Starting over

EDMONDS – Andre Kajlich sheds his T-shirt, lowers himself to the pool’s edge and hops in. The steam in the room clouds the stares of onlookers.

For a moment, his body bobs like a cork. Then he takes off, gliding underwater almost the entire length of the pool. He emerges at the other end, bobs back up and grasps for the wall.

He turns and takes off with a beautiful butterfly stroke, his arms pulling, rocking his chest and hips through the water.

Behind him, there is no splash in his wake.

After only two laps, Kajlich, 24, of Woodway is already tired.

Until only a few months ago, he was a 6-foot, 180-pound athlete. Kajlich – pronounced KY-lick – was a scratch golfer and loved windsurfing. He played soccer, tennis and football at Seattle’s Bishop Blanchet High School. His friends called him “excitable boy” for his energy.

In December, everything changed. Kajlich lost both his legs in a subway accident in Prague, Czech Republic. One leg is completely gone at the hip and the other is a stub above the knee.

What used to be standing depth for him is now deep water. So Kajlich holds onto the wall. Now that his body has been cut to 115 pounds, swimming is completely different.

Liz Rossman, a swim instructor with 15 years of experience in adaptive aquatics, helps him make his strokes more efficient.

Rossman hops in the water and holds Kajlich’s hips up as he practices his backstroke. When she lets go, he sinks. He tries again, this time keeping his chin back, and his torso rises flat to the surface.

When he reaches his mother, Patti Kajlich, walking laps in the pool, he flips over and quickly dunks her.

“Some things never change,” she says laughing as she re-emerges.

“Andre knows how to swim, but now it’s with a different body than before. He must find ways to help his body not hinder him,” Rossman said.

Today, Kajlich is learning how to swim again. And learning how to live again.

A ‘surreal’ trip

Since the fall of communism, the city of Prague has risen like a phoenix to become a cultural mecca in Eastern Europe. It’s described as the equivalent of what Paris was at the turn of the 20th century.

That’s part of what drew Kajlich to study there, he said.

“Prague is almost surreal. It’s got the old-world charm, and at night everything lights up and it’s metropolitan,” he said.

Kajlich was also following in his father’s footsteps.

His father, Relo Kajlich, is from Czechoslovakia, and 36 years earlier completed medical school at Charles University in Prague.

In 1967, at the age of 26, Relo Kajlich fled the communist country with his brother, ending up in Seattle.

Andre Kajlich went to Prague in September 2003 to study math and science at his father’s alma mater, eventually intending to study molecular biology.

He quickly made friends. At one point, he and two friends – Antonio from Portugal and Katri from Sweden – moved out of the dorm into their own flat. During the day they would study, and at night go out on the town with the 60 or so other international students.

On Saturday, Dec. 6, he and his roommates hosted a dinner party for 15 other students. Around midnight, they left to go to a club. It was snowing lightly.

“We were walking down this really quiet residential street, toward the biggest park in Prague, and we were all throwing snowballs,” Kajlich said.

That’s his last memory of having legs.

Unforgettable call

Patti Kajlich had just turned in her final grades for her students at Shoreline Community College, where she teaches nursing, and headed out Christmas shopping.

The next day, she was getting ready to put up Christmas lights. She wanted to take Rufus, her black Labrador retriever, for a walk. She grabbed his leash and had just put on her jacket when the phone rang.

It was Antonio.

“I just knew then, at that moment, whatever information I was going to get would change my life forever,” she said.

Her son had been run over by a subway train. Both of his lungs had collapsed, punctured by six broken ribs, and his liver had been lacerated. His left leg was separated at the hip, practically torn off. The train’s wheels just missed his sex organs.

His right leg was completely mangled from the knee down. A broken left elbow protruded from the skin, and he had cuts and gouges all over his back, contaminated by diesel fuel. Several teeth were fractured and a front tooth was chipped.

Doctors amputated the left leg at the hip and the right leg just above the knee, and gave Kajlich a total of 40 units of blood.

Patti and Relo Kajlich didn’t know any of this. All they knew was that their son might not live.

Kajlich remained in a medically induced coma for more than a week. As the doctors eased up on the medications, he slowly came to consciousness. He kept going into seizures, like an addict on withdrawal, and then experienced fever and hallucinations from the trauma and antibiotics.

As he was fading in and out of consciousness, his parents, who had made the journey to Prague, were calming him down, talking to him about his accident. Tears rolled down her son’s cheeks, his mother said.

“I told him, ‘You have survived a terrible accident, you are alive, you will recover, but your legs are lost,’ ” Relo Kajlich recalled. “What it means is you will have to work hard to be able to do everything you want to do. It’s the only way to look at it.’ “

One stop away

Many questions remain about the accident.

