Ailing in a hospital hundreds of miles from home during the dead of last winter, 16-year-old Lindsay Eide had plenty of reasons to be blue. After all, she should have been back in Bend, completing her junior year in high school and fine-tuning her swing for golf season.

But grim as her life seemed at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, Eide was surrounded by reminders of how fortunate she really was.

There were kids with cancer and leukemia – they were bald because of chemotherapy,” says Eide, now 17. There were kids on their death beds, kids younger than me. It was hard to be around. What I had didn’t seem serious compared to those kids.”

But what Eide had was serious enough: a condition known as reflex neurovascular dystrophy.

RND stems from a short circuit in the spinal cord, whereby neurovascular nerves force the blood vessels to constrict, decreasing the amount of vital oxygen received by tissue such as muscles, bones and skin.

The result: pain. Intense, persistent, debilitating pain.

For about a year,” Eide recalls, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t have pain.”

Amazingly, she has fought off the condition. And she has fought her way back to elite status among Oregon’s junior women’s golfers.

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Eide knows a lot about pain. When she was 14, she endured a harsh case of toxic shock syndrome, complete with the accompanying high fever, skin rash and vomiting. Just as she was recovering, in the fall of her freshman year at Bend High School, a violent reaction to a routine tetanus shot sent her to the emergency room.

My parents took me to the hospital … I don’t even remember the ride,” she recounts.

I had like the worst headache possible. My eyes were pounding, and I began vomiting. It was terrible. I remember telling my mom to say a prayer for me. I really thought I was going to die. It felt that bad.”

Doctors tested for possible causes of the reaction, and did a spinal tap to check for meningitis. The tests ruled out meningitis but otherwise were inconclusive. Whatever the cause, the episode left Eide’s body weak and her immune system tapped out, which she suspects opened the door to RND.

At the start of golf season in her sophomore year, she began to experience soreness in her neck and painful knots in the muscles of her back – discomfort bad enough that she no longer could carry her golf bag and had to resort to a pull cart.

Then she began to feel inexplicable pain in her hips. She had problems walking as the pain spread to her knees and then to her ankles. She missed most of the golf season, but she played through the pain for one tournament to qualify for district competition. And though she had hardly played in months, Eide placed second overall and led Bend High to the Intermountain Conference team championship.

I knew I could still play,” she recalls. But healthwise, I was just not getting better. My muscles and joints hurt, and I was losing mobility and strength because I couldn’t run or work out.”

Doctors were at a loss to explain Eide’s problem. She was prescribed an assortment of medications and treatments – including steroids – to combat her symptoms, some of which closely resembled those associated with rheumatoid arthritis.

But nothing worked. By last fall, Eide’s outlook on life was bleak.

I was losing hope because it just kept getting worse,” she reflects. I lost my motivation to do anything. I’d kind of given up on everything, actually.”

Her classmates noticed something different about their usually vibrant friend, and it wasn’t just that Eide was using a cane to get around at school.

They saw a huge change in me,” she says. I was really depressed. I stayed home on weekends. I didn’t want to talk with anybody, even on the phone.”

It got so bad that for a time Lindsay’s father, Tim, had to carry her up the stairs to bed at night.

I felt like the only people who knew what I was going through,” she remembers, was my family.”

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In late January, the mystery of Eide’s ailment began to unravel. A clue surfaced one day when her grandfather observed, while massaging her tender feet, that one foot felt abnormally warm while the other was cold to the touch. Eide’s doctor recognized the condition as a possible symptom of reflex neurovascular dystrophy and directed her to Seattle, where doctors at Children’s Hospital promptly confirmed the hunch.

It was really a relief just to know what it was,” says Tim Eide. RND is hard to diagnose.”

And every bit as hard to overcome, as Lindsay discovered during four weeks of grueling therapy.

It’s so hard, they won’t even let the parents watch,” says Karen Eide, Lindsay’s mother. They don’t want the parents to see their kids crying.”

Treatment for RND involves getting the patient – frequently a child or young adult – to begin using his or her body in a normal” way, breaking the body’s abnormal” reflex through intense exercise designed to retrain the nerves.

RND usually affects a limb, such as a foot or a leg, and most patients experience significant improvement after about a week of therapy.

But Lindsay had it head to toe,” says her father.

We went up (to Seattle) with the idea that it would be a week,” Lindsay recalls. Instead, it was a month.”

