He is the Miracle Man. It’s how he is introduced, and it’s how Kevin Everett is defined, now and probably forever.
See Kevin walk. It is a stirring sight, across the “Oprah” set Thursday or Friday on “Good Morning America.” And it’s especially so when you see him in person and you flash back to the hit and the face-first fall to the turf and the dire predictions of paralysis for the 25-year-old who suffered a dislocation of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae nearly five months ago.
Everett broke his neck in the Buffalo Bills’ season opener Sept. 9 at Ralph Wilson Stadium. No way to make it sound any less catastrophic than it was.
On an ordinary Sunday on an ordinary kickoff, the third-year tight end sprinted downfield in anticipation of doing what he always did. Only this time, hurling himself into the middle of Denver’s wedge of blockers at full speed, he cracked the front of his helmet into the side of return man Domenik Hixon’s and did not get up after the collision.
In the days, weeks and months since we have been told of the amazing response by Dr. Andrew Cappuccino, the Bills’ orthopedist, who is said to have risked his professional livelihood with a controversial procedure: He injected an iced saline solution into Everett in the ambulance and later induced hypothermia.
We also were told of the debate in the medical community over that course of action. A colleague of Cappuccino’s, Dr. Kevin Gibbons, who performed the surgery with him, maintained that misinformation had been reported: While the hypothermia helped in recovery, it certainly did not “cure the paralysis.”
We didn’t care. We wanted to see Kevin walk again, and when he did, on the one-month anniversary of the injury, we were amazed, relieved, satisfied.
It wasn’t talked about much, though it’s chronicled in the book “Standing Tall — The Kevin Everett Story” that those first steps were accomplished with the help of a platform walker with four wheels on which to balance his forearms.
He walked 65 feet that day, according to the journal entry of his soon-to-be fiance Wiande (pronounced WEE-Ahn-DEE) Moore, a 10th-grade English teacher who met Everett in college at Miami where she ran track.
Moore left her job to care for Kevin, writing everything down in her journals — what Kevin ate, what he drank, every detail of his rehab, how she was feeling, how she thought he was feeling.
“So that one day when we have kids,” she says, “I can show them, ‘This is what Dad went through. You can do anything.'”
Everett’s mother, Patricia Dugas, 45, was there constantly as well. She already had been through every mother’s nightmare a month before Kevin’s injury when her youngest daughter, Davia, 11, went into a diabetic coma and spent two weeks in intensive care.
Now five months later, she was sitting in the office of the Chicago-based publisher promoting her son’s book and marveling at the whirlwind of events and emotions when a memory suddenly occurred to her.
“When Kevin was first trying to walk as a baby,” she recalls, “my daddy said, ‘Go get a broom, I’ll show you an easy way.'”
They wrapped the baby’s hands around the broom handle as Patricia led him for several steps.
“Now take it from him,” her father said, and Kevin continued to walk on his own for several steps before starting to fall.
“I slid on my stomach to catch him before his butt even hit the ground,” Patricia says. “And my mom said, ‘Patricia, there’s going to be a day when you’re not going to be there. Let him see the ground hurts. It might help him steady himself.’
“Isn’t it funny I just thought of that now?”
It certainly is appropriate, because even with all the loving support her son is receiving, with the standing ovation from the “Oprah” audience, Everett must steady himself.
Five months later, it still is not easy.
After stiffly traveling 15 or so steps in the publisher’s office, he eases himself slowly into a chair, exhausted by the effort of his morning.
He can write and brush his teeth but still has trouble with fine motor skills and sometimes experiences spasms when he tries to grasp something. Regaining use of his arms was more of a concern than his legs when he first entered rehab and remains his biggest challenge. He attends physical and occupational therapy three hours a day, three days a week, and while he will not term it painful, “I experience a lot of stiffness,” he concedes.
He can walk for only so long and it is a slow, measured process.
“I have some balance issues,” he says, adding that he no doubt will use a wheelchair for the trip through the airport, his next destination this afternoon.
His mother says she was worried about her son’s state of mind as much as his physical condition in the weeks and months after the injury.
“I was always worried. ‘What is he thinking? Is he scared? Is he hurting?’ He was always a tough guy, and for me to see him on the field like that scared me to death.”
It had to have scared Kevin, too, but he bristles a bit when Oprah Winfrey says the doctor saw fear in his eyes as they rolled him over.
Later, asked about trying to be strong for everyone else, he denies it. Same thing with the description in the book of his first three weeks at the rehab hospital, when he would lower the shades and turn off the lights in his room, which was assumed to be a sign of sagging spirits.
“I don’t allow myself to feel bad about anything,” he says. “Like anything else, I take it in stride and always expect the best. What else can I do?”
After New York on Friday, he will head to Arizona on Saturday to attend the Super Bowl. It’s “a little bit tough” to watch football, he acknowledges, “because I always envision myself out there.”
But ask if he has allowed himself to mourn the end of his football career at 25 and he’ll tell you that “health is the most important thing,” and that he never considered the possibility.
He says he is a more patient person than he was before and we have no choice but to believe him. His progress comes now in smaller and slower increments and doctors say that after a year with an injury like his there is very little new progress.
Still, he is the Miracle Man. He tries to define and differentiate miracles.
“I don’t mind,” he says of the label. “I just see it as a blessing from God. One night going to bed with cancer and the next day waking up without it, that’s a miracle. This is something I have worked for and doctors have worked for to get me to where I am.”
Wiande helps him with his coat. Slowly, they make their way into the snowy Chicago afternoon.
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misaacson@tribune.com
