The Orchid

by Robert Waggoner

  I lost it. I stared at the boy, trying to back him down with my anger. He stared back. When I spoke, it was with calm fury. “You’re a jackass.” I said it because part of me wanted payback for insults just like that one that Lindsey had endured from stupid idiots like Frank. She was the girl who had changed my life and I was not going to let Frank get away with calling her anything.

  Lindsey desperately tried to communicate reason with her fingers but I was beyond reason. Emotion had earned its rightful place and I let it have the reigns.

  Frank’s face went blank and then, as the insult registered, he bridled and reached for the arm of my wheelchair. He intended to upend it and spill me onto the floor. I reached out and caught his arm. Frank was strong but years of using my arms for everything gave me a lot of upper body strength. My grip was like iron on his wrist. He tried to break free but he could not. The other two boys hung back, not sure what to do.

  “Let go!” Frank growled. He was off balance and could not swing at me with his other arm because he would have to swing across his body. I twisted his wrist so he could not turn toward me. He started to turn the other way, to swing a backhand at me, so I grabbed the wheel of my chair with my left hand to act as a brake and then I bunched the muscles and the fury that was building up inside me and pulled him into me before giving him a tremendous shove. He stumbled backwards and lost his balance. He crashed to the floor and stopped after his head hit a locker with a bang.

  The other two looked at Frank and then at Lindsey and me. They were trying to decide. Lindsey was on my left side, the boys were on my right side and our backs were to the lockers. They did not expect a cripple to put up a fight. They could come around to the left side and make it difficult or they could just come toward me swinging. As long as they were uncertain, that worked to our benefit.

  Frank struggled to his feet. He rubbed his buttocks, the first part of his body to hit the floor, and then his head. “I’m going to make you pay for that!” He glared at me as if that would do it. When I did not respond he turned as if to walk away and then suddenly whirled and gave my wheelchair a hard shove. The other two boys started to come toward me.

  I heard a gasp behind me but I could not afford to turn and look. I reached for one kid’s arm to keep him from tipping my wheelchair when I heard a shout.

  “Hey! Lindsey, Jimmy!” It was Chuck at the end of the corridor. Cindy was on his arm. They had come looking for us. “What’s going on?” They began to run toward us.

  I was never as glad to see a chess nerd as I was then.

  The boys glanced back and decided to leave. Chuck and Cindy moved to let them go past and then hurried to where we were. “Lindsey, are you okay?” Cindy knelt beside the prone form of the girl I had been trying to protect.

  “I think the handlebar knocked the wind out of me,” she gasped. Her face contorted in pain.

  Cindy helped Lindsey get to her feet but she doubled over in pain. “It hurts.”

  Cindy said, “Just stay there, I’ll go get some help.”

  I wished I could get out of my wheelchair and do something…anything, but I was helpless. She gave me a brave look but pain contorted the gentle features of her face. It took an agonizing five minutes for one of the chaperones to come and listen to what had happened. They tried to get Lindsey to her feet but again she doubled over in pain.

  “Call 911,” the chaperone said.

  A flurry of activity followed. Lindsey went by ambulance to the hospital and I followed in my car. I called her parents and mine from the school. They met us at the hospital and we waited anxiously for word from the doctor about Lindsey’s condition. At last, Lindsey’s mom and dad talked to the doctor. A little while later, they came out.

  “Her spleen was damaged by the force of the handlebar,” Lindsey’s mom told my mom and dad while I listened in miserable silence. “It would have been just a bruise if she hadn’t been pinned against the lockers.” She looked at me and then away. “I’m not sure what that means to her health. They’re trying to decide if they should remove her spleen.”

  “She should be okay without a spleen,” I said, “They can’t repair it because it’s too soft and spongy. I just studied about it in school.”

  My mom looked at me. “What does the spleen do?”

