The “Quad” Who Won’t Quit
By ALLEN RANKIN
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?”
