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TRIBUTE: Players from a rival
high school signed a get-well volleyball. |
it was the indelible moment
of the 2003-04 men’s basketball season. The February
7 Stanford-Arizona game was tied with 24 seconds remaining.
The crowd waited breathlessly to see if the No. 2 Cardinal
could remain undefeated, not to mention beat the Wildcats
at Maples Pavilion for the first time in five years.
After Stanford stole the ball near midcourt with two
seconds to play, junior forward Nick Robinson took one
dribble and launched a 35-footer—swish. Jubilant
students poured onto the court and piled on him.
“I was flat on my back; [senior Matt] Lottich
was on top of me,” Robinson said after the game.
“And a couple of other people were on top of me
in places that were rather uncomfortable.” But
he emerged unscathed, and played 30 minutes against
Cal the following week.
The day before, in an old barn of a gym at an Arizona
high school, a postgame dog pile had far different results.
Nearly 2,000 spectators had packed into the Tucson High
School gym, most hoping to see the home team beat Salpointe,
the city’s traditional basketball powerhouse.
Senior Joe Kay, a two-sport standout with a volleyball
scholarship to Stanford, led Tucson’s charge.
Each time he made a basket, the crowd roared his name:
“JOE KAY.” With less than 10 seconds remaining,
Tucson was leading by six when Joe capped off the game
with an explosive dunk. The crowd stormed the court.
Leading the pack were some rowdy young men whose chests
were painted with Tucson High’s colors. One apparently
tried to hoist Joe into the air. Instead, the 6-foot-6
player was knocked to the ground and trampled.
Tucson High’s basketball coach, Gary Lewis, was
headed into the locker room when his brother, Frank,
intercepted him. “Gary, we need to get Joe in
the locker room,” Frank Lewis said. “He
got dazed.” Joe’s father, Fred, also was
nearby. He remembers thinking that Joe’s eyes
looked wild and that some of his movements seemed strange.
The men helped Joe walk, but by the time they reached
the locker room door, he had nearly collapsed. They
dragged him into the room and laid him down on a red
wooden bench. Most of his teammates continued to celebrate,
unaware of what was happening.
“Joe, Joe, what happened?” Gary Lewis asked.
No response.
“You all right, Joe?” No response.
Gradually, players began to realize Joe was hurt badly.
Some boys began to cry. Some yelled at him, begging
him to respond. Still, nothing.
An ambulance arrived and the crew whisked Joe to the
University of Arizona’s medical center, just blocks
away. The verdict: during the postgame melee, Joe’s
carotid artery had torn, causing a devastating stroke.
He was hemiparalyzed—unable to move his right
arm and leg—and unable to speak. It was the day
before his 18th birthday.
Hollywood couldn't have created
a golden boy better than Joe Kay. A straight-A student
with a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT. A
gifted saxophonist and poet. A vegetarian since age
4, when he faced down the hamburger on his plate and
asked his mother, “They didn’t kill it for
me, did they?”
Joe was, his friend Marshane Flanigan once said, the
kind of guy who managed to pair swim trunks with a mismatched
plaid shirt, name the presidents in order in 10 seconds
flat, and not seem like a nerd. The kind of guy, his
mother says, who when faced with a schedule conflict
between traveling to Reno with the school jazz band
and taking the SAT II, did both—winning the festival’s
award for musicality and picking up another 800 in math.
He was a nonconformist, eating meatless meals as his
friends chowed burgers and, for a time, wearing his
hair in raggedy dreadlocks. He chose to attend gritty
Tucson High, his neighborhood school, rather than the
magnet school that attracted most of the city’s
gifted kids. He wasn’t afraid to push back when
he disagreed with authority figures. “Teachers
don’t always like Joe,” says his mother,
Suzanne Rabe. “He always had his own mind.”
And of course, he was a gifted athlete, blessed with
height, speed and the ability to jump high. As a junior,
Joe led the state in volleyball kills and was named
Tucson High’s athlete of the year. “He was
just coming into his own,” says Don Shaw, Stanford
men’s volleyball coach.
But while this may sound like the first act of a celluloid
drama, Joe’s story holds no promise of a perfect
ending.
“This isn’t a fairy tale. People want it
to be, but it isn’t,” Suzanne says. “People
say, ‘I’m sure he’ll be 100 percent.’
I want to say, ‘So look at the MRI and see. See
what it looks like,’” thinking of the obvious
signs of damage in her son’s brain.
 |
|
"We
are not bitter or angry. The one who leads us
in this is Joe."
