Crashing Through (4 page)

After graduating from junior high, Mike announced his intention to attend the local public high school. Las Lomas High, however, did not accept blind students. Administrators said that Mike would be better served by a school fifteen miles away that had resources and staff for the blind. Mike told his mother that he wanted to go to school with his neighborhood friends and that he needed no special resources. He told her he wanted to live in the real world.

Ori Jean petitioned the school. It would be two years before mainstreaming laws hit the books, so administrators were free to refuse her, and they did. She maneuvered, cajoled, charmed, and threatened. She talked to lawyers. Mike could picture his mother taking off her shoe and slamming it on the table if necessary. When September rolled around, he was in. He would be the only blind student in the school.

Not everyone was ready for the invasion. The gym teacher reassigned him to study hall. The woodshop teacher threw him out despite the care Mike took in examining the pickled finger in a jar the teacher had passed around as a warning to the careless.

In class, Mike adjusted to learning without the help of a resource teacher. Courses like geometry and geography proved especially challenging, but he made his usual A’s and B’s. He hung out with friends from his neighborhood and made new ones from his classes. People on the playground got accustomed in a hurry to his crashing-through style of play. The flurry of Mike’s new world, however, was overwhelmed by a storm unlike any he’d experienced so far.

Girls.

He’d had crushes as early as fifth grade, the stuff born of a class-mate’s giggle or the sound of a cute first name. But this! Overnight, the wonder and mystery and promise of a woman’s body suggested itself into every fold of Mike’s awareness. It called to him from the hallway breeze of freshly shampooed hair, the distant conversations of senior cheerleaders, the brush of a girl’s wrist when she reached to pass back a quiz. During his freshman year, Mike could scarcely conceive a thought that wasn’t hourglass-shaped.

He desperately wanted to touch a woman, not just for the pleasure he was certain it would bring but because he so fundamentally depended on touch for his construct of the world. Without touch, objects remained just ideas, and Mike wasn’t interested in rubbing up against an idea. Yet he dared not approach a woman for this purpose. He felt too shy to move in directly, too disconnected from the visual clues that signaled consent to know how to advance more discreetly. He considered grabbing a girl’s breast outright; no one would blame a blind guy who apologized and said he’d been aiming for a doorknob. He knew people who had done that. But as deeply as he desired the contact, he also considered the tactic beneath him. If something great was going to happen to Mike he didn’t want it to happen because he was blind.

If Mike was not yet to know a woman by touch at least he could dedicate the entirety of his mind to the matter. He listened intently to his friends’ talk about girls and asked for detailed descriptions of those who intrigued him. His pals went to the heart of the matter: topography, hair, legs, walk, face, topography. They brought around
Playboy
magazines, and though their descriptions lacked detail—“She’s naked. She’s riding a bike. Her boobs go across two pages”—they overflowed in unabashed admiration, which to blind eyes could be the most vivid description of all.

Still, these were just words—how could a person hope to conceive an idea about these wondrous boobs if he could neither touch nor see them? Mike yearned for the life-sized, anatomically correct dolls he’d heard schools gave to kids in magical lands like Sweden. Instead, he purloined his sister’s Barbie doll and went to work, running his fingers over her naked curves, associating all he’d heard about a woman’s body with her 39-18-33 measurements. Mike knew that the Barbie lacked the textures and details that caused his friends to howl at the moon. But no matter how much he handled his doll, he could not begin to imagine the nature of those nuances, even as he suspected that they were the best parts of all.

His imagination filled in the gaps. Often, his notions were wildly inaccurate, but it didn’t matter—when joined with things he knew directly (silky hair, pretty smells, soft hands, lilting voices) and primed by his friends’ worshipful descriptions, it added up to a construct of arousal and beauty every bit as real to him as images were to the sighted. As Mike’s life continued he would use those ingredients—imagination, reality, and the power of others’ passions—to understand much of visual beauty. Even at fourteen, Mike suspected that imagination might be the most important of them all.

Mike’s sophomore and junior years flew past him. He carried a 3.5 grade point average in his classes and excelled at math and science. At home, the kids took care of themselves while Ori Jean completed a master’s degree and began a full-time job as a high school counselor.

