12/26/2004 Donovan's Christmas surprise: Soccer star's aid heals family crisis By PAUL OBERJUERGE, Staff Writer When Landon Donovan called from Chicago, actress Bianca Kajlich finally was able to tell her boyfriend of two years that her brother was near death in Prague after losing his legs in a subway accident. She concedes, however, she hardly could string together a coherent sentence. ``I had been crying hysterically for hours,'' she said. ``Landon called the minute he landed, as he always does. I was so hysterical, at first he thought I was laughing. ``Then he said, `How do you know?' and `Who told you this?' And I lost it and screamed at him, and he just said, `I'll call you back' and hung up. ``And I thought, `Well, that just exposed another loser in my life.' Because I've had relationships go bad under stress. I thought this had just become another one. They say a person's true colors come out under pressure, right? ``And two minutes later Landon called back and said, `I am literally getting right back on a plane and flying right back to you.''' With that, the Redlands native -- and the nation's top soccer player since the 2002 World Cup -- began a 2003 Christmas season of sacrifice and generosity that astonished the Kajlich family, leaving them both moved and deeply grateful to a young athlete whom, at the time, they barely knew. Donovan arranged and paid for five flights to Prague. He bought gifts for distraught and disoriented family members. He comforted Bianca, her mother and her sister. He consoled Bianca's critically injured brother, Andre. He contributed to fund-raisers for Andre's rehabilitation. ``I get emotional when I think about it,'' said Dr. Relo Kajlich, father of Bianca and Andre. ``I have so much respect for Landon. He did things I will never forget.'' Bianca's family, and Landon, are together this Christmas in Edmonds, Wash., in far more joyous circumstances than the dreary and fearful Christmas of 2003 -- when Andre was still a shockingly injured patient in a Prague hospital. This year, they will celebrate Andre's survival. And being together. ``I liked him when I met him,'' said Patti Kajlich, Bianca's mother, of Donovan. ``But from the moment he came into the hospital room in Prague and stood at the foot of my son's bed, I've loved him.'' --- Andre Kajlich, now 25, last year went to Prague, ancient and beautiful capital of the Czech Republic, to study chemistry. On the evening of Dec. 6, he and two roommates put on a dinner for a multinational group of students. Andre did the cooking. He has a talent for it. It snowed that night, the first of the season, and Andre wasn't keen to go out. But the other young guys talked him around, and they had an impromptu snowball fight. Andre remembers the snowball fight but nothing after it -- until he woke up days later in Prague's Central Military Hospital. As best the Kajlichs can reconstruct events, the students visited two taverns and talked and laughed deep into the night. Andre's roommates went home about 3 a.m., but he stayed out with another friend. They had breakfast, and at about 7 a.m. on Dec. 7, Andre and the friend went their separate ways in a near-empty Prague subway station. Andre boarded a train, apparently missed his station stop, and backtracked. When he got to the Museum station, a transfer point deep under the Prague streets, he somehow wound up on the train tracks, several feet below the subway platform. No one witnessed his descent onto the tracks. There is no video surveillance of the platform. ``Maybe he fell asleep, maybe he fell, maybe he was attacked; there's a lot of crime there,'' Patti said. ``Andre doesn't remember, and we'll never know.'' Within minutes, a train arrived and Andre was terribly injured. Patti, a nursing instructor, said Andre's right leg was severed above the knee on the spot. His left leg ``was disarticulated. Yanked out of the socket'' (and removed enroute to the hospital). The train driver saw Andre moments before the train struck him, and he called for help. An emergency medical technician was quickly on the scene, and he kept Andre from bleeding to death in those first critical minutes. The Kajlichs later saw photos of the EMT lying flat on the platform, reaching under the train, working on Andre. ``He saved Andre's life,'' Patti said. Still, Andre had no blood pressure when he reached Prague's only trauma center. The Kajlichs were told Andre received 40 units of blood while they worked on him -- about four times the entire amount in an adult male's body. `A NIGHTMARE' While Andre's life hung in the balance, word of the accident got out slowly. Prague medical authorities didn't find identification on the critically injured young man. His roommates worried about him, when he didn't turn