- Suzanne Rabe |
Joe Kay’s story is a real one about the power—and
the limits—of love, medicine and hard work. It
is about how even those who are very blessed can have
their lives changed in an instant. And it is about a
young man who will make it, if anyone in his situation
can.
when joe suffered his stroke,
the blood flow to part of his brain was cut off. Brain
tissue, robbed of crucial oxygen, began to die. The
neural pathways that allowed him to move his arm and
leg were gone—or at least disabled. Gone, too,
were the roads that led to speech and to the academic
skills that had always been his gift. There was one
piece of good news: his receptive language, or ability
to understand what others said, was intact.
After a stroke, brain tissue can regenerate at the margins,
but there is nearly always some permanent damage. Similarly,
as the inflammation caused by the stroke subsides, some
injured neurons recover on their own. But most patients
need to create new pathways to perform old tasks—and
fast, before the brain tissue containing the relevant
instructions atrophies from lack of use. Each day that
Joe isn’t able to connect with the part of the
brain that controls movement in his right hand, for
example, it becomes harder to regain that ability.
During the first week after his stroke, Joe began to
sit up in his intensive-care bed. He ate voraciously—mostly
tortillas and soup. His vision seemed fine. He was conscious
and aware, but he couldn’t respond. “There
was no voice,” says his father, Fred.
Finally, about a week after the injury, Joe spoke his
first complete sentence. His big brother Alec, who had
flown in from Alaska, said, “It’s really
great to see you.” Joe replied, “It’s
nice to see you, too.” His words were slurred,
his face and tongue contorted, but he had said something.
“It was such a great relief,” Fred remembers.
Although Joe’s injury was serious, he had a couple
of things going for him. First, he is an unusually young
stroke victim. Young brains rebuild faster and more
completely than older ones. Second, he had his own in-family
team of specialists who worked right away to find him
the best treatment options. Alec and his wife, Laurie
Macchello, are both physical therapists, and Laurie
specializes in neurological injuries. Between them,
the two flew to Arizona eight times in the first seven
months after Joe’s stroke.
A week after the accident, at Alec and Laurie’s
suggestion, Joe was taken by ambulance to Barrow Neurological
Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix.
He spent more than a month there, first learning to
use a wheelchair, then learning to stand again, then—gradually—learning
to walk. He walked awkwardly, with an obvious limp,
but it was huge progress. On March 29, Joe was discharged
from the hospital. Ahead of him lay eight months of
full-time outpatient rehabilitation.
joe arrives for a rehabilitation
session in late May wearing black shorts and
a neat white polo shirt with “Stanford Volleyball”
embroidered in Cardinal red. With his limp right arm
immobilized in a black nylon sling, he juggles his belongings,
struggling to put his backpack into a locker. He walks
slowly, limping, to join one other patient and a speech
therapist at a table in Barrow’s makeshift kitchen.
  |
STEP BY STEP: Joe, who learned
to walk again several weeks after his accident,
wears ankle weights as he works with physical
therapist Patty Briody. |
In this session, Joe is practicing cognitive-retrieval
skills, trying to build up speed at simple tasks. Right-handed
for 18 years, he must now write his name on his worksheet
with his left hand. He looks uncomfortable, as if he
is wearing a giant mitten. Each letter is a struggle:
J-O-E. He stretches out his lanky frame, trying to get
comfortable in the cramped chair.
The exercise, a simple word search, is timed and Joe
works quickly. When he is finished, the therapist checks
his work. She asks if he usually crosses off each word
once he has found it. “Yeah.” he says. “Yeah,
and you forgot?” she says, her voice gentle. “Yeah,”
he says.
Next, Joe works on symbol recognition, something that
would have been tediously basic before the stroke. He
is given a sheet of paper with 10 numbered pictures—a
star, an elaborate circle, etc. His goal is to label
at least 85 of the 100 symbols on a second sheet with
the correct numbers. He again works quickly, but not
fast enough. When the timer goes off, he has finished
identifying just 74, and one is wrong. He drops his
pencil on the desk and shakes his head in dismay.
Joe’s frustration is evident, but he doesn’t
express it verbally. The culprit: aphasia, a language
impairment that makes it hard to understand or produce
speech; it affects about one-third of people with severe
head injuries. Initially, Joe’s aphasia was so
pronounced that he generally responded to every question
affirmatively. Now, much of the language is there, but
it takes more time to retrieve. As Joe’s father
puts it, “It’s difficult to throw it back
out.”
The aphasia has caused a change in personality, too.
