurologist was close to tears when he saw me, because by then it was July or August. I was in a less invasive wheelchair, and he could not believe it when I stood up. He said: if you train like an Olympic runner, you will make improvement. He gave me 90%. He said, I do not know if you will walk with a cane, I do not know if you will walk with a stick, but you will get better if you work your butt off. And he was right.
Dr. Haschemi: What assisted you the most, psychologically, physically, all of it?
Bob: Psychologically, when you become a quadriplegic, there is the acceptance of it. I never accepted that I was going to be a quad. I had a myofascial release therapist who I am still working with, and initially she worked on the mental and psychological side of the disability. What was helpful was that her spouse had become a paraplegic, so she knew firsthand how somebody whose life is radically adjusted can still have as normal a life as possible.
Physical therapy was twice a week. I had it four times a week, because I had a personal friend who is a physical therapist and was really the coordinator of all the care. I thank him every day. He went to school 20 years earlier, so his modality is a little different from the way you and I work clinically. It was good that I had all these different modalities, where I could pick and choose a little from every therapist I had. And obviously the pool, the aquatics, and my wife pushing me.
Dr. Haschemi: Who introduced you to aquatic therapy?
Bob: One of the gentlemen working with me, who had spent 20 years working with people with ALS. He knew things he wanted to try, and it was trial and error a lot of the time. We started in the pool with a lift. Within a week or so he said, that is done. He got a life jacket and adjusted it, so I could stand a little in the water and walk a bit with that apparatus. It progressed from that to nothing at all except walking. Within several months I could walk in the water and get in and out of the water with help. I am still doing therapy in the water four or five times a week, indoors or outdoors when the weather is nice, like today.
Dr. Haschemi: People who have a laminectomy do not usually get off scot-free. What did you deal with early on? Pain, stiffness?
Bob: My hands did not respond, and I had tingling in them. I was given medication for it, and the medication was making me more and more depressed, so after a short period I stopped taking it. And a lot of physical therapy. Lots and lots.
I had stiffness in the shoulders, in the rotator cuff. I also had neck pain from the incision, which was six inches across the back of my neck. I still have some discomfort there, especially late in the day if I have been doing a lot of physical activity.
Dr. Haschemi: Was one side worse than the other?
Bob: Not really.
Dr. Haschemi: That is not true. This is me as your physical therapist now. It is very hard to recollect how bad things were from the inside, which is why it matters to have people around you. Your right shoulder was non-existent and in terrible pain. I even recommended Botox, to settle the area so it was not so guarded and locked up.
Bob: I also saw a physiatrist and got shots in both shoulders, which opened up the area so I could manipulate the shoulder better.
You are right about the sides, though. For probably a year I was predominantly a lefty, and for the first 73, 74 years of my life I was a righty. I learned to pick things up and feed myself with my left hand. A little over a year in, I could write my name with my right hand again.
Dr. Haschemi: During treatment you made me a card. I still have it. Seeing you write your name now is very different. How are your legs?
Bob: It took my legs a while to come back. Being a soccer player, a skier and a walker, that was hard to understand. Once I started walking, I would go out with one of my therapists on a Friday and we would walk two miles.
Dr. Haschemi: You can never explain to someone how complicated walking is until you lose the ability and try to do it again. We take function for granted until we lose it.
Bob: I was in bed and I said, I want to get out of the bed. My wife said, but you cannot use your legs. She asked if I wanted to go to hospital. I said no, because I had been back twice after the initial surgery. We called one of my personal therapists, who came at one o'clock in the morning. He got me out of bed and put me in a reclining chair, and I slept there four or five hours while he slept on the couch.
Dr. Haschemi: What was the drive for that?
Bob: I don't know. Maybe I was just tired of being totally dependent and I wanted some of that independence back. That was July, one month after coming home.
Dr. Haschemi: What setbacks did you have?