When a neighborhood friend named Mark Babin encouraged Mike to join the wrestling team at school, he charged in, training and dieting until his five-foot-six, ninety-five-pound body looked like a comb. He made varsity in sophomore year. At one tournament, officials misspelled his name, listing him as “Miko May.” His teammates said they were going to circulate a rumor that he was an incredible blind wrestler from Japan. “I like that idea,” May told them. “That way there will be two mystiques about me.” His coach, Ed Melendez, didn’t flinch at keeping Mike on the team, and pushed his blind wrestler physically and emotionally. By the time Mike reached senior year he would be six foot one and 149 pounds, and would win about half his matches, almost all by strategy and stamina.

When Mike wasn’t thinking about girls or wrestling he was bouncing himself off the ionosphere. He had fallen in love with the hobby of ham radio when Rob Reis, a friend from an electronics class, had explained how a person could talk to others across the world using just a box of tubes and wires, a microphone, and an outdoor antenna. Mike tried it and was hooked. His conversations with people in Afghanistan and London and Vietnam were fascinating. But the idea of becoming a solo explorer spoke to him. Once he realized he could reach into new worlds otherwise impossibly far away, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to make it happen.

One day, Mike and Reis traveled to Santa Cruz to visit a ham radio enthusiast who was rumored to have a 175-foot tower in the mountains. The structure was every bit of it. The man told the boys that they were free to use his radio but that a beam atop the tower needed adjusting. Mike volunteered for the job. He climbed into the wind with no belt or ropes or other support gear, swaying four feet in every direction as he made it through 50 feet, 100 feet, 150 feet—the equivalent of a fifteen-story building. At the top he adjusted a sixty-six-foot beam while the wind moved the tower like a metronome arm. He was terrified—a false step would cost him his life—but he couldn’t stop thinking about the places he would reach once he got that antenna pointed right.

At home, Mike announced his intention to build his own eighty-foot antenna. Ori Jean wasn’t sure if he was serious. She became convinced when he began mixing cement for the foundation in the backyard. She pushed a million nightmare scenarios out of her mind as she watched Mike put up the first ten-foot section, then the second. By the time he was teetering at forty feet, she could no longer stand it.

“I have to go away from here,” she called to Mike. “I can’t stand to watch you go up any higher.”

“Okay, bye,” Mike called down.

Ori Jean got in her car and drove away. Even that night she wouldn’t remember where she’d gone. When she returned home there was an eighty-foot tower on her property and a kid in the garage talking into a microphone, saying, “This is WB6ABK. Is there anyone out there? Where have I reached?”

By the time Mike turned seventeen he had mapped out the next four years of his life. He and his friend Reis would study electrical engineering at the University of California–Davis, about an hour’s drive from his home in Walnut Creek. Blind electrical engineers were rare, which was one of the reasons he wanted to do it.

Status as a high school senior did little to advance Mike’s romantic ambitions. His friends didn’t fare much better than he did in love, but they had one incalculable advantage over him—they could drive. It didn’t take long for Mike to conceive the myriad ways in which a car conferred freedom. And when freedom was at stake Mike could not stand still.

One day while visiting a blind friend from camp, Mike suggested that they have a look at his parents’ motorcycle, a smallish Honda 90. His friend showed Mike how to start it. Then Mike had an epiphany: if they could just drive it to the school grounds they could ride gloriously unimpeded around the track. Mike got on the front, his friend on the back. They turned off the engine, listened for traffic, then started the bike and drove across the street. They repeated the procedure numerous times—engine off, listen, engine on, ride—until they arrived at the school. On the track they began to circle slowly, getting a feel for the arcs of the turns. Soon they had the Honda cruising, opening the throttle on the straightaways. A police siren wailed. Mike managed to stop the bike. His heart was pounding.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” the police officer asked. “It’s illegal to have a motorcycle out here.”

He turned to Mike.

“Let me see your driver’s license.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license,” Mike said.

“Well, then, we have a big problem,” the officer said.

“I’m blind,” Mike said.

“You were riding a motorcycle.”

Mike showed the officer his braille watch. It took a moment for the man to digest what had occurred. Then he told the boys he had to call this one in, that they could have killed someone. He kept lecturing, kept promising to tell their parents, kept mumbling words like “blind” and “unbelievable.” The officer finally walked the boys and their cycle home. He didn’t tell their parents. He didn’t call it in.

Weeks later Mike was in his driveway admiring Diane’s brand-new Datsun 510, purchased for $57.59 a month in department store wages, her baby. It pointed toward the street. Warning bells sounded from every logic and reason center in Mike’s brain. But he had only a single thought: I need to drive.