Joe used to be at ease in large groups, adding sharp
and humorous insight, his family and friends say. Now,
he is more shy and withdrawn. “He still has the
same witty thoughts, but he can’t interject them
into the conversation at the same speed,” Alec
says. “That’s really frustrating for him.”
In a one-on-one conversation in May, Joe’s speech
was slow and deliberate, but completely coherent. A
bit of that answering-everything-in-the-affirmative
remained, but he spoke clearly about finishing his first
book since the stroke (Bill Bradley and Phil Jackson’s
Values of the Game), his increased interest
in the science of the brain and visiting the Phoenix
Suns locker room with former Stanford star Casey Jacobsen,
’03.
Joe remembers being knocked down on the court that day
in February. He remembers opening his eyes and seeing
the crowd around him in the locker room, but being unable
to respond. Later, he became unnerved by the experience
of the remaining paralysis. “I can’t even
feel my arm or move it.” Joe said in May. “It’s
weird, one side is fine, but on the other I can’t
feel a thing.”
The hardest part of being injured, Joe said in the spring,
is not being able to do simple, normal, teenage stuff.
“I miss being with my friends and playing basketball
and volleyball and going outside and sweating out all
my frustrations.”
Instead, at the end of each day of therapy, Joe returned
to his family’s rented apartment, just five minutes
away, and napped. He seemed like a giant puppy, somewhat
unsure of how his body worked and worn out by a day
of hard work. Fatigue is common in stroke patients.
What Joe calls his “fog” probably also was
a factor. “I felt like I wasn’t in the right
place in time,” he says. “I noticed it about
two months after my stroke. Up till then, I was on so
much medication I hadn’t really had the chance
to think about it—what will be the aftereffects
of my stroke.”
keeping players, fans and
personnel safe during postgame celebrations is something
many schools struggle with. Carl Reed, Stanford’s
assistant athletic director for facilities operations
and events, reviews tapes of postgame activities and
attends seminars to learn to better handle big crowds.
He plans to establish a committee in the spring, including
members of men’s basketball’s boisterous
Sixth Man Club, to help educate students about the dangers
of storming the court after games. “It’s
a constant struggle,” he says. “You could
put up barricades and have police in riot gear, but
the flip side is do we want to look like it’s
a police state?” And, Reed adds, even the presence
of armed police won’t stop some fans from jumping
onto the court.
Nick Robinson, who lay flat on his back after his buzzer-beater,
says he became a bit scared as the pile of people atop
of him got heavier and heavier. When he later heard
about Joe Kay’s injury, Robinson’s first
thought was, “That’s the last time I am
at the bottom of a dog pile.” Still, he doesn’t
think there is a simple way to prevent a serious injury
like Joe’s. “How could you predict that?
There’s nothing you can do to predict that.”
 |
HE'S GAME: Joe is always striving
to get better, family members say, whether by
checking his gait in store windows or by playing
Boggle with his parents after a full day of rehab. |
Maybe not, but families of such accident victims don’t
always see it that way, often filing lawsuits immediately.
Joe’s parents—both attorneys (Fred spent
his career in the federal public defender’s office;
Suzanne teaches at the University of Arizona)—have
not. “We are not bitter or angry,” Suzanne
explains. “The one who leads us in this is Joe.
We wish the people who tackled him would come forward.
We feel like they owe it to Joe. He would be gracious
and he would be their friend.” The Kays do hope
that more might be done to prevent future on-court accidents,
and met with officials from the school district last
spring to discuss how postgame celebrations might be
tempered. And they have asked the district to help pay
Joe’s mounting medical bills, because neither
his family’s nor the district’s insurance
fully covers his outpatient therapy.
Primarily, the family focuses on getting Joe better.
“We haven’t had the time or energy to do
anything but support him and support one another,”
Suzanne says. They have kept out of the media spotlight,
turning down interview requests from dozens of reporters,
including Today host Katie Couric. They agreed
to speak with STANFORD, they
say, because of the attention and affection the University
community showed Joe before and after his accident.
Soon after his injury, Stanford administrators assured
the family they would honor his partial scholarship
even though he likely will never play Cardinal volleyball.
His offer of admission will remain open until he can
enroll (this fall, if all goes well). Don Shaw and an
assistant coach call regularly to check in. University
President John Hennessy sent a letter wishing Joe his
best. Casey Jacobsen and his wife, Brittney (Blunt,
’01), visited him in the hospital in Phoenix.
