Crashing Through (14 page)

The boys kept smiling and looking at him.

“All my life, whenever something seemed interesting to me, I went out and tried it. Sometimes I got bloody, as you guys know from my stories, and sometimes I ended up on big adventures. But no matter what happened, I was always happy I tried. Trying meant that I knew what things were like. Like when I crashed Aunt Diane’s bike. I didn’t want to sit around my whole life wondering what it was like to ride. That would have been worse than crashing, don’t you think?”

“Yeah!”

“So, I’ve been thinking about this surgery for a while now. And I keep wondering what it would be like to see. It’s not that I need to see or that my life will get better if I can see—I mean, my life is pretty great already with you guys and Mommy and all the things we do. What seems great is getting the chance to know what this vision stuff is all about. Can you imagine anything more interesting than getting a chance to see what it’s like to see?”

“Yeah, that would be cool,” Carson said.

“Yeah, you could drive us!” Wyndham said.

“So what I’m telling you guys is that I’m going to do it. I’m going to do the surgery next week because I wouldn’t really be me if I didn’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but that’s a big part of the fun, too. And the best part will be figuring it out with you guys. You two will help me figure it out no matter what it is, right?”

Carson and Wyndham looked at their dad. It was light outside. Dinner was still an hour away.

“Come on, Dad,” they said. “Let’s shoot some baskets.”

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Mike May had traveled the world but he’d never been nervous to pack a pair of socks. Now, in his bedroom on the night before the first of two surgeries designed to give him vision, he fiddled with his footwear as worries flew through his brain: Will the anesthetic sicken me as it did during my childhood eye surgeries? Will there be stem cells available when I get to the hospital? Why am I putting knives in my eye when my life is fine already?

Jennifer put her arm around her husband and helped him fill his suitcase. Then they walked to the kitchen to talk to their kids.

“We’ll be staying at Manpa’s house tonight; it’s very close to the hospital,” she said of her father’s home in Menlo Park. “Tomorrow morning, Daddy’s going to have his first surgery. It won’t make him see, but it gets him ready for the next operation a few months later, and that’s the one that might give him vision.”

“You guys behave for Grammy OJ,” May said, referring to his mother, who had arrived to babysit. “We’ll be back tomorrow night. I’ll probably look like a mummy with all the bandages on my face, so beware.”

May and Jennifer arrived early that evening at her father’s home. They were due at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco at six
A.M.
the next day. They climbed into bed early, but May couldn’t sleep. He still tasted the ether of his childhood operations, still wondered if some poor soul who’d checked “Donor” on his driver’s license had died that night, still poked at memories of being trapped in hospitals by people who hadn’t asked if he wanted to see.

They made it to the hospital the next morning with time to spare. On checking in, they learned that stem cells had indeed become available. The staff dressed and prepped May, even using a marker to highlight the eye to be operated on, a curious move given that his other eye was plastic.

A few minutes later Dr. Goodman entered the room, greeted the couple, and reviewed the surgery. First, he would scrape away the conjunctiva cells that had grown on top of May’s existing cornea—the ones that had accumulated because May’s stem cells had been destroyed and therefore could not produce daughter cells to keep the area clear. Then he would remove a ring of tissue from around the donor’s cornea—a ring that contained the stem cells—and place it around May’s own cornea, securing it with sutures. The trickiest part would be shaving the ring under the microscope from a thickness of about one millimeter to one-third of a millimeter, all while May waited unconscious on the table, the truest test of Goodman’s tremorless hands. If all went well the surgery might last ninety minutes.

Goodman wished the couple good luck and departed. At the same time, the donor stem cells were being delivered to the operating room in a red-and-white Igloo cooler, the gift of a young man killed the day before in a motorcycle accident.

The surgery went smoothly from beginning to end. May awakened in the recovery room bandaged, in pain, and nauseous. Goodman entered a few minutes later and squeezed May’s shoulder.

“It went great, Mike,” he said. “Things are looking good.”