  “It’s like a sponge that filters the blood only not like the kidneys,” I told her. “It removes old tired red blood cells.” It did more than that but I did not want to alarm her parents. She would be okay without it that much was true I was almost certain of that.

  My mom hugged Lindsey’s mom and my dad stood awkwardly beside me. Nobody asked me if I was okay but even if asked, I would have said yes. The only thing that hurt was inside me. I could not protect Lindsey sitting in a wheelchair and I had even been responsible for her injury. If I’d just tried to talk Frank out of his drunken actions instead of manhandling him!

  I told my story repeatedly to every official who asked. The worst reaction was the reaction of the Andersons who believed that I provoked the incident. I was the oldest; I should not have used physical force and so forth. I could see disapproval in Mrs. Anderson’s eyes when she looked at me.

  It was the next day before Lindsey could have visitors. When her parents finally let me in to see her, she gave me a wan smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I had to beg and beg my mom and dad to let you in. I threatened to get worse if they didn’t let you!” She grinned as she took my hand.

  “I’m so sorry, Lindsey,” I said. “I shouldn’t have pushed Frank down.”

  “You did what you had to do and I’m proud of you!”

  I stayed with her as long as I could but finally her mom sent her dad in to say that Lindsey needed her rest. I rolled past them in the waiting room, got in my car, and drove home. Something had definitely changed in the Anderson’s attitude toward me. I could not blame them. From their perspective, once again the boy next door was responsible for their daughter being hurt.

  Lindsey came home the next day. I watched from my window as she walked slowly into the house next door. As soon as I could get downstairs, I made my way over there.

  I could tell they did not want me there. I felt panic but I did not want to beg. I started to turn around but Lindsey called my name. “Jimmy! Wait! Don’t go.”

  Her dad’s lips tightened slightly but he opened the door for me to come in. I waited in the front room. Lindsey wore a bathrobe and her hair was a mess but to me she looked radiant. Just her smile was all I needed to assure me that she did not bear the same grudge as her parents.

  She sat down on the sofa and shooed her parents out of the room. They went begrudgingly. What was I going to do, start a fight with their daughter? Geez!

  “I’ll be okay, Jimmy,” she said. “I have to stay in bed for a few days so the sutures can do what they have to do. They’ll disappear after a week so I don’t have to get them taken out.” With the good news delivered, she looked around the room. Her parents were gone. “But there’s more.”

  I caught my breath.

  She took my hand. “Remember I told you about my dad?” I nodded. “Well, I didn’t tell you what he died from. He had Meckler’s Disease. It is a rare blood condition. Only a few people have it. He was one of them. It’s genetic.”

  I kept looking at her. My heart told me that there was more.

  “I have it, Jimmy.” Tears came to her eyes. She was trying to be brave. “My parents don’t know that I know. While I was in the hospital one of the blood tests came back positive for it. My mom and dad probably know because it was on my chart. I read my chart, Jimmy!”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. My eyes clouded.

  “My dad lived to be forty-two,” she said. “I have to do more research on it.” She looked at me. “Jimmy, something I was going to show you at my locker! They are doing spinal restoration in South America now but it is an American doctor and his team that are doing it. They have a fifty percent success rate!”

  How typical. Lindsey
never worried about herself.

  “You have to read it!” She gave me the web site name. “Go research it, Jimmy!”

  I promised I would. We held hands and talked quietly for a while and then her parents came back into the room. The tension grew so I excused myself and headed for home after extracting a promise that I could visit again after school the next day.

  My visits seemed less welcome to the Andersons, but not Lindsey. She watched from her window until she saw me coming and she always met me at the door. She was getting stronger now and soon would be able to go back to school. I missed our time together in my room. I was afraid that her parents would deny us that when Lindsey fully recovered. I wished I could speak to them about what happened but they did not seem inclined to talk about it. How different from Lindsey! They continued, instead, to give me looks that I interpreted as wishing Lindsey had never met me.

