Getting Hurt Is Painful, but So Is Not Playing : Rangel Tries to Rebuild Body and Life

It’s noon Friday, and a full parking lot confronts Robert Rangel, 18, at Fullerton’s St. Jude Hospital and Rehabilitation Center.

Rangel handles his prized yellow Camaro with considerable skill--especially for a guy who has had only six months to learn to do everything with one hand.

He has a sling on his left arm, a slightly crooked nose, a railroad map of pink scars across his chest, a brace on his left leg and a crutch in the back seat.

He is the survivor of an accident his doctors said would have killed a weaker person.

If anybody deserves to park in one of those inviting blue spaces, it’s Rangel.

A person with less pride and determination would surrender to the obvious.

But Rangel, a former all-Orange League football player and Valencia High School team captain, apparently prefers to circle the lot indefinitely.

The third time he passes the vacant spaces, a passenger makes the gentle suggestion that he park.

Rangel responds as if he has been advised to cheat on his income tax. Geez, those spots are reserved for disabled people. Why would he park there? Think he wants to get a ticket or something?

He says: “My friends always say, ‘Hey, get one of those handicapped spaces! Think of all the time we can save.’

“But I say, ‘Handicapped? I’m not handicapped.’ ”

Thursday, Oct. 17, 1985 was a big night for Valencia High School.

That was the night Tiger running back Ray Pallares broke Orange County’s all-time rushing record in a rout of Orange League opponent Savanna. Rangel, his best friend and a linebacker, intercepted a pass and ran it back to score his first varsity touchdown.

“I was so happy,” he said.

Sadly, it not only was Rangel’s last varsity touchdown, but his last game.

The buddies were together again that weekend, riding three-wheeled all-terrain vehicles in the desert near Brawley. One of the last things Rangel remembers about Saturday, Oct. 19 was following Pallares around a blind turn in a wash.

The last detail he can picture is the sight of Pallares’ hand-raised palm forward in the air, as if to protect him by stopping some kind of unseen traffic.

It was too late.

After that, Rangel recalls little. He doesn’t remember the dune buggy that came around the turn from his left.

He doesn’t remember the impact, nor Pallares’ lifesaving effort to prevent him from choking on his own blood, the rescue by rangers, the 45-minute ambulance ride to the trauma center in Brawley, the five specialists, or the eight hours of surgery.

But he remembers some of his four days in intensive care and all of the three months he spent recuperating on a bed set up in his living room in Placentia.

He remembers the burning pain in the damaged nerves running down to his paralyzed left hand. It would start in the morning, and often throb all day and into the night.

His father, who already had lost a father and brother in the past year, would sit up with Robert until the wee hours, comforting him, encouraging him, explaining why he couldn’t give up, saying all the right things when nothing else seemed right.

“Without my dad, I don’t think I would have made it,” Robert says.

Even before Robert was set up in his temporary quarters, the Rangel living room, once a Monarch shrine, had become a Tiger colony.

A few upper shelves still belong to the Mater Dei football trophies earned by Robert’s father, Everett Rangel, in the days when Dick Coury, now the Ram quarterback coach, guided the Monarchs to the CIF Southern Section title.

But the rest of the room where Robert recovered is Tiger territory.

There’s the large framed tiger photo, a Christmas gift from his younger brother . . . some photos of Valencia’s Tiger of the Week--a 6-foot, 218-pounder . . . a stuffed tiger his mother gave him to cheer him through a painful spinal test . . . a row of Tiger football videotapes, which Pallares and Rangel have watched until every play is committed to heart.

“My first thought was that he’d been robbed of his football career,” said Rangel’s mother, Dee Dee.

The Rangels have filed a civil suit against the driver of the other vehicle, whom they believe had been drinking. Robert’s medical bills, generally covered by insurance, have reached about $60,000.

He doesn’t watch the Tiger tapes much anymore. But his passion for football has not abated. These days he takes pride in his younger brother’s prospects--”He’s going to take my place next season”--while considering an offer from Tiger Coach Mike Marrujo to assist the freshman team.

Of his playing career, which he had hoped would lead to a college scholarship, he says: “I enjoyed it. It was the best time of my life. I’m just sorry I couldn’t finish it up. That’s the only thing . . . “

“I used to tell Ray, ‘Yeah, you’re the running back but you haven’t started all the games since we were sophomores,’ ” Rangel said. “I didn’t miss one until . . . the accident. I used to tell him that sooner or later I was going to get hurt.”

In fact, Rangel had never broken a bone or been to the hospital until last October. On the football field, that durability had always been a matter of personal pride. And in the end, it may have saved his life.

“The doctor told us that somebody else who wasn’t as young and strong could have been killed instantly,” Dee Dee said.