He explained that it would take three or four months for the transplanted stem cells to make enough new daughter cells to cover the corneal surface and to forge clear pathways for future daughter cells. If that happened, Goodman could transplant a new cornea into May’s eye, one that would stay protected and be kept clear. He instructed Jennifer in applying postoperative medicines and reminded them to visit the nephrologist he had recommended.

“We’re halfway there,” Goodman said. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

Shortly after the surgery, Jennifer drove May to Sacramento for his appointment with the nephrologist, a medical doctor who specializes in kidney function and diseases. Nephrologists are more expert than ophthalmologists in using immunosuppressive drugs to prevent transplant rejections, which is why Goodman had made the referral.

The doctor skipped the small talk. May would need to take cyclosporine in order to prevent his body from rejecting his new stem cells, as well as the new cornea he was to receive in the coming few months.

“There are risks of side effects with a drug as powerful as cyclosporine,” he said. “You need to consider them. They’re serious and they’re real.”

The doctor listed the risks from bad to worse: appetite loss, diarrhea, tremors, nausea, vomiting, hair loss, increased susceptibility to colds and flu, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, heightened vulnerability to infection, decreased ability to fight infection, ulcers, kidney failure, liver failure.

And then he dropped the bomb: cancer.

May and Jennifer sat dumbfounded. They’d been briefed by Goodman about these risks—he’d even told them of a patient who’d died from such a cancer. But his warnings had never anchored with them; somehow they’d both pushed his words to a hiding place. They’d barely discussed it. May wanted to tell the nephrologist, “Wait, this is something I hadn’t bargained for.” Instead, he managed to ask, “What are the chances that I’ll get…the serious side effects?”

“It’s hard to say. I don’t deal with healthy patients like you. The people I treat are usually very sick—they need major organ transplants, their lives are on the line. If they do get sick, it’s tough to figure how much was due to the medicine and how much to their existing illness. But they’re in a different boat than you are. The risks are worth it to them because their lives are in grave danger. You’re the picture of health.”

The doctor wrote a prescription and gave May a schedule for checking his blood work. Driving home, May and Jennifer wondered aloud about how the gravity of these risks had not really registered with them. On that ride, and in the subsequent days, they would talk about whether new vision was still worth it, whether it was worth it to risk dying in order to see. The conversations always ended the same way: May told Jennifer that he’d chosen to go forward for important reasons and that those reasons hadn’t changed. And then he told her this: I never back out.

Four months remained until May’s second surgery. He used the time to throw himself into Sendero, preparing the company and its product for a spring launch at one of the nation’s premier technology conferences for people with disabilities. He pushed away thoughts of new vision—and just about everything else—in a headlong rush to turn his GPS prototype into the real deal.

A week before the second surgery, while skiing in Telluride with Salviolo, May began to shake and turn nauseous from the cyclosporine. He lay in his rented condo and wondered if this was what it felt like to die. He pulled himself together and, on the last day of vacation before the surgery, made it to the top of a mountain. He stood there for several minutes, inhaling the open air and the surrounding peaks, knowing that he might never again experience this sport he loved, this world he loved, in this way that had been his character, his life, since age three, the blind way, a beautiful way, the only way he knew.

“This might be it,” he thought as he turned his head across the panorama. “God, it’s been fun.”

May reported to St. Mary’s at dawn on the morning of his scheduled second surgery. He didn’t bother to say good-bye to his blindness or otherwise reflect on what might be a big change—he knew it would be weeks before the results were known, just as it had been weeks before his bandages had come off after the stem cell transplant. The date was Monday, March 6, 2000. His big technology conference was just two weeks away.

Goodman transplanted the donor cornea—from another young motorcycle victim—without incident. When May awoke, his eye was bandaged but he felt none of the nausea he’d experienced the first time around.

“I know you’re busy, Mike, but I need to see you in my office for ten minutes tomorrow, just a quick checkup to make sure things are healthy,” Goodman said.

The next morning, May and Jennifer arrived at Goodman’s satellite office in San Mateo. A nurse showed him to an examining chair in a small room. Jennifer found a stool a few feet away.

“I just called your mom,” Jennifer told May. “The boys are off to school. Carson forgot his jacket. And a package came for you.”