  I asked my parents to intervene but since I had nothing specific to tell them, they did not know how to proceed. They did arrange for the Andersons to come over one weekend but it fell through. I do not know if the excuse was real or imagined. They allowed Lindsey to come over but because she was “recovering”, her parents insisted that she come home by 8:00 p.m. again.

  Our first few nights back in my room we were like strangers trying to get to know each other. Finally, Lindsey told me that her parents were afraid for her because of the hereditary illness she had and since not enough was known about it, they were afraid that excitement, stress, lack of sleep, or anything unusual might trigger it and they would lose their daughter. Lindsey told me she felt hemmed in by a growing wall of fear that she did not know how to counteract. She tried talking to her parents about it but they were afraid to tell her the real reason for fear it would scare her. So everyone in her house knew but her parents did not know that Lindsey knew.

  We debated on how to talk to her parents but could not come to any conclusions. Finally, she looked at her watch. It was 7:30 p.m. She came over to the chair next to my wheelchair and said, “I’ve missed you. I want you to know that I think you were brave in trying to defend me. I don’t blame you for what happened, Jimmy.”

  A great sense of relief washed over me. Lindsey never lied about her feelings. She had learned from her dad not to hide her fear or anger because it only made you worse inside. She saw the look of relief on my face. “Do you blame yourself?”

  I nodded. Of course, I blamed myself! I was the person who was supposed to protect her. I had failed. Not only that, but my temper made the situation worse than it should have been.

  “Don’t change, Jimmy,” she pleaded. “I don’t want you to change in that you become over-protective of me like my parents have. Please.” She looked at me with those brown eyes. I felt better.

  “Okay.” I promised.

  She kissed me.

  That was something I had been longing to do. When we finished kissing it was time for her to go home.

  I finally remembered what Lindsey wanted to show me that night at the prom. I went to the web site she had mentioned and read about an American doctor who had success reversing spinal cord injuries. Unfortunately, the American Medical Association did not approve of the practice so this doctor had moved his spinal cord clinic to Brazil.

  I read seven or eight testimonies of patients who were paraplegics like me and who had recovered full use of their limbs. The process took a number of years but only one surgery. I got the phone number of a couple of patients whose testimonies were on the web site and called them.

  “You would be a perfect candidate,” one of them told me. “I was injured when I was seventeen and Doctor Lang did the surgery when I was twenty-four. You would have a better chance of recovery than I did!”

  All the patients I managed to contact over the next week told me how wonderful the clinic was but most importantly, they told me that it had really worked; they were walking. Some of them with canes, but all of them were out of their wheelchairs!

  When I had enough information, I began talking about it with some of my professors at school. Only one had heard about the surgery. The others discounted the testimonies as faith healing mumbo jumbo. The one professor who had heard of it though, encouraged me to look into it. He suggested that I contact the doctor and see if he thought I was a candidate or not.

  Lindsey was excited when she learned that I was actually looking into this. I asked her to sit down with me that night while I explained it to my parents and asked for their blessing. She readily agreed and asked her parents for permission to eat supper at my house.

  After supper, my mom cleared the table with Lindsey’s help and then we sat down and I began to explain what I had learned. My mom and dad were at first skeptical but then began to ask questions. By 8:00 that evening, we had agreed that my dad would contact the doctor for an appointment just to see if I was a candidate for the procedure. My mom was cautiously excited. She did not say so but I could see hope in her eyes for the first time since the accident.

  “What if it goes badly?” She wanted to know, “Will things get worse?”

  I could not answer that question but I promised it was something we would ask the doctor.

  My dad made an appointment with the doctor the next day. He was going to be in Dallas for a short time and agreed to give us two hours and an appointment at his clinic. My mom insisted on going with my dad and me. I tried not to think about it for fear of disappointment.

  That night I sat thinking. My life would be so different. My first fifteen years of life I’d pretty much wasted. I was a selfish, boring jock with an attitude. That life ended when the deer ran in front of the car. My new life did not begin until Lindsey poked her head into my bedroom. If I could walk again, what would I do?

