Monday Monday is usually a column dedicated to mercilessly mocking Duke life but, in the wake of such a heartbreaking loss to the Kansas tall boys (I totally know and care about basketball), I would like to dedicate this column to telling a deeply personal and profoundly moving story. While it is not my own, it is a story that embodies the best of Duke; it not about academia, or a tall boy like Graggy Trant Jr. or Bruegger Bagles V, or even about Nugget—our campus’ very own 100-pound Persian cat.
Instead it is about an ordinary person, broken down by the world, but who found within them that special Duke spirit to pick themselves up and keep going. Jokes aside, this is an important and serious story. I can tell you, without doubt or exaggeration, that it is the greatest Duke story ever told. You need to hear it.
When I first met Jake, I could tell there was something different about him; his eyes had an intensity to them that most do not. They glistened a beautiful blue but seemed, in some ways, to contain within them an unspeakable sadness and pain. He sat calmly at a table in WU, typing away on a laptop thoughtfully. It was only when I approached him and offered to shake his hand that I saw the true state of his condition. He did not stand to meet me. He could not stand to meet me. His legs were placed limply in a brushed aluminium wheelchair.
What most people do not know about Jake is that he was a marine at one point and, as a consequence of his service and one night where things went terribly wrong, he had spent the past seven years completely paralysed from the waist down. Adapting to his life after the inciting incident was hard for Jake, seemingly impossible at times, but he pushed through and slowly began to believe he could put his life back together. After years of therapy and the unconditional support of his twin brother, Tom (a fellow military man), things were looking up.
Then a second tragedy struck; one that crippled him emotionally this time. For all that Jake had worked so hard to control his circumstances, to adapt, to simply be human again, he could not control the fate of his own brother. On a cold night in a dark alleyway in Philadelphia, Earth Tom found himself face-to-face with an armed robber; never a man to back down, Tom refused to just give up his money. The two fought, a gun fired. Tom fell to the ground, lifeless. Jake was broken. With no parents and now without his lifelong friend and all of the emotional support that his twin brother had provided him with, all seemed utterly lost.
Herein came the moment that changed Jake’s life forever. A pioneering medical project at Duke’s world famous, award-winning School of Medicine reached out to him with an opportunity like no other. It was new, it was risky but it might just give Jake a second chance at life. In the final years of his life, Tom had been preparing for a complex and dangerous procedure and now, if Jake agreed to be a trial patient, they would put up the money for a spinal surgery that could give Jake the ability to walk again. With nothing left to lose, Jake gritted his teeth and agreed.
Jake was lifted into a cold, humming machine hooked up to a variety of brain monitoring systems in a lab with four identical beds. The top of the cocoon-like contraption closed over Jake, locking him in. Squirming with claustrophobia but unable to physically move, Jake could only watch as the brain-scanner began pairing to the biological blueprint that his own brother had once left in the machine. The emotional wave crashed over Jake, he began to scream. Everything went black.
When he awoke, he was not the same. He felt changed. Stronger. Faster. More blue. He looked down at his legs and saw he was world’s away from the clunky machine he had just been strapped into. He stood—literally stood—in the middle of a lush jungle and gazed at his body. He ran for the first time in years, his big blue feet pounding into the dirt of Pandora’s dense forest floor. For a moment, he felt like he was in heaven. Until someone yelled at him:
“Hey Jake. Grab a gun—we gotta go fight this really big corporation that’s like trying to harvest all the unobtanium on Pandora and protect the Mother Tree. That’s like the big tree thing where the Na’Vi tribe life with their flying pterodactyls and s**t. So yeah—let’s like go do all that stuff.”
If you are still reading this then you have just wasted the past five minutes of your life reading the first act of James Cameron’s 2009 classic Avatar. There is no God. We lost to Kansas. Fun fact: Grayson Allen failed to make a single field goal in the second half! Have a great week!
Correction: Monday Monday earlier stated mistakenly that Duke’s School of Medicine was prize-winning”; as of yet the school actually has zero awards, just a s**t-ton of Purell Supersoakers and way too much time on their hands.
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