(5 of 22)
The result is gaping holes in the spinal cord. Long nerve fibers, or axons, that originate in the brain and weave down the spinal cord, eventually connecting with other nerves that branch to muscles as distant as the toes, are torn and stripped of their protective fatty coat of myelin. The myelin sheath is like the rubber coating on electrical wire. Without it, the nerves cannot function.
"The central nervous system does not regenerate the way the peripheral system does," Reeve says. "Someone chops off your arm, and it can be reattached. You might even pitch a baseball someday. But evolution did not do the same thing for the central nervous system. It was explained to me that if the central nervous system of an animal were to regenerate, the animal would not have the speed and agility it once had, and would thus be easy prey. It is better for the animal to just die. Evolution decided that it's better not even to try." The challenge for medical science in finding a cure is that the body must be made to do what it was not made to do.
Reeve often speaks of the accident as a "failure," an instant of "humiliation and embarrassment." He says, "I used to worry when I was making Superman that I'd mess up. You know: SUPERMAN HIT BY BUS. That in a headline." He is inclined to be hard on himself. "In the first days," he says, "I kept thinking, 'I've ruined my life.' But you only get one. You can't say, 'I've spoiled this one. Can I have another, please?' You feel as though you're a creature from another planet. Because here on earth people walk around and breathe on their own. But where I come from, people are on a hose, and they sit in chairs and they don't stand up."
But then his mood changes, and the normally purposeful attitude reasserts itself. "All that self-pity comes in the beginning. And it does recur. But what you begin to say to yourself, instead of 'What life do I have?' is 'What life can I build?' And the answer, surprisingly, is, 'More than you think.'"
Like so many spinal-cord injuries, Reeve's resulted from a fluke accident. Originally, he was not even headed for the riding event in Culpeper; he had signed up to enter an event in Vermont when friends persuaded him to change his plans. After Vermont, he had intended to go to Ireland to make the TV mini-series Kidnapped, produced by Francis Ford Coppola. He just thought he would do one more event on his new horse, Eastern Express, called Buck, a 12-year-old American Thoroughbred gelding.
He arrived on Friday in time to practice in the afternoon, and went to walk the course for the cross-country event. Walking the course means going on foot from jump to jump to check out striding, footing, quirks in the fences, the unevenness of the ground, and shadows. Experienced riders walk the course twice. Reeve always did it three or four times. "The last thing I remember is that on Saturday morning I went out and walked the course again," he says. "I finished suiting up, got Buck out of his stall, rechecked the girth, hopped onboard and headed out for the warm-up area. The next thing I remember was Wednesday afternoon in the hospital at the University of Virginia."