Courtesy Readers Digest 1981. November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of
personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm
your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and human
triumphs
As Eugene Williams strode briskly into the gym that fateful
afternoon—Thanksgiving Eve of 1966—several of his fans pounded his back in
congratulation. A tall, good-looking, 16-year old senior at St. Albans High
School in Washington D.C., Gene was a football hero of the moment, proclaimed
by sportswriters the outstanding prep-school tackle in the Interstate Athletic
Conference. He was also co-captain of the St. Albans lacrosse team, a member of
the student council, the player of a mean bass fiddle in a popular combo, an
artist whose paintings were exhibited among the school’s best. “How does it feel.”? His father asked, “to be
16 and sitting on the top of the world?”
It felts fine, young Williams recalls. Everything was so easy for him then! With a minimum of studying he’d chalked up a
respectable B average. This, plus his
athletic ability, he hoped, would get him accepted by Howard. That’s why he was talking up Wrestling. “It’ll may be increase my chances’ so he threw
himself wholeheartedly into the afternoon practice session.
Then it happened.
Executing a quick somersault to elude an opponent’s hold, Gene heard his
neck pop, and saw a flash of light. The
next thing he knew he was being lifted into an ambulance.
Bu midnight the neurosurgeons knew the worst: Gene Williams
had fractured his spinal column at the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae. He had become a quadriplegic—paralyzed in all
four extremities, almost totally deprived of voluntary motion from the neck down. A tracheotomy was performed, and in the hall
outside the operating room he tried to wave to his benumbed parents. But his left forearm—the only thing he could
move at the time—remained raised for only a second before falling back limp.
In the intensive care unit, Gene lay in frigid traction,
steel tongs holding his head and broken neck in a vise. He would remain thus clamped and pinned down
for six weeks. To ward off bedsores, he
and the canvas frame that held him were turned over every two hours. On his back, he stared at the ceiling; on his
stomach, at the floor, through a small “window” in the mattress. He couldn’t see the other patients in the
unit, each marking his own struggle to live, but at one time or another he
heard three of the die.
And suddenly it came to him as never before: everybody is responsible for his own
actions. When the chips are down, what
you do, and are, is up to you and you alone.
He determined that, win or lose, he would turn in a performance that he
had his family could be proud of.
The game grew rougher.
In February, Gene fell prey to kidney and bladder infections. His fever climbed to 104degreesF. He contracted bursitis of the haw and, barely
able to take in even liquid food, lost 75 pounds. Though he regained the ability to breathe
almost normally, and to move both arms a little, his fingers—and the rest of
his body below the upper chest—remained still.
He tried to concentrate on pleasant things. Visits from his former teammates helped. So did the painful but looked-forward-to
sessions with Janet, the pretty ad compassionate young physiotherapist, and
angel straight from heaven.
In June+, Gene’s parents transferred the wasted, virtually
helpless invalid to New York University’s renowned rehabilitation center, informally
called Rusk Institute. They hoped for a
quick miracle. But Dr. Donald A Covalt,
the institute’s associate director, quietly explained: “For your kind of spinal
chord injury, we can’t do anything much here except show you the right plays,
hand you the ball and suggest that you run with it. Whether you remain helpless or become
independent again will be entirely up to you.”
“Then he added, “I can promise you this:
If you choose to win back a high degree of social usefulness—it will be
the hardest work you ever did!”
Gene was “wonderfully lucky,” the doctor said, to still have
the potential use of the triceps muscles in his arms. Once ‘reeducated” and developed, these should
allow him to make important pushing motions impossible for May quads.
Gene instantly liked this frank, tough doctor who talked
like a coach. For Covalt, he would knock
himself out trying.
Down on the mat in the institute’s gym, Gene struggled and
sweated at weightlifting. This slowly
developed seemingly nonexistent wrist, arm and shoulder muscles. Very small maneuver, starting with learning
to turn him over in bed, was a Herculean wrestling match. Even sitting up in a wheelchair was an art.
Without normal automatic reflexes, it took concentration and practice to keep
his weight centered so he didn’t topple out.
After a few weeks, Manning and Kathleen Williams, visiting
the institute to console their son, found themselves being lectured by
him. “Everybody works under a certain
set of handicaps. And the worst
handicapped are those with no awareness to their potential, no desire to do
anything much. We quads at least know
what our weakness are, and are trying to overcome them.”
Practicing in the center’s horizon House, Gene slowly
improved at the 123 Activities of daily Living (ADLs). He worked doggedly to reduce the time it took
to dress him—from more than three hours to, eventually, 30 minutes. Best of all, he qualified himself to drive a
car, a specially equipped two door Cheverly his father gave him. He learned to pull himself into the front
seat, fold and drag his wheelchair in, and then drive—with the aid of hand
controls operated by lame fingers powered by his good wrists.
Most quadriplegics who come to Rusk spend months of more
there. Gene insisted on leaving after
two. “Thanks,” he told the doctors, “but
I think I can make it on my own now, and I want to catch up on some
living.” This he proceeded to do, with
purpose and flair.