He got in the car, lowered the window so he could hear where he was going, and turned the key. The engine, the same one that murmured during rides with Diane, seemed to thunder over all of Walnut Creek with Mike behind the wheel. He released the parking brake, put the vehicle into gear, and began rolling out of the driveway. He’d negotiated the space a million times before—on bicycle, skateboard, roller skates, in full sprint—but the upcoming ninety-degree left turn suddenly seemed a stranger. Mike kept driving. He wobbled through the turn, his stomach in his throat, and began the climb up Kevin Court, listening to the echoes made by tires against curbs and whatever cars he prayed were not oncoming, adrenaline fighting his hands, no plan for how to return but certain he had to keep going, clutch popping, now the street was narrowing, he could hear it, but he wasn’t done driving, he wasn’t done going, he stepped on the gas and now the car was cruising, it was in front of him and running away from him, but he wouldn’t let go, and then he pushed the pedal or he lost his nerve or the car stalled but halfway up the street the Datsun’s engine died and the only sound left was Mike’s heaving breath bouncing off the car’s sweaty steering wheel. When he found Diane, he apologized for parking her car in the middle of the street and told her it seemed like he’d driven a very long way.

CHAPTER
THREE

As August temperatures pushed near 100 degrees, May engaged the afterburners on his business plan. Shuttling between cities, he secured a major investment from a Colorado businessman and recruited a top engineer to refine the GPS software. He registered as a California business, signed distributors, and hired an office manager. When he needed a name for the business, he looked for a word or phrase that got to the heart of what his product offered blind people—the ability to find one’s way independently. He chose Sendero, the Spanish word for “pathway.”

The business grabbed at him around the clock: liability insurance was too expensive; the unit’s $3,500 retail price remained prohibitive; the software had moods. When he found time for leisure thinking he used it to diagram new plays for Wyndham’s soccer team or conceive chapters for the serialized stories he told Carson before bedtime. Dr. Goodman’s offer of new vision six months ago seemed a million miles away.

May’s family was equally occupied. While Carson and Wyndham pinballed between activities, Jennifer piled up paint samples and met at home with her interior design clients. Ordinarily, her business conversations were background din to May, but lately he found himself listening a bit differently. He took note when she described a wallpaper pattern as “restless.” He stopped typing when she told a client that a fabric seemed to dance. His curiosity surprised him—he knew that Jennifer spoke this way and he loved it about her. But he’d never stopped to listen so closely before.

And he kept listening. At the dinner table one evening, someone commented on the steam rising from a bowl of spaghetti, saying that they could “see right through it.” That idea fascinated May, even as he told himself, “I’ve known that about steam all my life.” He paid attention to a discussion between Carson and Wyndham about the many ways in which a person could write the letter
G.

August got even busier. So it was interesting to him when he found himself reaching for his telephone one morning and dialing the University of California–Davis Medical Center rather than a potential investor or supplier.

“I’m calling to see if you or the doctors there know anything about a new kind of stem cell transplant surgery that’s supposed to give vision to the blind.”

A staff member asked May to repeat the question. He ran through it again.

“Stem cell?” the person asked.

“I think so,” May said.

“We’ll have to call you back.”

When they called back, the staffer said that no one at the center had any idea about a stem cell surgery of any kind, let alone one that caused the blind to see.

May called Stanford University. Same answer. He tried renowned East Coast eye institutes. Nothing.

The news made sense to him. May had been told by his lifelong ophthalmologist, Dr. Max Fine, that nothing could be done to restore his vision, now or ever. When Fine died in 1989, the
New York Times
noted his fifty-seven years of experience and called him “a pioneer in corneal transplant.” If anyone knew May’s prognosis, it was Dr. Fine. He had been especially clear about the “now or ever” part.

In mid-August, May and Jennifer joined members of her family for a weekend getaway at a hotel. May welcomed the respite. On the first evening, everyone gathered for a short boat ride. Onboard, the conversation quickly turned to a group of elegant passengers nearby. Jennifer’s family described these people as “bronze, narrow, and Italian-designed,” and said that the moonlight “chased the women’s jewels.” Jennifer noted that the wispy hems of ladies’ dresses “lapped at the breeze” and that men “lit cigarettes with flat gold lighters and shaped their arms into triangles so their dates wouldn’t slip.” A moment later, Jennifer’s sister Wendy made a discovery.

“Oh, my God, look at Miss Salmon,” Wendy whispered to Jennifer, nodding across the boat toward a woman in her early thirties. “Is she real?”