A group of incoming freshmen, the kids who would have
been Joe’s classmates if he had entered last fall,
set up a website to send their support. “Out of
the woodwork, these Stanford people keep coming,”
Fred says. “It’s like, ‘You are in
Stanford. You are part of the family.’”
There has been similar goodwill from the Kays’
community in Tucson. When both parents were accompanying
Joe to Phoenix, they returned home each weekend to a
clean house and a refrigerator full of meals. Dozens
of teenagers, even opponents from other high schools
who knew Joe from summer-league teams, made regular
visits. “If love could heal, Joe would be running
marathons right now,” Suzanne says.
over the summer, Joe did
go running for the first time—two miles. He wasn’t
as fast as he used to be, he told Don Shaw. “That’s
okay,” Shaw assured him. “It’s just
great that you are doing that.” He also began
to regain some movement in the fingers of his right
hand.
By fall, he could lift a water bottle to his mouth,
but couldn’t release his grip on it without the
aid of a spring-loaded device. At press time, he was
entering a three-week constraint-induced therapy program
at the University of Alabama, where he would have his
left arm bound so he would be forced to use his right.
Eating a meal was expected to take hours.
It was difficult to watch his friends go off to college,
and to be somewhat recovered but still dependent on
his parents. “He started to chafe against everyone
telling him what to do,” Suzanne says. Before
the accident, “the apron strings were completely
untied. He was ready to fly. Now, we’re running
his whole life for him.”
Many things that would once have been simple for Joe
remain out of reach. He is desperate to drive again,
Suzanne says: to regain that measure of independence,
to stop asking his parents for rides to parties. But
he failed a driving test when he rolled through a stop
sign, unable to get his right foot to cooperate. He
could get licensed to drive a car with a left pedal,
but he doesn’t want to give up or settle. In the
fall, he enrolled in a basic calculus course at Phoenix
College. The high-level math that was once second nature
now requires significant effort, and some aspects—like
word problems—leave him flummoxed. “It’s
just really slow. He has to plug in the numbers. It’s
like, ‘Welcome to the real world, Joe,’”
Suzanne says, laughing gently.
Suzanne is wryly witty, but also honest and direct.
Seeing her gifted son hurt has been wrenching. The day
after Joe’s stroke, Suzanne dropped out of everything,
resigning as an elder in her Presbyterian church and
as a leader of a group that opposes the death penalty.
She has spent hundreds of hours online researching treatments
and read every book for laypeople on the subject of
strokes. For weeks, she could force down only crackers,
cheese and sips of 7-Up. The well-meaning but worn-out
phrases people offered in sympathy didn’t help.
“God never gives you more than you can handle,”
some friends assured her. “I don’t think
God had a hand in this,” she says. “Platitudes—I
have not appreciated platitudes.”
thi final act of joe's script,
of course, is still being written. When Alec first saw
Joe in the intensive care unit, his hope was simple:
that his little brother would live independently someday.
That hope is already being realized: in January, Joe
will move into the honors dormitory at the University
of Arizona. He will take more calculus, plus a class
on communication and its disorders. It focuses on aphasia
and apraxia, another speech impairment.
“I do not see any real cognitive issues,”
says Kay Swan, who oversees Joe’s physical rehabilitation.
She points to his recently developed interest in politics,
sparked in part by concern for his own health-insurance
prospects once he turns 19. Joe engages fellow patients
in discussions of abortion and Iraq, and even snagged
an invitation from Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to
attend the final presidential debate in Tempe in October.
“The fact that he is discussing these issues is
a miracle,” Swan says.
As Alec sees how Joe is always working, checking his
gait in store windows so he can refine it, his hopes
have grown. He believes Joe might someday walk with
a barely noticeable limp, regain more use of his right
hand and become nearly anything he wants to be.
“I expect him to be a successful professional.
It will be a lot more work and it may take longer, but
I just don’t think he is going to let anyone get
in the way of that,” Alec says. “He’s
come really far, but I’m still not satisfied because
he’s not satisfied.”
Joe himself dreams bigger than anyone. He won’t
even accept that the Cardinal volleyball team may be
beyond his reach. “Never say never. There may
be a small chance—one in 100, one in 1 million;
there is a small chance.” Is there anything he
is sure won’t be possible? “Pretty much
nothing,” Joe said during a phone conversation
in the fall, sounding strong and confident. “I
don’t know if I will be able to jump as high as
I could or have the dexterity I once had or compute
math problems in my head, but I think I will be able
to do almost anything.” One sign: he can again
name all the presidents in order. He’s just a
bit slower, at 13 seconds. |
