A Spirit the Waves Couldn't Break

He was grossly swollen and medicated. He couldn't move and, hooked to a ventilator, he couldn't speak. His parents and older sister, Katherine, held up homemade signs in his hospital room. Do you want ice? Do you want your pillow turned? Blink once for no, twice for yes. His eyes signaled pain, exhaustion, fear.

Friends from school and the neighborhood headed up Interstate 95 and signed the blue spiral notebook labeled, "Josh's Log of Visitors and Well Wishers."

The girls pretended to be bubbly, and the guys urged him to stay strong. They managed brave faces, until they left the room.

Everyone was long back at college, and the trick-or-treaters had collected their candy. And still Josh, on Day 93, was not home. On Day 34, he had his 19th birthday. On Day 38, he was transferred from Shock Trauma to the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington. On Day 71, the morning news announced the death of an actor who had inspired millions after his own spinal cord injury.

"Chris Reeve died," Josh's mother wrote on his calendar.

The calendar lay half-hidden by a pile of papers and magazines cluttering the small extra bed that paralleled Josh's, where Nedra Basile had slept nearly every night for eight weeks. If in the predawn dark he called out, his voice a faint, shallow rasp, she was close by. She grew adept at suctioning the phlegm that his compromised lungs struggled to clear.

An entire season of medical crisis and immobility can waste the brawniest athlete. Josh was 55 pounds weaker, as limp and pallid as his thigh-high support tights. Anxious and fearful, he seemed to have lost his edge in other ways, too, and the spinal cord injury team was concerned. What was he willing to see when he looked in the mirror?

"A lot has to do with Josh himself," Pamela Ballard, program director, said. "His fortitude, his attitude, his adjustment to where he is in life."

The accident spared him a shoulder shrug, a modest movement that physical therapy sought to use to advantage. "Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up," assistant Bruce Varnes pushed, much the way Josh's tennis coaches once did. Except that Josh was not racing to save a drop shot at the net but straining to convert his shrug into something that could help position his right arm within range of a wheelchair joystick.

"Big lift, big lift."

Grimace.

"C'mon, up, up."