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Spasms can occur at any time. In a restaurant, during a public appearance, his body can suddenly jerk about wildly; since brain messages do not get through to the body, it spasms as if out of boredom, waiting for orders that do not come. He had a major spasm three minutes before he went on live at the televised Academy Awards presentation in March--just as he was being rolled out the door of his dressing room.
When he went to Washington to lobby for research funds, he suddenly lost his voice due to a trach replacement that had been made a few days earlier. A trach needs to be changed every three weeks so that tissue does not grow over it. The body tries to expel the trach because it is a foreign element; this is when secretions form. When the tissue grows, it can cut off the air supply by closing the hole in which the trach rests. Every three weeks, the whole apparatus has to be torn out.
"It's one of my least favorite moments," he says. "It's very painful as the whole thing is taken out. And then I have to breathe on my own for a while, while they cut away. The doctor literally takes out a scalpel and cuts away in my throat at the granulated tissue that has formed in there. So it's a little scary. And the down side is that once the trach is changed, it takes a number of days for it to settle into position so that you can talk effectively. So the first couple of days, the slightest movement of the tube will cause the trach to get out of position, and you don't have any voice."
This is what happened just before his appearance on Capitol Hill. He had no trouble with his voice when he met with the Clintons in the White House. But the trach was not in a good position. He was nervous when he got to the Hill: "I mean, all the media were there. I think 12 or 15 Senators were there, all friends and supporters--Paul Simon, Pat Leahy, [Paul] Wellstone from Minnesota, Nancy Kassebaum, John Kerry from Massachusetts, Bob Kerrey from Nebraska--all there in the front row, two feet away from me. Like, right in my face, all sort of looking with great support and ready for me to say something pithy and impressive. And I felt the moment has come, and I'm bombing."
Nobody noticed, mainly because they did not know how fluidly he could speak under normal circumstances. His appearance was noted in more than 200 articles, though "I, of course, went off into a corner and beat myself up about having blown my big moment."
These physical menaces do not include that of depression, which has brought thousands of paralyzed people to a paralysis of the mind and spirit. Reeve too succumbs from time to time. Nor do they include the fear attached to everything new--modified versions of the terror he experienced at taking that first shower at U.Va. Then there is the fact of immobility itself, which entails an entire reorganization of one's image. He loathes the fact that he is developing a small pot belly because of atrophied abdominal muscles.