“That must be the replacement antenna I ordered,” May said.

Goodman, dressed in a white lab coat and bow tie, opened the door and went for the sink.

“Good morning,” he said, washing his hands. “How did things go last night? Any bad reactions to the painkillers?”

“No, this time it went really well,” May said. “I ate a good dinner and slept all night.”

“Excellent. Let’s have a look at those stitches.”

Goodman coaxed the tape along in quarter-inch increments, careful not to cause May to flinch, then lifted away the mounds of gauze he’d used to cover the eyelid. May’s eye remained closed, the area around it not inflamed, a good sign. May expected to hear Goodman’s instructions for changing the dressings and keeping the wound clean. There were always a lot of steps for cleaning an eye, and it was a hassle, too, with medicines and drops and such, but suddenly Goodman wasn’t talking about dressings, he was doing something strange and asking something strange, too, he was pulling open the eyelid with his thumb and forefinger and he was asking, “Can you see a little bit?” he was asking…

BOOM! WHOOSH! OOHHHHHHHHHHH…

A cataclysm of white light exploded into May’s eye and his skin and his blood and his nerves and his cells, it was everywhere, it was around him and inside him, inside his hair, on top of his breath, in the next room, in the next building, in the next state, glued to Good-man’s voice, on his hands, it was fantastically bright—such intensity had to be bright, so, yes, bright—but not painful, not even uncomfortable, and it rushed toward him and around him, yet it didn’t move, it was always moving, it was always still, it came from nowhere—how could something come from nowhere?—it was all white, and now Goodman asked again, “Can you see anything?” and May’s face erupted into a smile and someone inside him made him laugh and then talk, and he said, “Holy smoke! I sure can!” and those words made Jennifer’s heart pound and her throat clench and she whispered to herself, “Oh, my God.”

Now, a second into light, the brightness began to take on a texture—could he touch it?—and a second after that it stopped rushing from everywhere and now seemed to come from a place, it was
out there,
it was coming from the buzzing sound overhead, and May’s mind went away from the light for the briefest moment so that he could remember that the buzzing in a doctor’s office came from fluorescent lights, and as soon as he remembered that he flung back to the light, which now came from somewhere definite, it came from the fluorescent light above for sure, and a second after that it wasn’t just light anymore, there was a bright shape in front of his face he knew must be the office door, he remembered where it had shut, and there were walls around him, he knew it because the light to his sides was different from the light above and he didn’t have to think about why it was different, he just knew it was a different color—color!—his old friend color, color was right there and it was turned on, he didn’t have to back into his brain to think about it, color was just there and he knew it and he could call to it if he wanted to, and now to his left there was a blob of black and to his right a new kind of white moving alongside his arm, Goodman’s coat, it had to be Goodman’s coat, doctors wear white coats, that’s really white and—whoa!—the black blob on the left was sharpening, it was getting lines and edges, it was becoming something more than color and something more than light, it was an object, objects have lines, it had to be a piece of equipment because objects in doctors’ offices are equipment and—boom!—now it looked like equipment, and now that he knew it was equipment he could see a shiny silver line underneath the black object and that made sense, he’d felt that thing before and it was where it was supposed to be and now he knew what it was, it was the metal arm that held the piece of equipment that Goodman used to look into his eye during exams, now he could see it was the arm, now he could see.

Now Goodman was moving, he was somewhere else every moment, his white coat streaking against dark walls and shining on the room, and then darkness came out of Goodman, on top of him and to the sides of him—his head and hands!—head and hands right where they were supposed to be, his hands another new color, not white but friendly to white, and as Jennifer moved toward her husband May could feel his adrenaline asking to be allowed in, begging to do its job and tell him that something overwhelming was occurring, something sublime and colossal, but his instincts wouldn’t turn him over to such emotion, to allow him to say what was in his throat—“Oh, my gosh, it’s happening!”—because he sensed that he could not pay attention to feelings and to this new world at the same time, that if he were to think, the images would disappear, that the images required more than just his eye for their existence, they required all of him, and he knew that he didn’t want those images to go away, even if it meant postponing the explosions of joy he could feel bubbling underneath.