Step 1 in the process was taking her off the heavy doses of medication that had helped make her life bearable – but had done nothing to combat the cause of the problem.

Withdrawal from the drugs at first made her so sick that she couldn’t even eat. But within days she was feeling better and working like never before in RND therapy.

It was like boot camp, really,” Lindsay recounts. The therapists were pretty demanding.”

By her third week at Children’s Hospital, she could see and feel progress. By the fourth week, she could run, work out on a stair-climbing machine and ride a stationary bike.

It was a huge change,” Eide beams.

Karen Eide chokes up when she talks about her daughter’s therapy experience.

She just wanted to get well so bad,” says Karen. I can’t begin to tell you how hard she worked.”

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A month of rigorous therapy, however, was only the beginning of Lindsay’s road back. When she returned home in early March, there was a heap of schoolwork waiting. She had to maintain her workouts – a minimum of two hours every day at the gym. And there was golf practice after school as well.

Rare was the night she would get home before 9 or 9:30. And then it was time for homework.

As challenging as her schedule had become, it was a small price to pay for a return to normalcy.

It was great just to see her back living the life of a regular teen-ager,” says her father.

But Lindsay is hardly regular” – not on a golf course, anyway.

I got back (to Bend) just before our first tournament,” she recalls, and I came out playing the best I’ve ever played.”

Did she ever. Eide capped a splendid spring season by winning the Intermountain Conference individual title and leading Bend High to the district championship. She then played marvelously at the state tournament, placing fifth and, along with senior Amy Mombert (third place), leading the Lava Bears to the Class 4A team title by a whopping 13-stroke margin.

Lindsay had a great season,” says Mark Tichenor, her coach at Bend High. With all she had going on, she didn’t miss a match, didn’t miss a practice. What a trouper.”

Tichenor clearly was moved by Eide’s comeback.

In my 24 years of coaching, I don’t think I’ve seen a better example of a kid playing through pain like Lindsay’s been through,” he says.

Most people would have given up the sport and just tried to get well. But you realize now how much of a focal point and a driving force golf is in her life.

It’s just an unbelievable example of courage.”

Bob Garza shares Tichenor’s take. Garza is the head professional at High Desert Golf and Learning Center in Bend, and for the past year and a half he has served as Eide’s personal instructor. He saw his pupil go from gloom to glory.

There’d be times she would come out and hit five or six shots,” Garza recalls, and you could tell she was in real pain. You could just tell by the look on her face. She’d almost be in tears. I might suggest that, hey, maybe we don’t have to do this today. But she’d get out there and try. That’s the type of person she is. Lindsay has a lot of guts.”

Garza detected Eide’s emotional torment, too, as doctors tried in vain to determine the cause of her physical grief.

She went through a lot, not really getting any answers to what was wrong with her,” says Garza.

That was before the RND diagnosis, and the Children’s Hospital stay.

When they finally pinpointed it, it was huge burden off her,” Garza recalls. When I saw her again, she was smiling, had a spring in her step and was ready to go. It was definitely a different Lindsay.”

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The success of Eide’s spring has continued into summer. Last month, she finished a solid second at both the Oregon Golf Association Junior World Qualifier and the OGA Junior Stroke Play Championship. This past week, she played into the semifinal round of the Junior Match Play state championships, qualifying in the process as one of just four Oregon players for the Girls Junior World Cup Matches next month in Boise, Idaho.

By Tuesday, Eide will be in San Diego, one of 144 girls from around the globe teeing it up at prestigious Torrey Pines Golf Course in the Junior World Golf Championships.

Her busy summer schedule includes a host of other high-caliber tournaments throughout the West. All along the way, she will be scouted and courted by college coaches, a number of whom have already come calling with offers.

Yet for all the places she’s going, it doesn’t seem possible that Eide can go as far as she has come in the past six months.

I can’t believe it,” admits her mother. I just can’t believe it.”

We always believed Lindsay would get through all this,” says Tim Eide. But there were times. … We’re lucky to have had a lot of people praying for her.”

Tim said the Eides were reluctant at first to go public with Lindsay’s story.

It’s hard, because we’d really like to just put it all behind us and move on,” he said. But someone else out there might be going through the same kind of thing, and they might benefit from knowing what Lindsay’s been through.”

Bill Bigelow is Bulletin sports editor.