The woman seemed to have been assembled by a team of male pubescents. Her tiny waist gave way in one direction to a pair of tanned and taut legs that seemed taller than half the men around her, and in the other to a chest so full and eager that no bra could have contained it anyway. Her heels coaxed out unusually perfect calf muscles, while the strip of salmon-colored gauze she used for a dress coaxed out all the rest. Hers was the face of a 1940s movie star. Her long blond hair beckoned men from every era.

“I’ve got to tell Mike about her,” Wendy said. “I’ve got to tell Mike about Miss Salmon.”

“He’ll love it,” Jennifer said.

Wendy pulled May aside and described the scene. She spared no detail. Jennifer could not discern most of the conversation, but every few seconds she heard her husband say, “Really?” or “Wow!” or “How do you know that?” And she could hear him ask her sister, “You can see all that just from sitting across the boat?”

The next day, the families gathered in one of the hotel rooms to take a break from the sun. They checked the pay-per-view movie lineup and came across a film called
At First Sight,
starring Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino, about a blind man whose vision is restored. It seemed a natural, especially as May had mentioned his chance meeting with Dr. Goodman to Jennifer’s family. He took a position on the king-sized bed, flanked on one side by his wife and on the other by her sister, as the movie began.

Eyes rolled just a few scenes in. The main character seemed dull and frightened. He became derailed by everyday circumstances. He smiled goofily.

“This guy is a downer,” May said.

When the blind man’s girlfriend pressured him into pursuing a miracle cure for his blindness, Jennifer fidgeted and mumbled to herself, “Why would someone pressure another person like that? It’s so personal.”

Halfway through the movie no one was paying attention.

“I’d be back at the pool looking for Miss Salmon if I weren’t already sandwiched between two such beautiful women,” May said.

The sisters asked if he was still watching the film.

“Not much,” May told them. “The main character’s not a real person.”

When May returned from this trip he asked his office assistant, Kim Burgess, to help him search the Internet; the speech-synthesized screen-reading software he used on his computers worked well for word-processing or spreadsheet tasks, but it bogged down trying to decipher complex Web pages. He told her he wanted to research stem cell transplant surgery for the eyes.

At the same time, he submitted a query to an Internet newsgroup dedicated to issues that concern the blind, asking if anyone knew of such a procedure. He told Jennifer that he still expected to find nothing—if the minds at the universities he’d contacted knew nothing, if Dr. Fine had known nothing, he expected to come up empty on his own.

Soon, information trickled in—a foreign Web site here, an e-mailed answer there. It appeared that there did exist a procedure involving stem cells and vision, one referred to as “corneal epithelial stem cell transplantation.” When May used that language on the Web and in queries, the information began to flow. Much of it was bound in the private vernacular of scientists and surgeons; they spoke of “limbal allograft,” “existing symblepharon,” and “cicatricial keratoconjunctivitis.” May panned the literature for colloquial nuggets and used a dictionary to machete through the rest. He determined this much to be certain about the procedure:

•
It was indicated only for very special cases—but a chemical burn was among them.

•
Its evolution was recent and its implementation rare—fewer than four hundred had been performed worldwide.

•
Very few doctors knew of the surgery, and almost none had attempted it.

•
If successful, it could restore vision to the blind—even to those who had been assured they would never see.

May briefed Jennifer on his discoveries. It felt strange to him to think about vision—he could remember doing it only once before. In his late twenties, he’d heard a man on the radio describe using hypnosis to help people recover childhood memories, and he’d wondered if a hypnotist might make him see what he’d seen before his accident. It was a fascinating proposition and one he’d entertained for a few days before returning to his busy life.

“The stem cell surgery is really interesting,” he told Jennifer. “I’d like to know more about it. I still don’t think it would change my life, but I have to say, it seems like it’s for real.”

V
ision begins at the cornea. When light enters the eye, it passes first through the cornea, a transparent, circular layer one-fiftieth of an inch thick at the very front of the eye. The cornea has no color, but its job is critical—to allow light in and do the majority of focusing. The cornea must stay clear; otherwise, trying to see would be like trying to look through a frosted shower door or a dirty car windshield.

But how are corneas kept clear? People can’t run wiper blades over them as with car windshields. The body, it turns out, has its own ingenious method for keeping the corneas clear. It begins with special cells known as corneal epithelial stem cells. These are not the controversial stem cells taken from embryos or fetuses, but rather cells that exist in every person for a lifetime.