up by midday, and began calling hospitals and police. Thanks to their description of his clothes, he was tentatively identified late in the day. One of his roommates confirmed the ID by going into his hospital room -- before being told Andre had lost his legs. The roommates found a phone number for Andre's parents in suburban Seattle, and dialed it at about midnight, in Prague. At 3 p.m. PST, a family in Washington went into shock. ``It seems like a nightmare now,'' Patti Kajlich said. ``At that moment, I had trouble remembering the name of any airline.'' Andre's father, 63, a retired anaesthesiologist, decided to fly the next day to Prague. He is a native of neighboring Slovakia, and speaks Czech. He also had a valid passport; Patti and Bianca did not. That is when Donovan, 22, got involved. After his snap decision to fly immediately back to Bianca, she and Donovan were in constant touch with her parents, in Edmonds. Bianca, 27, was adamant her father not fly in the main compartment of a jet. He has a heart condition, one that has prompted three heart surgeries and an early retirement. She didn't want him in a small seat in a crowded plane for a very long trip in a very grave crisis. Donovan, meanwhile, was on the computer and on the phone, looking for a seat from Seattle to Prague the next day. He found a flight with an opening in first class. It would cost about $15,000 in cash, as Donovan recalled. ``I asked them how many (bonus miles) that would be,'' Donovan said, and they said, `125,000.' Then I asked them how many miles I had accrued. And they said 126,300, or something like that. It was amazing, how close it was. I got the ticket.'' Bianca called home and told her father that he would be flying Swiss Air to Prague, first class. Landon had arranged it, she said, and he was not to give it another thought. Dr. Kajlich was distracted and distressed, but grateful for the extra space and special treatment in the air as he rushed to see his only son. DIPLOMACY HELPS Patti and Bianca Kajlich had expired passports. Only through the intervention of a friend in Washington D.C. were they able to get them renewed in one day. On Dec. 9, Patti and younger daughter Anya, a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, flew to Los Angeles International Airport, where they were met by Bianca -- and by Landon, who also had been busy. ``Landon had gone on a shopping spree,'' Patti said. ``He bought CD players, CDs, magazines, snacks, anything you would need on a long flight, and it was like Christmas. ``We went to Bianca's house (in Sherman Oaks) and all of us stayed up all night crying and packing and opening these little goodies from Landon.'' On Dec. 10, the Kajlich women and Donovan flew out of LAX, bound for Prague via Minneapolis and Amsterdam. All of it arranged and paid for by Donovan. ``When Bianca and I were talking about it,'' Patti recalled, ``she said, `Mom, we're arranging for the flights out,' and I said, `Do you want credit-card numbers?' and she said, 'Landon is taking care of it all.' ``I was so relieved not to have to be dealing with it.'' As Bianca consoled her mother and sister, Donovan also handled all logistics. ``He was the man,'' said Patti, 56. ``I was only too willing and relieved to let him do it. He was that pillar for all of us to lean on, and the three of us let him. He just took over, and he knew what to do, instinctively, and it was quiet and unassuming and just so generous. ``We nicknamed him Herr Cruise Director, and we still call him that, or HCD for short, because he was totally in charge of that whole trip.'' Said Bianca: ``We were in a fog. He carried everyone's boarding pass and showed us where to go. He was so great.'' How much did those four roundtrip tickets cost? Donovan would not say, but an internet search indicated that a similar December itinerary, purchased only a few days before travel, would cost at least $2,100. Each. Said Relo: ``It was welcome help, because we are not rich people.'' Said Patti: ``Whenever I wanted to thank Landon or make a fuss, he would have none of that. He said it was done, and no big deal. He's like that.'' `WE'RE GOING TO LOSE HIM' Things were grim in Prague. Patti counted eight intravenous lines in her son. He was unconscious, in a medically induced coma, but had seemed to stabilize. Then infection set in. Andre was given five antibiotics, but he was ravaged by fever that spiked to 105 degrees. Czech medical personnel could not determine the infection's source. ``We thought we were going to lose him,'' Patti said. More than a week after the fever's onset, Prague doctors discovered a pocket of infected fluid near one of Andre's lungs. They inserted a tube to drain the fluid. After another week, the fever abated. While Andre fought