Kajlich’s roommate and several friends left the party at about 3 a.m. and took the tram back home. But Kajlich went to get a bite to eat with a Finnish friend. About 7 a.m., they walked to the subway. Kajlich headed to the westbound train, while his friend headed the other way.

No one knows what happened next.

One stop away from where he boarded the train, Kajlich wound up on the tracks in front of a train. The conductor saw him, but it was too late.

No witnesses came forward. An engineer assigned to watch the security cameras said he saw nothing, and the feed wasn’t taped. However, the Kajlichs suspect foul play.

“Yes, I had been drinking some that night and I was definitely tired, but my friend said at breakfast I seemed fine,” Kajlich said.

Since the fall of communism, crime has risen exponentially in the Czech Republic, especially organized crime and gangs, a police detective told Kajlich’s father.

Kajlich said he probably looked pretty “American” that Sunday. He was wearing a gold bracelet given to him by his grandmother, cargo jeans and a sweater. He admits that, had someone tried to rob him, he probably would have fought back. And he might have been thrown onto the tracks.

Oddly, three other people were also hit by subway trains that week. Kajlich was the fourth.

“What bothers me most, what I will never accept, is that there were no eyewitnesses,” Relo Kajlich said. “At 7:30 in the morning, people were there and would have seen it. But if it’s gangs or something like that, they don’t want to get involved.”

A long recovery

After spending more than a month in the Prague hospital, Kajlich was flown back to Seattle. His leg and hip wounds were still open.

At Harborview Medical Center, Dr. Doug Smith, a renowned orthopedic surgeon who works with amputees, was able to pull the skin and muscle together and close the wound at the left hip.

He performed a skin graft, taking skin from under Kajlich’s arm and attaching it to the right leg stump, which ended right above the knee.

Now, Kajlich has begun his long recovery.

A grimace spread across his face. He pushed his left hip against the hand of John Fergason, a prosthetics specialist with the University of Washington.

Fergason was trying to gauge the power and motion in Kajlich’s left hip to see if he could hold and move a prosthetic leg.

“It’ll be pretty tricky,” Fergason said.

They moved to the parallel bars. Kajlich lowered himself off his wheelchair and held himself about 3 inches above the floor using the bars. He stood by putting weight on the right limb.

“I am looking for how the muscles shift, and how the skin draws,” Fergason said. “We must be very careful with the shape of the bottom of the stub. The skin can blister when you hang the weight (of an artificial leg) off the end.”

Kajlich won’t go directly from sitting in a wheelchair to walking on prosthetic legs. The doctors stage his recovery. He must first learn to walk with prosthetic limbs that are about 5 inches longer than his stub, with no knees.

Once he can bear weight on the shorter prosthetics, he must learn to walk on them. Once he can walk, the prosthetics can be made taller. After that, knees can be introduced. That can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months.

‘Life Rolls On’

The first memory Kajlich has after the accident was feeling as though his feet were gnarled and that he needed his toenails clipped.

“It was a kind of phantom sensation I was having, and that my toenails felt long. My mother said, ‘You don’t have toenails.’ “

Then there were the dreams.

“The whole time in my dreams, I was in this struggle. I was fighting a war in Mexico and I was mad about it, running around doing gunbattles,” Kajlich said.

Today, he does battle with his body, and others’ perceptions of it.

“I always thought I’d be able to teach my kids how to play sports one day,” Kajlich said. “Now it will be different than I was expecting it to be … definitely different.”

Kajlich says he draws upon his experience growing up with his father, who at a young age was diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease. His father has lived a full life despite the debilitating disease, which kept him from playing sports. He raised a family and is able to skeet shoot and swim with his son.

“Growing up with my father’s condition has probably prepared me for my life ahead,” Kajlich said. “It’s not like either of us is completely ruined, just slightly crippled,” he said with a smile.

Patti and Relo Kajlich have also had to deal with their son’s loss.

“It’s hard,” Relo Kajlich said. “I don’t think either of us is mourning yet. It’s something so monstrous, it sometimes comes and hits you when you least expect it. Sometimes, I think it’s almost harder for it to be him. I wish it were me.”

Their son’s attitude and sense of humor quickly pull them out of grief.

A sweat shirt Andre Kajlich wears says it all: “Life Rolls On.”

He’s learning classical guitar, takes cooking lessons, plays poker with his college friends every Tuesday night, and swims.

“I’m aware of the fact I do have a positive attitude. For some reason, it doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I would do anything to change it, but I have no choice,” Kajlich said.

“It’s a little unnerving that I can’t find an example of someone else in my situation, so the doctors are guessing. But they don’t know. It’s frustrating. If my left leg were longer, it would be clearer to doctors what I would be able to do.

“Then I think, since it’s such an unknown, I’ll always be surprising myself and others with what I can do.”

Pamela Brice is a reporter for the Herald in Everett.