NEW HOPES, NEW DREAMS

CHRISTOPHER REEVE IS PREPARING TO WALK AGAIN. WHAT PROSPECTS CAN DOCTORS REALLY OFFER VICTIMS OF SPINAL-CORD INJURY?

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He was accepted at 15 by the Williamstown (Massachusetts) Theater Festival, to which he has returned virtually every summer since, in spite of his film career. (He has a home in Williamstown as well as in Bedford Hills, New York, both perched on hills with picture-book views.) After graduating from Cornell in 1974, he studied acting at Juilliard with John Houseman. He made his first Broadway appearance with Katharine Hepburn in A Matter of Gravity, an odd play in which he received quite good notices. In 1978 came the movie Superman; he initially thought the role so silly, so beneath theater, that he almost skipped the tryout. Characteristically, he wanted to work hard to do the part right. On the set he approached the veteran Gene Hackman, who was playing Superman's comic-villain archenemy, and asked if he wanted to rehearse. "Not really," said Hackman. Reeve asked, "Mr. Hackman, what was it that attracted you to the role of Lex Luthor?" Hackman answered, "You mean besides the $2 million?"

In all the ventures that followed, Reeve brought the earnest student's desire to learn and a self-described and often self-lamented perfectionism. It is hard to tell whether his approach to things is a product of what he concedes to be a "control-freak" tendency or of a genuine, deep-seated fear that most things are bound to go wrong. At the same time he has a determined sense--nearly grim in its seriousness--that whatever is wrong can, with discipline, be made right. The accident has not changed this basic attitude, though the nature of his injury is too serious for him to pretend that a cure is merely another skill to be learned.

He lives between the acceptance of the reality of his condition and the expectation of changing it. He goads the politicians to help the scientists. He goads the scientists to make him and others well. He exercises and prepares his limbs for the day when a cure might be administered. And he waits.

At night he dreams that he is whole again. He is sailing with Dana. He is playing with his children. He is flying an airplane. He is acting. He is even riding again. In the morning he tries to feel the body that was alive in his dream.

"It's all well and good to speak of having a positive attitude with something like this," he says. "But the more I learn about what is necessary to put me back together, the less I feel that strength and determination are deciding factors. This is a medical problem. You're talking about nerves that have been pulled apart."

When the spinal cord suffers a blow, vertebrae are compressed, and if the force is great enough, fractured. The sheer force of the blow kills some nerves instantly. Then the compression causes electrical impulses traveling through nerve cells in the area to go haywire, and the overload causes many neurons to kill themselves. The dying nerve cells leak calcium, which attracts enzymes to the area that chew on the tissues. The by-products are free radicals, unstable compounds that scavenge oxygen from healthy cells, often destroying them. As these cells die, they trigger a secondary wave of destruction that sweeps from the injured area and radiates outward. Blood flow to the central nervous system is slowed, immune cells flood the area and, in a frenzied attempt to clear away the debris, begin to chew up damaged and healthy nerves alike.

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