  A thrill of anticipation raised the hair on my neck. I would definitely get to experience the one pleasure denied to me by the injury! I rolled over to the window. “You’d be a whole man, Jimmy,” I whispered to my reflection in the double-thick glass.

  I imagined Lindsey’s reproach, and it was as palpable as if she had been standing in front of me. I had not thought of anyone but myself when I uttered that sentence. Ashamed, I rolled away from the window and over to the computer. She needed me to think about her now, not myself!

  I typed Meckler’s Disease into the search engine at my computer. Nothing came up. I switched search engines and tried again. Still nothing. I tried every trick in the book but there were no articles on this rare disease.

  “How do doctors know about it?” I asked myself. “How did the doctor at the hospital diagnose the disease if it’s so rare?” My room remained silent except for the churning fan on the computer. I wheeled around the room, looking at the full bookshelves. None of the books from my first year of college had anything about the disease. I went back to the computer.

  After an hour, I gave up. I had to go to bed.

  The next morning, I woke up early with a thought. I’d heard about a search engine called “Dog Pound” that ignored the routine search and went about looking for topics a totally different way. I brought it up and typed in “Meckler.”

  Two thousand articles and web sites popped up. I looked at the clock. We were leaving soon. I refined the search to Meckler’s. The dog symbol on the search engine wagged its tail. A dozen articles showed up. The middle article’s blue underlined header declared, “A rare, hereditary disease with no known cure…”

  I printed it and got ready for the trip to Dallas.

  On the airplane, I read the article. It was an experimental treatment using drugs developed from—and this sent chills up and down my spine—the Cataleya Orchid! The coincidence was mind-boggling. Best of all, the article mentioned by name the doctor who was doing the research. The article mentioned an island in Hawaii I had never heard of. I put the article away.

  I wasted no time in writing a letter. I had to address it to Dr. Laird in care of the magazine because the location details were rather nebulous.

  As I sat back and c
onsidered all of this good news, I had a weird chill. So many things could interfere! First, of course is that the research on the orchid would prove to be worthless. Second, Lindsey’s parents would absolutely refuse to have anything to do with an experimental treatment. Third, those idiots at Lindsey’s school would cause her more trouble creating the kind of stress that might trigger the disease. Fourth…

  I found myself despondent and worried. Lindsey would not approve of my pessimism—that was for sure. Another thought worried me; lately Lindsey had grown withdrawn and quiet. I knew her parents were scared…please don’t let it affect Lindsey! I could feel my heart begging for just one miracle that would match the miracle of Lindsey in my life.

  Chapter 10

  With mom and dad at my side, I flew to Dallas to keep the appointment with Dr. Lang. He did an examination, looked at my charts and X-rays and then sat down with all of us in his plush office. When he finished explaining everything and answering questions, he told us he had an opening in two months time. It was the last opening he had until next April. He agreed to hold the slot open for forty-eight hours.

  We went back to the hotel room and talked it over. It would cost $30,000 for the three weeks in Brazil and another $10,000 for the therapy afterwards. Insurance would not cover the cost. He mentioned that in the United States this procedure would cost over $100,000 because insurance would pay the bills and the cost of medical care was three times what it needed to be. In Brazil, we would have the same sterile operating room but drugs, nursing, and hospital costs were so much lower. The drawback, and the reason for the AMA’s reluctance, was that only fifty percent of the patients undergoing this surgery had positive outcomes. There was a chance that my recovery would be incomplete. If for some reason, the spinal cord did not regenerate I might end up with intense pain but no positive benefits. Only thirteen percent of his patients had that result and nobody under the age of thirty. In the end, we accepted the offer and the appointment. Dad wrote a check and we made arrangements. With a summer surgery, I would not have to miss any time in school if after surgery things went well.