Denise: He was on an antibiotic through a PICC line, and the antibiotic made him really sick. That is how he developed C. diff, so he went back to hospital for three to five days. When we came home they cut the antibiotic down a bit and it eased up. The second time, Bob had not eaten or slept for three or four weeks. They almost gave him a spinal tap because they thought something might be wrong cognitively, but there was not. It was from not eating and lack of sleep. We came home around June 4th and then everything was better.
Bob: I lost 35 pounds in five weeks.
Dr. Haschemi: Did any dietary changes or supplements help?
Denise: We had nerve-building supplements from the health food store for about a year and a half. We do not take them any more. I believe they helped a lot with the tingling and the numbness. Most people experience that for a very long time, and I feel like Bob had it for maybe three to four weeks.
Bob: It was way longer than that.
Denise: The problem, and the reason he could not use the walker, was the sensitivity in his hands. Everything was freezing cold or burning hot. We tried everything. Golf gloves with the fingers cut off, garden gloves. You name it, we tried it.
Dr. Haschemi: The walker was what hurt you most, because of holding it. Your hands would feel like they were on fire. Doing it over and over probably desensitized those nerves as they were rebuilding. Your consistency through the week was a big part of you jumping back.
Bob: I had therapy about four hours a day.
Dr. Haschemi: You are the only person I have ever told to back off. People think taking a step back is the thing to do with an injury, when really you have to take ten steps forward. You took a hundred.
Bob: The neurologist said it. If your muscles do not make contact with your nerves, the nerves are going to die.
Dr. Haschemi: That is true even for a healthy person. Back off and the nerve endings and the fibers you build in the muscle go backwards quickly. The good thing is that if you develop a good base, it is much easier to get back to where you were. Where are you now versus a year ago?
Bob: I go out for a walk every morning by myself. I don't need a shadow. To me that has made all the difference. Independence is everything. I have been hitting a golf ball. I hit it straight now, where I used to hook it or slice it. I have been playing lacrosse with my grandson. I went miniature golfing with my wife and one of my personal therapists.
I had one finger on my right hand that buckled every time I tried to open it, and I work my hands every morning after breakfast for 30 to 35 minutes. I can shuffle a deck of cards now, which I never thought I would do. If my OT saw me doing it she would have a heart attack, because she had been trying for the longest time to get me to do certain things with my hands.
We were in the Cayman Islands in February with the whole family for my wife's 70th. I saw my grandchildren jumping off the side of a boat to go snorkeling and I thought, I am going to jump in too. And I jumped in, and I could swim around. Getting back on the boat I could not do. My son pushed me back in. This coming Tuesday we are going to Europe for three weeks. That will be a telltale sign of how far we have come. I really don't put any restrictions on myself any more.
I do want to go back to doing what I love, and that is community work. It may take a different form, and I might have to rely on my partner to pick me up in the car, but I think it will help me mentally to see that I am worth something again. That is the hard thing. When you get what I had, you feel absolutely helpless, because you cannot do anything on your own and you have to rely on people. I said early on: if I can make enough progress, maybe I can go back to doing what I like. I did it for 25 years, in community work, mental health care and forensics.
I remember saying to my partner, when I first started standing on my own, that I did not want him coming back here until I could walk. I wanted that to be a goal. If you do not make goals for yourself, you are going to stay where you are.
Dr. Haschemi: What would you tell someone going through it now?
Bob: That it is going to be an expensive journey, because of the way health care is in this country today. Unless you have money, you do not get care. And you need the support of your family. I had my wife. Without her I would not be here either. If I were a poor person, in any of the poor neighborhoods I have done advocacy work in, you would be in a wheelchair. I thank God I had the financial wherewithal to come back as far as I have.
Dr. Haschemi: That is a powerful message to end on. Thank you for letting me be part of this.
Bob: If you need a physical therapist, you are the one to get.
Every recovery is different. This is one person’s experience, not a prediction of what physical therapy will do for anyone else.
