Sometimes, when the days grew long and hours stood still, they would walk to the foot of their daughter’s hospital bed.
Margaret Meier would carry a beach ball. Steve Meier would move in close. Their daughter, Maggie, lay in a coma — bedridden, unresponsive, in and out of consciousness. Her brain had been attacked, an infection destroying so much of her old life. And now the fight was on. Somewhere, the Meiers kept count of the madness: dozens of seizures; seven trips to the intensive care unit; two code blues — moments where Maggie would stop breathing and a response team would hustle in to keep Steve and Margaret’s daughter alive. Maggie spent 100 days in that hospital. And something had to fill the time. Where’s that beach ball? It wasn’t normal, of course. Normal would have meant that Maggie was back at Blue Valley Northwest High School, taking the floor for the Huskies as a freshman. Normal would have meant basketball practices and team dinners and homework. This couldn’t be normal. But it could be basketball. So Margaret would grab the beach ball, and move it toward her daughter, gentling jostling her 5-foot-10 frame. “Come on Maggie,” Margaret would say. “Let’s shoot hoops.” Sometimes, Maggie would wake up just long enough to hold that ball; just long enough to shoot that ball. Three minutes. Four minutes. Maybe five. And then … back to the coma. “That showed us,” Margaret says, “that there was something still in there.”It’s a Tuesday evening in January, chilly and dark, and the bleachers at Bishop Miege High School are mostly full. The Blue Valley Northwest girls are playing Bishop Miege, and it’s already late in the second half when a senior forward with long brown hair pulls down a rebound and tosses a quick outlet pass. The pass is subtle and instinctive, completed in one continuous motion, the kind of basketball play that’s made without thinking. In other words, BV Northwest coach David Glenn says, it’s the type of play Maggie Meier has always made. Moments later, Meier is trailing the action, moving toward another open spot, watching as a teammate finishes the fast break with a layup. “It just feels like … normal,” she says later. “It’s what I’ve always done.” In the bleachers, Steve Meier sits and watches. “Basketball IQ,” he says. Three years after having her life thrown into chaos by a rare brain infection called mycoplasma meningoencephalitis — an aggressive form of meningitis — Maggie is back on the basketball court at BV Northwest. She’s a senior now, a versatile role player on a team that reached the Kansas 6A state tournament last season. The illness, the hospital stay, the hundreds of pills — those are all just distant memories now, some blurrier than others. “I can remember bits and pieces,” Maggie says.This is what the happy ending looks like. It plays out on a daily basis — in class, at practice, at home — and will continue to do so for at least the next three weeks, every single time Blue Valley Northwest takes the floor. “Senior night is going to be a special night,” Steve says. But there’s a funny thing about happy endings. If you only see the end, how can you understand the struggle? Can you see Maggie lying in a hospital bed and fighting to live? Can you see a freshman in high school sitting in a special-ed room by herself, relearning how to read and write and master now-foreign social skills? Can you see that same girl, working and sweating to return to the basketball court just one year later? “She went through every stage of life again,” Steve says, “It was like she had to grow up again.”
