The Lograsso family.
Three months to live?
"Four, maybe," the surgeon says.
On July 8, Dr. Shields removed the left eye and a long section of the optic nerve. The boy recovered in an intensive-care unit, a patch over the left-eye wound. He took chemotherapy for the right-eye tumors.
There's no explaining all this. Why does a toddler watch golf in Korea? Why, when a mother has no way to know a clock is ticking, does she put her hand in front of her son's eye? Love moves a family to cross an ocean and continent to find the right doctor, but ask this: Who knows why they arrived a life-saving week sooner rather than a week later?"
"God at work," Regina Lograsso says.
She mentions a day two months after the surgery when Kyle felt sick. Driving to a doctor, she turned to look at Kyle--why look just then?--and for the first time saw him gasping for air. Stopping at the next driveway, she asked the homeowner to call 911.
"He was limp and felt like a hot rock," the mother says. At the hospital, Kyle's temperature was 105, his blood pressure 21 over 13. His blood had become infected through an incision made for chemotherapy tubes.
Four days in ICU this time, and then Kyle, brightening, had an idea. "Dad," he said, "can we play 'Hot Shots'?" Jeff had brought a PlayStation to the hospital. So, with the boy hooked up to his tree of intravenous antibiotic-dripping bags, the Lograssos played video golf.
Two weeks in all, for a second time near death and kept alive a second time, and his mother says, "Miracles."
Chemotherapy regressed the right-eye tumors. Subsequent testings have shown no cancer in his body. While Kyle will be tested the rest of his life, the survival rate of retinoblastoma patients is more than 95 percent.
Father and son now get to a golf course three and four times a week. On May 21, 2006, Kyle's chip shot from a green's edge rolled out of his sight. Then he heard his mother shouting, "Kyle! Kyle!" A mother's voice at full volume is usually bad news for a 3-year-old, so Kyle scrunched his shoulders. "No, no, Kyle," his father said, "you didn't do anything wrong. It went in. A birdie."
The first of his life.
"Here, Mom, this is for you," he said. He gave Regina the ball.
The father stood there.
"Don't worry, Dad, I'll make one for you, too." That, he did. By summer's end, the birdie-ball rack in his bedroom had six spaces filled.
Today's prosthetic eyes most often are convex plastic shells, similar to contact lenses, painted to match the patient's good eye.
Sometimes Kyle walks through his house saying, "Mom, Mom, there's something wrong with my eye," and the mother will see that her son once again has pressed the prosthesis to his cheekbone, where its appearance suggests that his eye has changed locations.
The effect is memorable, especially when Kyle arranges it to coincide with visits by his sisters' girlfriends, most of whom have never seen an eye down there. Nor have they seen the orbital implant that is revealed in an eye socket when its prosthetic cover goes missing.
Kristen and Kaley Lograsso (ages 13 and 10) are two of those beautiful little girls lucky to have a sweet brother like Kyle. Their lucky moments included the morning when Kristen popped a handful of Honey Nut Cheerios into her mouth. Having a sweet brother like Kyle made it possible for Kristen to say words few sisters have ever said.
She said, "Eee-yew, Mom, I ate Kyle's eye!" Kyle had dropped his prosthesis into the Cheerios in hopes it would surface for his big sister at just the right icky moment.
For that, if for little else in all this, Regina Lograsso has an explanation.
She says, "He's a boy."
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