Given all that Antonio Garcia has gone through — the inability to breathe on his own, the loss of feeling in parts of his body — a moment this week symbolized the progress the two-sport standout has made since falling frighteningly ill with a mysterious spinal condition.
The Bellarmine College Prep senior catches a bounce pass from one of his football teammates, dribbles three times as he approaches the basket and shoots. The ball kisses the backboard in a quiet courtyard at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and falls through the hoop.
It was a perfect snapshot on the comeback trail for the football and baseball standout, even if he made the basket Tuesday from a wheelchair while still being confined to a hospital.
Three weeks earlier, Garcia had no movement on his left side and needed an apparatus to breathe. Now, the player who scored the winning touchdown in Bellarmine’s epic victory over Folsom for a Northern California championship last December no longer is in intensive care at Stanford, no longer is hooked up to a machine, no longer is without feeling in his body.
“It was a question to whether or not I was going to live to where I am now, it’s a miracle,” Garcia said. “I’m just so grateful that I can do what I can do now. I can move in a wheelchair. I can talk to my friends. I can do all this stuff. I know it’s just going to get better every day. I can’t wait to get back to normal.”
Garcia and his father, San Jose police chief Eddie Garcia, say doctors still do not know what caused the horrific scare that began when the University of Kansas baseball commit started feeling severe neck pain at a Bellarmine alumni baseball game March 26.
“They say it’s some sort of inflammation that happened,” Eddie Garcia said, noting that it is good that there are no limitations to his son’s recovery. “He’s the first of whatever they have seen with regards to this. It’s nice that he is coming along so well, responded to the medication that they have given him. I would have never thought three weeks ago that he would be this far along.”
‘So confused’
Garcia showed up for the alumni game the day before Easter feeling fine. But shortly after batting practice, a sharp pain began to attack both sides of his neck. A teammate who also had neck soreness gave him a bar to roll out the discomfort that Garcia described as a “10 out of 10,” and the player who led Bellarmine with a .500 batting average tried to play.
But after fielding a ground ball at shortstop early in the game and throwing a runner out at first, Garcia knew something was wrong.
His dad took him home, and things worsened. The family was told by its pediatrician that Garcia, who could not hold down food, might have a bad case of the flu. With Kansas about to play Villanova in an Elite Eight NCAA tournament basketball game, Eddie helped his son to the couch to watch.
“As the game went on, I kept getting weaker and weaker and more scared,” Garcia said. “At one point, I was trying to move so much, I fell off the couch.”
By 10:30 that evening, Garcia told his dad he could not breathe right and had lost feeling in his body. Eddie picked up his boy as a fireman would in a rescue mission, dragged him to the car and took him to Good Samaritan Hospital.
“I couldn’t feel my feet dragging on the cement,” Garcia said. “It was crazy. I was so confused.”
When a few tests at Good Samaritan returned negative, doctors sent him to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.
There, he had to undergo a two-hour MRI. But because he kept having trouble breathing before the test finished, he had to be intubated.
“The last thing I remember my nurse telling me,” Garcia said, “is we’re putting you on Versed. It’s a superstrong drug. You’re not going to remember the next couple of days. I just start bawling.”
State of shock
Visitors, including Garcia’s girlfriend and a football teammate, arrived Easter Sunday and could not believe the well-conditioned athlete’s condition.
“We were talking to him, and he would nod to us,” friend and teammate Jacob Bergstrom said. “Then he was trying to mouth words and was asking for a pen. We gave him a pen, and he couldn’t write anything.”
Garcia has short memories of those early days at Stanford — including a sad and frightened look from longtime assistant football coach John Amarillas — but mostly the first week is a blur.
As word spread about Garcia, support poured in. Nick Murtha, a Leland senior who overcame a brain cancer diagnosis last summer to return to the basketball team this winter, visited his close friend. Garcia wore a wrist band in honor of Murtha last football season.
“I really have no doubt that he’ll make a full recovery,” Murtha said.
Garcia also received a letter from the owner of his favorite NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones. Garcia and his dad have no idea how Jones found out about an ailing boy from San Jose — they have asked around — but are thankful that he sent such a personalized letter and a blue T-shirt that said, “Fight.”
In the letter, dated April 7, Jones wrote, “We were so sorry to learn of what you’re going through — something no young man should have to face — but we hope you’ll take comfort knowing you have friends here in Dallas who believe in you and who are cheering you on. I was honored to hear that such a stellar athlete out of California calls himself a Cowboys fan.”
Sofia strong
Mike Rodriguez, Bellarmine’s baseball coach, needed to travel only a few rooms away to visit Garcia at Stanford. In a sad twist, Rodriguez’s 3-year-old daughter, Sofia, was undergoing treatment for leukemia when Garcia was admitted.
“Obviously, we’re there very frequently through the treatment process,” Rodriguez said. “But to see one of our players there, especially for something that there wasn’t an injury really … There wasn’t any sort of thing that would make you think that, ‘Oh, he’s going to be in the hospital.'”
The baseball team has rallied around little Sofia — adding Sofia Strong to the back of its caps — and now a teammate.
“With Antonio going down, it was another blow to these guys,” said Brian Vieira, an assistant coach who has helped fill for Rodriguez while the head coach is with Sofia.
Road back
Garcia’s breathing tube was removed last week, and he was transferred to Valley Medical in San Jose on Monday for rehabilitation. He is back to eating normally, playing video games on TV and interacting with friends on social media.
He even rose from his wheelchair to stand for pictures with a few football teammates Tuesday in the Valley Medical courtyard and later with his dad in the hospital room.
With his daily rehabilitation schedule taped to a wall in the room, Garcia hopes to be released from the hospital in a week or so and aims to attend Bellarmine’s prom April 30. He wants to be in the picture his football teammates plan to take with their championship rings.
As he watches teammates Troy Martig, Wolfie Rehbock, Jack Bunton and Bergstrom shoot baskets at Valley Medical, Garcia says doctors still are not sure how all this happened.
“At first they were thinking spinal stroke or an infection,” he said. “They started baby aspirin for the stroke and steroids. They said the steroids, if it was a stroke, they weren’t going to do anything but couldn’t hurt. Right away, the steroids started working.”
Garcia and his father said that doctors have ruled out the stroke.
“They know or think that it’s an infection, a virus, an inflammation in my spine, but they have no idea how it got there, which is crazy to me,” Garcia said. “It’s not football at all. They kept asking if anything happened in the past couple of days. Nothing did. It’s a totally random, freak accident.”
Garcia, who spent 22 days at Stanford, still plans to attend Kansas in the fall. But he knows he has some fighting to do before then.
“I am ready for Round 7,” Garcia said. “I’ve fought my fair share of rounds. I’ve got a couple left.”