When her second-youngest daughter laid her head onto the dinner table, Margaret Meier started to sense something was wrong. Maggie had been complaining of a headache all week long. She’d even stopped by the nurse’s office on Friday afternoon. But after taking some Motrin, Maggie was able to manage for the rest of the day. And then came Saturday — Nov. 8, 2008. Maggie was leaving dinner and climbing into bed. “I do not feel well,” she told her mom. By Sunday, Maggie’s condition had worsened. She was alone in bed, nearly incoherent, and the Meiers knew it was time to move. “The minute we got in the emergency room,” Steve says, steadying his voice. “She had a Grand mal seizure.”The next few hours were a blur. That first night, Margaret says, her daughter suffered more than 20 seizures. There were tests and waiting, and more tests, but nobody could quite figure out what was wrong. “The first 36 hours after she was admitted, she was totally awake,” Steve says.“One minute she would be screaming,” Margaret says. “She’d be laughing, she’d be crying, she couldn’t control anything. And then, all in between here, she’s having seizures.” Three years later, Margaret says, there is some clarity. Maggie’s brain was under siege, and the infection was making everything go haywire. By the time doctors had pinpointed the cause, three weeks had passed. And the process was just beginning. The family, including Maggie’s four siblings, would spend Thanksgiving and Christmas at Children’s Mercy. And with every day, every week spent with a feeding tube and in the hospital, the Meiers worried about their daughter’s future. The illness had infiltrated much of her brain. It caused memory loss, destroyed basic motor skills, left Maggie to start all over. The girl that had spent the previous summer practicing with the varsity team at BV Northwest would now spend most of her freshman basketball season in a coma. In the ensuing months, the family clung to a thin strand of hope — an idea sparked by one doctor and an unlikely connection to basketball. William Graf was a member of Maggie’s team of neurologists, and he also had a daughter who played high school basketball. Knowing Maggie played, Steve says, he offered a simple promise.“I will get her back on the court,” Graf told the Meiers. “She’ll be back.”
A coach and a young player stand together on the gym floor at BV Northwest. They’re shooting baskets. It’s April 2009. Weeks earlier, Glenn had finished his first season as the Huskies’ girls basketball coach, and now he was inspecting his young pupil’s form. The arms and follow-through were sound, same as always. But the legs were still weak. Maggie Meier’s recovery was still just a few months old, and some things would come back more quickly than others. After leaving the hospital in early February, Maggie had spent nearly two months going to full-time rehab, relearning how to do simple tasks like brushing her hair or washing her face. But the insurance soon ran out, and Maggie had to return to high school while still functioning at a first-grade level. Her days were spent working with Rochelle Spicer, a teacher at BV Northwest. Together, they worked on simple tasks and goals, like improving speech patterns and understanding social cues. “She would hold up a picture of an apple,” Maggie says, “and I’d have to know it was an apple.”And then there were the mid-day shooting sessions with Glenn, time defined by small improvements and tiny bits of progress. Here was a young girl that had talent and experience, Glenn remembers thinking, one with whom he’d shared high-level conversations just months before. And now she was back to square one. But even in those moments, Glenn could see what the Meiers had seen back in that hospital room. “Her muscles,” Glenn says, “did not forget how to shoot.”
Maggie Meier is sitting at the kitchen table, sorting through a stack of old photos and hazy memories. It’s mid-January, and Maggie’s older sister, Jacquie, is at her left. Even now, Maggie has trouble remembering the early stages of her infection — or certain events from before it set in. In some ways, it’s as if she’s lived two lives. And her second one has been busy.She attended summer school the past three years to catch up; she’s now on track to graduate and was inducted into the National Honor Society last fall. Her father once pleaded with her to slow down — “Just have a normal summer,” he said — but her competitive nature won out. She returned to the basketball court, earning varsity minutes as the Huskies reached the 6A state tournament during her junior year. This season, her versatile skill set has helped the Huskies to a 9-6 record and a victory over EKL rival Gardner Edgerton on Tuesday. “She has the ability to post her girl up,” Glenn says, “and take them outside and shoot a jump shot.” Last year, after the trip to state, Graf, the neurologist, called the Meiers with a special message: He’d seen the state-tournament box score. “She is truly a miracle,” Graf told Steve Meier. “We don’t have kids who have what she had and come out to be what Maggie is today. It just doesn’t happen.”Next fall, Maggie plans to attend a small college. Maybe somewhere close to family. “I want to major in special education,” she says. Moments later, Maggie’s attention turns back to the photo album. She starts to lean in and inspect it, triggering memories and emotions that might not even be there. She looks at one photo: It’s the day she returned from the hospital. She’s sitting in a wheelchair, her parents surrounding her as she hoists a shot in their driveway. “You can see my form in this one,” she says.
