8A
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2005
Marso
ANDY MARSO
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5A
with Andy. Matt lost both feet and his fingertips to bacterial meningitis when he was 18, and talks about his marriage, the baby on the way and his thriving business. He tells Andy there's a life worth living once this waking hell is over.
That hell includes a power outage that deflates Andy's circulating air bed down to a hard metal slab, a leaking cooling blanket that leaves his just-bandaged skin grafts soaked in water, and late in the summer, a sudden infection that enters Andy's central venous line, leaving him him gasping for breath, shaking so hard the whole bed moves. He's terrified he has meningitis all over again.
He endures all of this, and his reward comes Sept. 16, when he finally leaves the hospital, and joins Ginny, Harry, and Dorothy at an apartment near the Med Center.
"Let me try it myself"
Andy's left the hospital with toe-less rounded stubs for feet andstitched nubs as hands. The nubs have a swatch of thick, meatythigh skin on the tops, with criss-crossing scar tissue on the bottoms that run up Andy's arms. His surgeons have fashioned a smallthumb-like nub on his left hand,a little over an inch long and thick.
Ginny is awed by her son's relentlessly positive attitude, and she knows she must let him use it. Somehow he manages to pull a shirt over his head, scrub shampoo on his hair in the shower and lather with a loofah he can twist around his wrist.
He has trouble with doorknobs. He can grip the salt slimshaker, but not the fat red-p pepper shaker. The ligaments in his wrist are stiff, and rotating his palms is difficult. At times, he closes his eyes and feels his fingers still there, pushed back underneath the nubs, still aching. He opens his eyes and curses the phantom pain.
Three times a week he returns to the Med Center for occupational and physical therapy, and the hour drags on forever as Andy practices picking up wooden puzzle pieces
or twisting loose screws and bolts. It's tedious and mind numbing, but he's starting to rotate his wrists more, and the remaining thumb is becoming more of a useful tool rather than excess tissue.
He's writing again, too. Matt Tait, Andy's sports editor at The Sentinel, tells him to jump back in and write as often as he can. Tait never had to coddle Andy, and since the illness, nothing changed. Andy writes a half dozen stories.
watching chair by bleachers. Tait receives them on time. and.
and they're
just as solid as before his illness. At first Tait thinks Andy dictates the stories to Ginny, but Andy tells him he plucks out each letter with his thumb.
Another week brings another milestone. Andy and Clay go to a movie, his first time out without his parents. With his stumps nestled inside four-inch slanted boots that put his feet on point, Andy climbs the three flights of stairs to see the apartment he would have moved into after graduation. In late October, Watkins doctor Leah Luckeroth holds a celebratory BBQ, and the press coverage drives donations to the Andy Marso Fund. Andy's medical bill is now approaching $3 million.
Andy faces another crucial decision for his feet. He's had eight surgeries so far, and he'll do anything to avoid more amputations, but with the damaged tissue remaining, he has three choices: Do nothing, and be confined to a wheelchair and occasionally walk on clunky orthopedic boots; undergo surgery and don an erector-set-like metal frame on each foot that will require six months of therapy and little guarantee he'll run again; or amputate his legs six inches below the knee, a one-time surgery that offers the quickest recovery time and an opportunity for Andy to run with the help of prostheses.
Andy imagines playing basketball. With the amputations, he could run in a pickup game in a few months. But he looks at his legs, remembers the nightmares about surgeons cutting too much.
The heavy plastic prosthetic on Andy's wrist makes positioning over the banana harder the second time around. He estimates how much to flex his
and tells Craig Horton, his foot surgeon, he wants to try the frames. Horton's optimistic the frames and therapy work, but he's also brutally honest with Andy. If they try the frames, and it doesn't work, he can always cut higher.
it's starting to bruise brown—and
muscles, watches the fake fingers squeeze the fruit —
bruise down -- that hooks his right thumb under the banana's skin to jerk the peel farther down.
Grandma, watching in the apartment kitchen, offers to help
But he's almost done. He only needs to switch off the hand, let the fingers release and drop the fruit to the table once more.
