Recently that question has taken on a terrifying resonance. Last year Candace, 19, was a freshman at Georgia's Mercer University, where she studied biology and still dreamed of a medical career. Now she lies in a bed in her family's living room in Lithonia, Ga., the victim of a neurological condition that is as baffling as it is horrific. Although her brain-wave patterns appear normal, she cannot see, hear, speak, feel or move—and no one knows why. "I've never seen anything like this," says Dr. Jonathan Glass, a neurologist at Emory University School of Medicine. "If Candace is going to die from this, I don't know what's going to kill her." Worse yet, Candace's younger sister Sophia, 18, a freshman at West Georgia College in Carrollton, is showing early signs of the same mysterious disease. She is already deaf and her vision is failing. "Sophia," says Glass, "is traveling on an airplane headed straight for a mountain."
Despite that, the Andersons firmly believe that their daughters will recover, and their neighbors have rallied to support them. "The Andersons are not giving up, and neither are we," says Mary Wilson, 54, a close friend of Sarah's who has spearheaded an effort to help the cash-strapped family pay their bills. "People are giving from the heart—Candace is a fighter, and so are we. We believe she is going to overcome this."
Although the two youngest Anderson daughters have undergone a battery of sophisticated medical tests, doctors don't even have a name for whatever is ailing them. (Older sisters Sheri, 29, an account manager for a trucking company, and Charlie, 28, a high school math teacher, remain healthy.) Glass, who has treated both girls since the spring of 2001, believes the illness is genetic; he blames it on malfunctioning mitochondria, the tiny energy factories that metabolize oxygen in cells. "Many mitochondrial diseases manifest themselves as blindness and deafness and peripheral neuropathy [damage to the nerves]," says Glass. But tests for such a disorder have been inconclusive, because the sisters appear to have a genetic mutation never before encountered in a human disease.
Not long ago the lives of both sisters seemed filled with promise. Born one year after her family relocated from Tampa to Decatur, Ga., Candace radiated intelligence from infancy. "I'll never forget the day she was born," says her father, Charles, 54, a home builder. "She turned her head and looked back at me when she was being returned to the nursery—I couldn't believe it, and neither could the nurse." By the third grade Candace was admitted to a magnet program for gifted children. Her best friend was always her bubblier younger sister, with whom she shared a voracious appetite for learning. "They were both big readers all their lives," says Sarah.
But at 14, Candace, who had been an honor student, began missing homework assignments, telling teachers she hadn't heard their instructions. By her freshman year at Columbia High School she had been diagnosed with a severe hearing problem. Within two years she was profoundly deaf. Despite her condition Candace continued to take part in school activities, including the choir. "She could still sense a beat and learned the words by reading lips," says Sarah.
During Candace's junior year, pain in her feet and legs made walking increasingly difficult. Often unable to get out of bed, she studied at home with Gayle Dobbs, 52, a teacher of the deaf employed by the local school district. Around the same time Sophia, who remained in school, began to lose her hearing. "No one had any explanation," says Charles, who eventually moved his family to Lithonia, another Atlanta suburb, because he suspected unknown toxins in his home might be making his daughters sick. "Doctors said if the cause had been environmental, the girls would have gotten better in the new house," he says. "They didn't."
Still, the sisters remained upbeat about their situation. "In all my years of teaching the deaf, I'd never met anyone like Candace and Sophia," says Dobbs. "They were totally self-confident. Their attitude was that this was just a hurdle, nothing more—nothing was going to stop them." Despite their handicaps, both girls returned to school that fall, studying alongside their classmates with the help of court reporters who accompanied them to class and transcribed lectures.
Aside from her hearing loss, Sophia remained stable. But Candace's troubles worsened. By the middle of her senior year the pain in her legs was compounded by numbness in her feet, and she was confined to a wheelchair. She found an ally in classmate Japheth Hutchinson, now 20, who began wheeling her to class and carrying her books. They became a couple, attending their senior prom together and talking about marriage. "I never heard Candace complain," says Hutchinson, who visits her regularly and continues to hope for a wedding day. "That's just the kind of person she was." In the spring she graduated with the Columbia High class of 2001, walking across the stage with Hutchinson and Sophia supporting her on either side.
By the time Candace enrolled at Mercer, about an hour's drive from her parents' house, nerve damage had spread to her hands, making it difficult for her to button her blouse or hold a fork. Still, she attended classes using a motorized wheelchair.
By October of that year Candace's vision had also begun to fail. A visit to a neuro-ophthalmologist confirmed the worst—she was going blind because of optic-nerve damage. After being telephoned by the physician, Sarah had to relay the diagnosis to her deaf daughter. Overcome with grief, she sat both Candace and Sophia down and broke the news (at the time, Candace could still see well enough to read lips). "I'm not afraid," she recalls Candace saying. "I know God is either going to heal me miraculously or call me home." Soon Candace's vision became so poor that the family began to communicate with her by tracing letters with their fingers on her forehead.
Determined to make Candace happy before her last links to the world were severed, Sarah allowed her to take the bus to New York City with Hutchinson for a vacation this past Christmas. The couple spent their holiday simply riding the subway and exploring the city. "She kept saying she was seeing mostly shadows," says Hutchinson, who plans to attend Georgia Perimeter College in January. "But we were together. That made whatever we did wonderful."
The day after she returned to Georgia, Candace awoke totally blind. "I called her academic adviser to tell her she would not be returning to school," says Sarah. "She cried—she had never known anyone so motivated."
In May Candace was rushed to the emergency room with terrible back pain. Within days she lost all remaining sensation in her limbs and her speech became slurred. "She told me, 'I can't feel my mouth—Mom, help me,'" Sarah says. "The next day she wasn't talking at all."
Since then, Candace has remained suspended in an awful limbo. "We don't know what is going on inside her head," says Glass. Still, the Andersons,
who have given up their insurance because Medicaid covers more of their daughters' medical costs, are convinced that one day Candace will be able to move and communicate again. Although a nurse helps with her care now that Candace is home from a three-month hospital stay, Sarah rarely leaves her daughter's side, attending to her breathing and feeding tubes, combing
her hair and holding her hand. "I believe she can sense my presence," Sarah says. "I promised not to leave her and I won't."
For Sophia, now a freshman at West Georgia College majoring in special education, her sister's condition is a terrible portent of what may lie ahead. "It's devastating for Sophia to look at Candace in that bed," says Dobbs, who remains close to the Andersons. "Yet like Candace, Sophia is not giving up."
To help the Andersons cope with expenses not paid for by Medicaid, friends and neighbors as well as teachers and students at Columbia High School have launched the Candace Anderson Mystery Fund, which has raised money for the family. "We have no clue as to what has happened in our bodies," Sophia told supporters at a fund-raiser at Atlanta's New Life Tabernacle of the Church of God in Christ in August. "But we believe God will provide an answer."
Neighbors have gone door-to-door collecting money, and regularly bring food to the family. "I'm willing to do anything," says Jenice Brinkley, a real estate agent who lives across the street. "Every morning when I get up I look over at the Andersons' house and I stop and say a little prayer. If nothing else, I can at least do that."
The outpouring of goodwill helps keep the Andersons from despair—as does their seemingly bottomless optimism. "The doctors say there is nothing more they can do," says Sarah. "But I know Candace is going to get up out of that bed. You wait."
J. D. heyman
Gail Cameron Wescott in Lithonia
- Contributors:
- Gail Cameron Wescott.
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