These stem cells reside along the edges of the cornea. If you imagine the cornea as a round window, the stem cells—about a thousand of them—live along the area where the frame would be. The stem cells produce millions of daughter cells. These daughter cells have a single mission: to converge toward the center of the eye, covering the cornea in a transparent protective layer.

This protective layer of daughter cells is the cornea’s main defense against dirt, scratches, bacteria, and infection. It also prevents blood vessels and cells from the white part of the eye (known as the conjunctiva) from growing over the cornea. The protective layer itself might get dirty, but every few days the daughter cells that compose it fall off and are replaced by new ones, thereby ensuring perpetual freshness and clarity. The stem cells around the edges of the cornea never tire of making new daughter cells—they do it for as long as the person lives.

But what happens if these stem cells are destroyed—perhaps by disease or burn or trauma to the eye? In that case, they can no longer produce the daughter cells that form the protective layer over the cornea. Soon, blood vessels and conjunctiva cells grow over the cornea, clouding it and then making it opaque. Light is no longer able to pass through the cornea on the way to the pupil, iris, lens, and retina. That means the person is blind. A chemical explosion—like the one that happened to Mike May when he was three—can destroy corneal epithelial stem cells instantly.

Before 1964, scientists had little idea that the edges of the cornea play a role in keeping the cornea clear. And they certainly didn’t know of the existence of corneal epithelial stem cells and how they protect the cornea. When surgeons encountered a grown-over cornea, they removed it and transplanted a clear donor cornea in its place. That worked most of the time, because the patient still had stem cells around the edges capable of producing protective daughter cells. It failed, however, in cases when the patient lacked those stem cells. Ophthalmologists believed those failures to be caused by the body rejecting the donor cornea. They never suspected that the patient’s lack of stem cells was the cause of the donor cornea going bad.

In 1964, a Colombian ophthalmologist named José Barraquer treated one of his patients—a man who had suffered a chemical injury to one eye—in a new way. He transplanted a section of the edge of that patient’s healthy cornea onto the edge of the injured eye. The patient’s vision improved. Barraquer didn’t realize it, but he had performed a stem cell transplant. Science now knew that, somehow, the edges around the cornea were important to corneal health.

Research along these lines was advanced in the late 1970s in Pittsburgh by Dr. Richard Thoft, who refined Barraquer’s techniques and also began transplanting the edges of cadavers’ eyes into patients. But it wasn’t until 1989, through the work of Drs. Kenneth Kenyon and Scheffer Tseng, that science fully understood the role of corneal epithelial stem cells and how best to transplant them. The process, it turned out, required two surgeries and a good deal of technical skill on the part of the surgeon.

When a donor dies, an eye bank dispatches a volunteer to remove the donor’s eyeballs. The eyes are placed in a preservative solution and sent back to the eye bank, where the corneas and surrounding stem cell areas are cut from the eye and placed back in solution. They are then sent to a surgeon for transplantation, preferably within five days of the donor’s death. (Surgeons prefer to use corneas and stem cells from donors no older than age fifty.)

The first surgery is to transplant the donor stem cells. After the patient is placed under general anesthesia, the surgeon scrapes away any conjunctiva cells and blood vessels that have grown on top of the patient’s cornea. That alone requires an artist’s touch, but the hardest parts are yet to come.

The patient is left sleeping while the donor cornea and its surrounding doughnut of stem cells are placed under a nearby microscope. The surgeon uses that microscope—and a midnight-still hand—to cut away the center part of the donor cornea, leaving just the doughnut of stem cells. His job now is to place that doughnut on top of the patient’s existing cornea, thereby providing the cornea with a new supply of stem cells.

In its current state, however, the doughnut is too thick to transplant. Still using the microscope, the surgeon thins the doughnut by shaving it from underneath, narrowing it from one millimeter to one-third of a millimeter, all without damaging the stem cells on top. His movements are a tiny ballet of precision and nerves.

After the ring of stem cells has been thinned, the surgeon places it on top of the patient’s existing cornea and sutures it into place. The entire process takes between ninety minutes and two hours.

The stem cell transplant by itself produces no vision. That’s because the patient’s existing cornea has been too badly damaged by overgrowing cells and blood vessels and no longer functions properly. He needs a new cornea, but before he can receive one, he must allow his new stem cells to produce waves of new daughter cells to forge a clear path to the cornea. Without that clear path, future protective daughter cells cannot reach a new cornea.