The banana tastes good, but it's not about flavor. It's about struggling five minutes to do it without help.
For what it represents, this is the best banana Andy Marso has ever tasted.
Coming out of the tunnel
Sunnington.
Andy's Feb. 28 surgery on his left foot, his ninth in as many months, leaves him with 12 metal rods securing his foot into a pressured 90-degree angle. The rods connect to a black plastic frame that Ginny says could be leFTover from the Spanish Inquisition, but it's the only way to pull Andy's atrophied tendons to a flat-footed position, giving him a chance to walk in real shoes again.
Horton tells Andy he'll spend five to six weeks in this frame, then he'll switch the left foot to a brace and put the right foot in a similar, erector-set-like frame. For Andy, it means three months confined to his wheelchair.
It's a tradeoff he gladly takes for the chance to keep what is left of his feet. Stuck in this wheelchair, he's left to test what he can do with one thumb and what remains of his hands. He grips his black gloves with his
teeth, tugs the material over his nubs, and pulls the Velcro strip across his wrist with his mouth.
Without fingers, this is how you improvise.
Some movements Andy just can't work around. The air-quotes — two extended fingers on each hand he always put around sarcastic words — are gone from his jokes. He tries to put extra inflection in his tone, but it doesn't produce the same effect. When he feels like giving someone the finger, even in jest, he's left searching for a less shocking equivalent. Ginny Marso mourns a future loss — when Andy's first child is unable to wrap his or her hand around Andy's fingers.
Andy's ordeal is enough to make anyone, even devout Catholics like the Marsos, for sake faith and question their God. But Andy says he couldn't have made it this far without his belief this happened for a reason, that God has a plan, and all of this — the pain-filled nights, the amputations, but also the outpouring of support — will make him stronger, and possibly more whole than before.
He doesn't dwell on how this happened to him — a sip off a dirty glass in Pearson Hall, a shared beer at the concert the weekend before the Basehor softball game — it doesn't matter now.
Now, he looks forward. His last surgery for the frame on his right foot is this Monday. Six weeks later, he should be free of the two-pound burden, with both feet in braces, and ready to go into intensive rehabilitation.
In the meantime, he has a graduation speech to prepare. Andy is the School of Journalism's commencement speaker. He smiles when asked what he'll say, and assures his J-school buddies he's going to keep it short. After graduation, he'll return to Minnesota, and eventually come back to Kansas City, maybe write for The Sentinel again, and pick up the career and life meningitis put on hold one year ago today.
Andy shuts off the prosthetic with his thumb and chucks the last lump of smashed banana toward the trash can. Peeling the
Contributed photo
TOP: Last Oct. 30, Andy and his family, from the left, Dan, Ginny, Harry and Dorothy, attended Malcolm Gibson's Kansan BBQ. Gibson is a journalism professor and adviser to the paper. Andy is wearing black compression garments to protect his scarred skin. Padded hand and feet braces absorb shock to his amputation sites.
LEFT: A friend from St. Cloud made the Marso family bracelets to wear during Andy's hospital stay. This is Dan Marso's bracelet, which he only takes off when he showers.
banana is manageable, with this substitute hand, but that's all the prosthetic is — a substitute, a $17,000 tool — and hardly a replacement. He pulls his left nub out of the cuff, his skin dusted white with baby powder that makes the prosthetic's rough interior more bearable. Wearing the hand is like wearing a mitten, and Andy can't quite get used to the feeling. Eventually, when prototypes become available, he wants to buy a neural-powered prosthetic, a hand that responds to his thoughts, not just his muscles
Since the day he blearily awoke in his schol hall bed, Andy Marso says he's spanned
three separate lives — a life before meningitis, a life battling the illness and surviving amputations during 141 days in a hospital, and his life now. Andy was content with the first life, horrified by the second, and today, he's determined to take on the third.
He admits it's a challenge. This life means figuring out how to wash your hair without fingers, how to balance and walk without toes, even how to peel a banana. But don't tell him he's courageous; to Andy, it's all just part of the plan.
Edited by Ashley Bechard
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