(From Daytona Beach News-Journal article)

ORMOND BEACH -- What happened to two Stetson University students who have been schoolmates since fifth grade is about as rare as being struck by lightning.

A potentially fatal and rare syndrome -- occurring in 1 out of 100,000 people -- hit them both: Kyle Hays of DeBary in the fall of 2009 and Jared Penney of DeLeon Springs this past September.

So, as Jared, 20, struggles back from the brink, the two have made a plan to parlay their potentially fatal bad luck into reality show stardom. The boyhood friends é want to be an unstoppable force in the TV show "The Amazing Race" as two men who defeated Guillain-Barré syndrome.

"If I get better," said Jared, who has been struggling with his transformation from an active young adult who shot hoops and bench-pressed 200 pounds regularly to a hospital patient who can barely lift a Dixie cup.

His father, Bill Penney, jumped in quickly to add: "When you get better."

Hoping to help Jared's recovery, Kyle, 21, makes the hour-long drive from Stetson to Florida Hospital Oceanside once or twice a week to offer Jared what sympathy and wisdom he garnered from lying in the same place almost exactly a year ago. And there's plenty of gallows hospital humor to lighten what was Jared's 72nd consecutive hospital day when Kyle stopped in Tuesday.

"I signed a 'do not resuscitate' order today," Jared said, without cracking a smile, explaining that he had surgery on an ingrown toenail earlier.

Kyle, who attended St. Barnabas School in DeLand and Warner Christian Academy in South Daytona with Jared, did a double take and laughed, "What? By accident?"

"No, I clicked on it -- who's going to die during toenail surgery?" Jared said. "One in a million?"

Kyle cracked back, nodding: "About the same chances of getting Guillain-Barré."

The syndrome is best known as a rare reaction to flu vaccination. The 1976 vaccination against swine flu caused an unusual number of cases of the disease. But why these two men, who also had classes in common at Stetson, came down with the syndrome exactly a year apart seems to be a total fluke, according to their doctor, David Gaughan, a rehabilitation medicine specialist.

"I think it will end up being a mystery," Dr. Gaughan said. "Two is not a trend. It's an oddity."

The syndrome occurs because a particular kind of virus triggers a reaction that causes the body's own infection-fighting cells to start attacking the myelin sheath that is part of the body's outer nervous system. The white blood cells go rogue and start picking apart a vital part of these nerves. And that leads to extreme weakness because some of these muscles and nerves don't function with a damaged myelin sheath, Gaughan explained.

Kyle's case caused him to weaken gradually. Jared remembers him being on the basketball court at Stetson complaining that he didn't feel right.

"We were all saying, 'Kyle, stop being a big baby,' " Jared said, smiling ruefully in his hospital bed.

Kyle laughed and said, "Karma."

Over a week, Kyle, then a junior at Stetson, started experiencing numbness in his feet that began moving up his body. A visit to a back specialist ended up with his admittance to Halifax Health Medical Center in Daytona Beach. A month later, he was at Florida Hospital Oceanside. In contrast, Jared's experience this year -- also his junior year -- was more sudden.

Two days after recovering from a bout with the flu, Jared woke up on Sept 20 unable to feel his legs. He said he was punching them, but couldn't feel anything. His dad, who is the associate vice president of information technology at Stetson, told him to drink some Gatorade. Twenty minutes later, though, Jared was saying he couldn't feel his hips. An ambulance was summoned and he went to Florida Hospital DeLand.

While at the hospital, Jared told his parents that his stomach felt funny. And then, when a technician who had given him a breathing test was just 35 feet away, Jared couldn't breathe.

He was immediately sedated and then intubated so a machine could do the breathing for him.

As Bill and Vicky Penney got more details about their son's condition, a thought dawned on them: This is exactly what Kyle had a year earlier.

"At first I thought, 'There can't be two people with this,' she said. "I never heard of it until Kyle had it."

The Penneys have watched their son, who hasn't been in the hospital since his birth, drop from 178 pounds to a low of 130 pounds. He's back up to 144 pounds now and beginning to be able to propel his own wheelchair. But his hands still hurt so that he spends a good part of his time outside of physical therapy with them resting on towels.

His father has moved into the bed next to him. Jared said that having people visit him on a regular basis is helping break up the monotony of his current existence.

"And there's plenty of that," he said.

Dr. Gaughan said he expects Jared will soon be back shooting hoops with Kyle.

"The odds are very good that he's going to be fine," he said.

Jared is hoping to see some result from the therapy he completed this week.

"All I want for Christmas is my legs," he said.

Father's Blog

Jared Penney's dad, Bill, blogs about his son's experience at bpenney.blogspot.com