Everett Rangel, a supervisor at Northrop Corp., said: “I told him he was blessed. We could have been feeding him through a straw for the rest of his life.”

But the injuries were severe.

He had a wound in his face that required a plastic surgeon’s stitching from the inside and the outside, and a distressingly long list of broken bones, including almost everything that could possibly be broken on his left side, except his ribs and hip. His nose, collarbone, shoulder blade and two lower leg bones all were broken.

The collision basically collapsed the upper left side of his body, severing the major artery in the top of his arm and crushing some nerves. The surgeons installed a pin in his shoulder to hold it together.

But pin suggests something tiny. Outside of Rangel’s doctors, only a jumbo jet mechanic might call that chunk of metal a pin . Eight inches long and a quarter-inch thick, the giant screw protruded from his skin for several months, and had to be cleaned daily by his father because his mother couldn’t bear the sight.

“When I used to work out in football, I’d get tired or I’d smash my hand or something, and I used to think it hurt so much,” Rangel said. “But the pain I feel now is so much greater that I think I was dumb to think those things hurt.”

Rangel has returned to school just twice--to stand up from his wheelchair for the end-of-season team photo and to visit a counselor, who told him he will probably be able to participate in his class’ graduation ceremony, if he continues his daily studies with a home tutor. He also hopes to attend the prom.

At first, staying home was a little like a treat, despite the episodes of pain.

“I thought I’d just come over here (home from the hospital) a few weeks, and I’d be better,” he said. “I didn’t know how bad off I was.”

His mother said the house was filled with “between 12 and 24” of his friends “at all hours” during the first few weeks, which actually was a nice distraction. But the novelty wore off soon enough and tedium set in.

“After a while not that many people were coming, except my close friends, Ray (Pallares), and (teammates) Andy (Ruscitto) and Joe (Garten),” Rangel said. “Then it started getting really boring.”

He had a major psychological transition to make--in his self-image, in his plans for the future, even in the present, where a two-handed life had not prepared him for the trials he would face in his 19th year.

“He used to get mad that I had to help him (do something such as) take a shower,” Everett Rangel said. “Now he does it by himself, but for a while, when he had his cast on, he’d get down about it.

“I told him, ‘Don’t look on the bad side. We took care of you when you were a baby, and it’s just a matter of course. Someday when I get old and gray, maybe you’ll be helping me. It’s something we do for you with all the love we have.’ ”

Meanwhile, he discovered ingenious methods of conquering new challenges one-handed, such as balancing himself and his cane long enough to fish his keys out of a hiding place in his sling and unlock the front door to his family’s Spanish-style stucco home. His hard-earned self-sufficiency has become a source of pride.

“I’ve learned a lot of tricks, little things I’ve figured out how to do, like opening jars and cutting oranges,” he said, demonstrating how he can squeeze an orange between a cupboard door and his knee to steady it for slicing.

“Or putting on my shirt. It took me an hour to do my first shirt, but I’m getting pretty good at it now.”

He pointed at his feet, to a pair of white tennis shoes with Velcro in place of laces. “My dad took care of (the problem of) tying my shoes--he bought me these for Christmas,” he said.

He has passed many physical and mental milestones since the first time he was able to leave the house after the accident. A group of his friends picked him up in Pallares’ van to go to the drive-in and see “Rocky IV,” appropriately enough. Later, his parents bundled him into the car to watch one quarter of a Valencia game, which was as much as his strength would allow.

Still, even to a teen-ager whose parents describe as mature beyond his years, the signs of progress often seem to come too slow. He misses the muscular symmetry of his upper body, which he built through weight training. His injured arm is now an inch smaller than the other and he comments that his left shoulder looks “caved in.”

“Sometimes I look in the mirror and it’s a little hard to believe this is me,” he said. “I was so much better off before.”

But he can rally himself with one bit of information, and it has taken on the quality of a lucky charm to him. “With damaged nerves, it can be irreparable or you can get better. They really don’t know what’s going to happen. You never know.”

So he applies all that desire that was once expended on the football field to new physical tasks, including 30 minutes a day at home of manipulating his injured arm while it is attached to electrodes to electrically stimulate the muscles.

He drives to St. Jude for another daily physical therapy session, working to increase his range of motion, extend nerve sensation below the elbow, strengthen the muscles in his control and win back the others.

His face tenses as he struggles to get his arm to respond to his will. It’s probably the same expression he wore in the Tiger weight room.

His physical therapy assistant, Judy Bellegarde said: “It’s really hard with nerve things. You can never say how much will come back and how much won’t . . . “

Rangel wipes his brow with his free hand and straightens the bill of his Tiger baseball cap. While lying on his back and concentrating on raising his left arm inch by inch, he finishes Bellegarde’s sentence--the way he thinks it should be finished.

“But it can get better,” he says. “It can . . . it can.”