Completing his senior year at St. Albans, he pumped his
wheelchair around the gentler slopes of the campus. Like every other quadriplegic, he had to
struggle just to exist. Several times a
day he had to lift and exercise his lame legs to keep circulation going. Drugs had to be taken, and he had to drink
five quarts of fluid every 24 hours to ward off kidney and bladder
infections. Because most of his body had
lost the ability to perspire, warm weather or heated classrooms were constant
problems. The external catheter he wore
make his unpredictable bladder socially acceptable had to be endured.
His parents ad younger sister helped by valiantly pretending
he was as normal as anybody. In their
modest Georgetown home, they set up a private downstairs apartment for
him. Rolling up and down the ramp that
replaced the back-door steps, he came and went as he pleased at all hours of
the day and night, as independent in this respect as any young man in
Washington.
He found time to be a volunteer line coach for the football
team. He studied hard, and began making
top grades. “When you have to work this
hard to stay alive,” he confided to a friend, “You want to live a life that’s
worth all the effort.”
There were terrible frustrations and longings. Gene couldn’t of course, manage the bass,
piano of guitar he had played before the accident. But one day his eyes fell on an old African
talking drum that had been lying idle around the house. He found that with drumsticks placed in his
limp fingers, motored with wrist action, he could beat out a faltering rhythm. With practice the rhythm improved.
At night he cultivated the friendship of “far out” jazz
musicians. His apartment at home began
to jump and rock with their jam sessions.
He grew a beard—arguing to the St. Albans headmaster that he needed the
extra facial coliage to pad him in his falls from the wheelchair. Off campus, Gene affected the kind of
uniform—sloppy jeans, sweatshirt and sandals—that identified him as a liberal
young ant-Establishment type. Though shocked
initially, his father was the first to concede that an enthusiastic and able
“hippie” was infinitely preferable to the wan, helpless figure he’d seen at the
hospital. And he remained his son’s No 1
fan and booster.
In June 1968, Gene, now near the top of his class
scholastically, graduated from St. Albans.
That fall, he entered Howard, to major in musicology while also taking
some premed courses to help him understand—and improve—his condition.
When a new student combo began jamming in the basement of
his dorm one day, Williams mustered the nerve to ask, “Mind if I sit and play a
little percussion?” The other musicians,
astonished at his skill, and at the way he helped them attain the “sound” they
sought, invited him to join a group.
Eventually, the combo, christened “Jones,” played commercially for
college dances, and Gene, lifter by the blare of horns, caught up in the rhythm
of couples swirling to his drumbeat, found himself sensing “a lot of
participitation and involvement, and a lot of beauty and power.” He also became a disc jockey on the “Smoky
Joe’s Café” show, on Harvard radio station WHRB.
Before the accident, he had dreamed of driving west,
alone—of finding adventure out there. In
the summer of his sophomore year, Gene drove west, alone, in his special hand
controlled car. He roughed it, sleeping
in the car, often cooking his meals. In
two later summers, he trekked alone through Mexico. At home in Washington, too, he saw plenty of
action. The stubborn young idealist
alarmed his family by taking a front-line stand in the May Day March of 1971,
when protesters of the Vietnam War tried to block Washington traffic.
Gene got his B.A. from Harvard in 1973. Today, at 31, despite the paralysis of four
fifths of his body, he is again looking forward to a bright future. Tracking him down recently, I found him happy
and self-sufficient living in a 150-year-old Massachusetts house that he and
some friends are reclaiming. Among his
friends—struggling young people like him—he is affectionately called Geno. And he has won back all three of the
distinctions that made him “promising” before the deadly neck-snap.
Athletics? He’s still
a top athlete, in his league: a champion at running the obstacle course and
endurance race that is a wheelchair user’s daily routine. Wheelchair manufacturers complain that their
vehicles are not build to stand the wear and tear he gives them.
Art? With a special
long-handled brush that fits into the curve of his wrist, Gene is painting
again—and believes his new work is “the best I’ve done yet.”
Music? He is the
percussionist in a frenziedly wild trio which, its fans agree, ‘takes jazz
buffs places they’ve never been before.”
With music alone, he probably could support himself from now on.
But he is working toward another main profession. His brown eyes burning, Gene told me: “I want
to spend the rest of my life helping people who have injuries like mines. I’ll work in a rehabilitation center, if
possible; if not, elsewhere.
He is pulling together his own special kind of therapy
program, ‘Like most quadriplegics.” He explains, “I’ve benefited less by
technical medicine than by simple things like exercise, diet, massage. And macrobiotic. And by human thing—like meditation and
prayer; the compassion of people like my first physiotherapist, Janet; the
gumption of my parents; the thoughtfulness of a doctor who explained to me that
my sex life was not over but would just be ‘different’; and the courage of
other quads whose accomplishments proved that I, too, could make a grade.”
The Reverend Charles Martin, distinguished headmaster of St.
Albans, declared; “Of all the graduates this school has ever turned out—and
they include some national leaders—none has been greater credit to St. Albans,
or has held up brighter torch for others to follow, than Eugene Williams.”
High praise. But Gene
would doubtless prefer this lesser compliment.
“What are you doing a story about him for?” another percussionist in
Boston asked me, genuinely puzzled. “
What’s so different about Geno?”
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