for his life, relatives were allowed to see him only two at a time, and only in sterilized medical outfits. They stayed with him in round-the-clock shifts, so one of them would be there when he regained consciousness. Bianca and Landon took upon themselves the jobs of shopping for groceries and little gifts, including Christmas presents for other family members. One of the items they purchased was for Andre -- a violin at a music shop that was about to close. Andre had played the violin in his youth, and Bianca decided ``when he woke up that he should see something to remind him his life was not over.'' Patti remembers the first time Landon came into Andre's room. He stopped near the foot of the bed, she said. She told him he could come closer, if he liked. ``He said he was fine where he was, and I realized how much of a shock it must be for someone his age to see my son like that.'' Bianca and Landon flew back to Los Angeles on Dec. 14 so she could return to work on the set of a UPN sitcom named ``Rock Me Baby,'' which had virtually shut down since she had gotten word of the accident. On the flight back, she asked Landon if the scene in the hospital room had frightened him. ``He said, `No.' I said, `You could have touched him, it's fine.' We had been told he could probably hear us or feel our touch. ``And Landon said something amazing. He said, `He was in a coma, and I wanted the touches and vibrations he received to be from his family members, and not from someone else.' And that was really cool.'' --- Landon and Bianca returned to Prague on Dec. 30. Andre was conscious. He knew his legs were gone. Generally, his interaction with his sister's boyfriend was brief and airy. Andre could not speak, because he still had a tracheotomy tube in his throat. He communicated through hand signals or by writing. But Andre recalls something Landon told him, during those hazy days. ``It was kind of a funny statement,'' Andre said recently, ``coming from him. But he told me, `Limbs are just an extension of who you are, and you're still the same person at the core of it all, and what's happened is not that important.' ``And he himself admitted it was kind of funny, considering he makes a living using his limbs. But he was super supportive.'' CHRISTMAS AGAIN Andre improved enough that he could be moved, and on Jan. 9 he was taken by air ambulance back to Seattle. He has prosthetic legs, and hopes for a future in biochemistry. Landon was to celebrate Christmas Eve with Andre and the Kajlichs, in Edmonds. Today, he and his family, which has traveled from Redlands, will spend the day with Landon's aunt in another Seattle suburb. Landon and Bianca will stay with the Kajlichs through the new year. Landon is scheduled to join his new club team, Bayer Leverkusen of Germany, on Jan. 3 for a training camp in the Canary Islands. A year after Andre's accident, the Kajlich family is perhaps even more grateful to Landon Donovan than they were last Christmas. Said Bianca: ``I think it's amazing when human beings overcome their innate selfishness. Landon has always been different. He understands that your job doesn't make you a great person.'' Said Patti: ``I cannot find words to describe his selflessness. He possesses qualities not common in most human beings, let alone a young man of his age and talent.'' Talent. Athletic talent. The idea that a pro athlete should be so giving is what seems to stick with the Kajlichs. Said Relo: ``He is a sportsman, and we know what they are. But I found out he is very intelligent, and very honest, and he cares for his family greatly.'' Said Andre: ``I don't know many athletes, but Landon does not fit under the stereotypical professional athlete. You could spend a good amount of time with him and not think it's his occupation. He's a modest guy, and interested in things other than sports. You can tell he's caring, and interested in the people around him -- and you kind of figure self-absorption is a common attribute of guys who are praised all day.'' Donovan says what he did was no big deal. Just helping out in the way he could -- a world traveler and a well-paid young man, thanks to soccer. ``I would like to think that most people would do the same thing in that situation,'' he said. ``I don't know, maybe that's not always the case, but that was my reaction.'' Said Bianca: ``What's so amazing and unique about Landon ... he's an athlete, and we have the impression of a macho jock who drinks his beer and plays his game. But it's like he's the anti-star, someone who cares about others and knows how important family is. ``It was made clear how much of a big heart he has when he put everything aside to help our family.'' Said Andre: ``I'm looking forward to getting together with him for Christmas.''