The next steps for this coach may be steps

GREENWOOD VILLAGE - One moment Ryan McLean was rolling around the pool deck, barking encouragement. "C'mon Sarah!" she said. The next, she's leaning over the side of the pool, as a red capped teenage head peers back up at her.

"Your breathing looks better," she instructed the swimmer, "but you need to do more kicking!"

It's easy to see a former swim champion, like coach McLean, sitting in her wheelchair and wondering if she still craves the kick.

Or, see her looking up at the students in her science class and wonder if she obsesses about modern miracles in other labs that could one day help her stand at their level.

After all, don't we always want most, what we can't have?

It turns out, what McLean wants is for us to know this - she's spent 11 years in a wheelchair and she's just fine with that.

"I'm not going to say that I wouldn't like to walk," said McLean. "It would make my life a lot easier. But, it's not really something that's of importance to me anymore".

She has certainly proven that the words "wheelchair" and "confined" are mutually exclusive, if the person in that chair refuses to see it as limiting.

Eleven years ago, she was finishing up a third year on the Cherry Creek High School varsity swim team when late on Feb. 1, 1997, McLean and five friends were involved in a head-on crash on C-470. Her boyfriend and the driver of another car they hit head on both died. Three others were badly hurt. Ryan was flung 150 feet from a tumbling SUV.

A long list of her injuries included spinal cord damage from a broken back. At 17, Ryan was a paraplegic from the waist down.

After a summer spent recovering and learning how to live without the use of her legs, she came back to school. Astonishingly, she also swam, very slowly she admits, for the junior varsity team.

All these years later, that's the team she now coaches at her alma mater, along with teaching science there.

Ironically, the process of building a new life, while sitting in a wheelchair, has actually been liberating for her.

"I realized that life was going to be, what I wanted it to be. I could actually choose and I could play around with things and I could fail and that would be OK," said McLean

Now, this teacher with her open mind is about to take a leap of faith into a gene pool 1,700 miles away.

"This summer I'll be traveling to India, to visit with an Indian doctor there who is doing a stem cell treatment where she is taking stem cells and injecting them into certain parts of people's bodies," said McLean. "The hope is that those stem cells will develop into nerve cells and grow and actually re-route parts of my spine that are not working, not functioning anymore."

That doctor is Geeta Shroff. McLean found out about her from Amanda Boxtel of Basalt. Boxtel underwent treatment with Shroff in Delhi last August. Her Web site, www.amandaboxtel.wordpress.com, details the procedures and her experiences.

Boxtel's recollections on her Web site are very positive. However, Shroff's treatments and those of other doctors in countries like China and Mexico which are less regulated than the U.S. are often dismissed by the medical community here.

Dr. Daniel Lammertse is the medical director at Craig Hospital in Englewood. It is a national leader in spinal cord injury research and rehabilitation. Lammertse says he receives scores of inquiries each year from people who want his advice before they undergo treatments like the one offered by Shroff.

"I can understand the motivation to try and seek treatment to improve their health and their function. That does not mean that I support the treatments that they're seeking because quite frankly, most of those have no scientific validation and in fact, can be potentially harmful," said Lammertse.

Lammertse has a term for the kind of trip McLean is about to take: medical tourism. He says there are two constants he sees from patients after their trips.

"The majority of those patients will return and report to us that they've had some vague improvement in bodily functions, whether that be an improvement in balance or body awareness. I have yet to see any of those patients demonstrate objective positive change in their function that we can measure objectively, and I have seen more than one of them suffer," said Lammertse.

McLean, who did much of her rehabilitation at Craig and still plays sports there, contends she is going in with her eyes open, hoping only to find some help in maintaining her body for the long term.

"There's a lot of issues that I need to worry about. Overuse of my shoulders and circulation and skin, just sitting in the same position every day, for 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day. This treatment will hopefully be able to restore something in terms of giving me a better sense of balance or a better sense of a core muscle so I can take tension off of my shoulders, give me more circulation. There's bladder and bowel issues that that would be remarkable if I could overcome," said McLean.

Despite the skepticism and even outrage that surrounds steam cell research, McLean believes her future will be to help stem cells make strides, not vice versa.

"I would like to be a frontrunner and be about what people are doing with stem cells and how they can help," she said.

That could put her under a microscope and that is not a scenario this woman of science relishes.

"I'm definitely a mild mannered person," she said. "But I'm definitely starting to be OK with showing the United States in particular, that maybe this is something that is going to be OK."

For now, a healthy, long life is what McLean really wants - and she's fine with rolling toward that next step, whatever it holds.

"No matter what, I know I will be a better person from it, whether that be physically or mentally or emotionally. I know this is something that is going to be very changing for me," she said.

To read more about McLean's journey, visit her Web site at www.ryanmcleanfund.blogspot.com.