Elwood couple mark renewed health in marathon

For Arthur De Martini, a 47-year-old lawyer from Elwood, running any distance is a feat, much less running 26.2 miles through all five New York City boroughs.

About five years ago, De Martini said, he was driving to work in Williston Park when he suddenly lost feeling in his legs. Doctors would eventually diagnose him with transverse myelitis, a condition that causes the immune system to attack the spinal cord.

His left leg was almost completely paralyzed, and three-quarters of his right leg became numb. De Martini was in a rehabilitation hospital for a month.

"I was actually kind of out of shape," De Martini said Friday of his overall health in 2005, when the disease struck. "This was a wake-up call."

When De Martini crosses the finish line Sunday at the ING New York City Marathon, it will be the culmination of a personal long-distance race, a slow and steady churn back from poor health, crisis and fear.

"It'll just be a great accomplishment," De Martini said.

De Martini plans to run the race with his wife, Martha, who is using the race to put a bow on her own health-related accomplishment. Martha De Martini, a kindergarten teacher, has lost over 70 pounds since April 2008 after, she said, her husband's health scare made her realize how quickly everything can change. "My husband said we should try to give back," she said. "We came out O.K., but other people weren't as fortunate with serious medical things."

For the couple, neither of whom have run a marathon before, Sunday's race is an opportunity to do some good by raising money for cancer research. So far, donations tied to the couple's marathon race have topped the $2,500-per-person requirement to gain entry into the marathon through charity work. So far, they have raised about $7,000.

The money will be donated to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centers to support cancer research. That's because a child in Martha De Martini's school, Harley Avenue Primary, in the Elmwood school distinct, is battling bone cancer.

"He knows how it feels to be in that dark, awful place," Martha De Martini said of her husband.

Arthur De Martini still has "sensory" problems with his left leg. The nerves that signal the leg to move when his eyes aren't fixed on it still don't function properly, so his leg drags behind his body when he runs.

"You can hear the shuffling down the street," he said.

About a third of the patients who get the disease De Martini suffered from never recover from paralysis, others regain only partial feeling, and some make a full recovery, said Dr. Karen Blitz, of North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, who treated De Martini. "He was unable to walk when this occurred," Blitz said. "Now he's able to run a marathon. He's amazing."

The lingering effects of his condition haven't prevented the couple from 18 weeks of training to prepare for Sunday's race. The farthest the couple, who have two daughters, ages 13 and 9, have run is 20 miles.

"We're going to have to eke out those last six on a wing and a prayer," Martha De Martini said.