Sep. 24--Matt Palm proposes a trade for shoes. You get his black, gold and white Nikes for a day. He gets your casual black loafers.
You can walk in your pair. He can't. Is it a deal?
"When you've gone through what I've gone through, you really appreciate the little things," he said. "Having the ability to take care of yourself, to move your arms up and down, or even to walk, is priceless. I don't take those things for granted anymore."
Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare affliction that paralyzed him from head to toe, changed Palm's perspective.
The former Mira Loma High School basketball player spent nine months bedridden at UC Davis Children's Hospital, his body attached to tubes and monitors from November 2005 to August 2006.
"Seriously," he said. "Things were so bad, I wondered if I would live."
Palm, 18, who roams American River College in a powered wheelchair, is a shell of his former self.
Still, a fighting spirit remains in his soul. He hopes to walk again, earn a degree from Sacramento State and become a basketball coach.
Although life dealt him a tough hand, Palm is determined to play it and find a way to win.
"The greatest thing I noticed about Matt during this entire ordeal is that he never felt sorry for himself," said Palm's father, Jan Palm.
"He never said 'Why me?' He never blamed anybody. Of course, he got depressed at times. That's normal. But he's a fighter. Like the old saying goes, he is making lemonade out of lemons."
Signs of progress abound. He graduated from Mira Loma in May, just a year behind his class. He is taking one class, intermediate algebra, three times a week at ARC.
He is free of a breathing machine. More important, he can talk again. He no longer communicates by blinking once for "yes" and twice for "no."
Palm enjoys providing his perspective on situations instead of others doing it for him.
"A lot of times I felt like a hostage inside my own body," he said. "I would want certain things, but I couldn't communicate with people to let them know how I was feeling. I couldn't tell them whether I was hot or cold, comfortable or uncomfortable. That was very frustrating."
No moment was more tormenting than the day he took ill. It started with a cold, then a sore throat, followed all too quickly by a call to 911, an ambulance ride from his then-Carmichael home to Mercy San Juan Hospital and finally at trip to Children's Hospital.
Within hours, he went from healthy teen to immobilized patient, a victim of GBS that attacks the body's immune system and nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. The cause is unknown.
GBS affects three in every 100,000 Americans yearly, according to the Mayo Clinic. Most recover from even the most severe cases, although it's often a slow process. Once they recover, there is a small chance of recurrence.
Actor Andy Griffith contracted GBS in 1983 and couldn't walk for seven months. Tennessee Tech men's basketball coach Mike Sutton was stricken in 2005.
Palm, whose case is among the most severe, has regained movement from the waist up. He has sensation from his head to his ankles.
"I feel a lot stronger and not sore like before," he said. "I rarely have pain. And I see small signs of other things in my body coming back. I feel like my body went into shock and I'm waiting for my nerves to recharge."
Whether he will be able to live normally remains to be seen. What's certain is that the syndrome derailed his hoop dream.
He was coming into his own on and off the court before his sickness. He applied himself to his studies and the Mira Loma basketball program, improving in the classroom and challenging for the starting point guard spot. He was a nifty ballhandler and had a sweet jump shot. Despite being 5-foot-10, he could take the ball to the basket and dunk.
"He was playing at such a great level that he had the potential to be a mid-major to low Division I college prospect," Mira Loma boys basketball coach Doug Friedman said. "He was really developing into a solid player."
Palm replaced the desire to play the game with the passion to study it. Whether it's high school, college or pro, Palm watches basketball on television at home.
"I just see the game in a different manner," he said. "I've watched so many games that I can tell what's going to happen in a game before (it happens)."
He also understands how precious life can be and to cherish the moment. Palm has shared some of those moments with longtime friend and former Mira Loma teammate Marcus Naisbitt.
Naisbitt frequently visited Palm at the hospital and is a fixture at Palm's Arden home on Sundays, when the two watch NFL games.
"Basically, Matt is like family to me," Naisbitt said. "I felt if I stopped going to see him and doing the things we always did, he would look down on me and think our friendship wasn't true."
Palm does not take the friendship for granted.
"Some of my old friends stop coming around," he said. "Maybe they couldn't handle seeing me in this situation. Or maybe I couldn't do anything for them. All I know is I truly know who my true friends are now."
He is developing new friends at ARC. His goal is to roam the campus with them. He just hopes to do it in his own shoes one day. To see more of The Sacramento Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sacbee.com/. Copyright (c) 2008, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
Copyright (C) 2008 The Sacramento Bee, Calif.