Jeep-ers! Birthday parade honors sight-impaired teen

MOSES LAKE — It’s become a thing in the last year: birthday drive-by parades.

Which is why, at a little after 1 p.m. Sunday, Dorothy Street, north of Moses Lake, was jammed with vehicles — mostly Jeeps, though a few other cars and trucks, including one lone silver Prius bringing up the rear, joined the parade.

“I was asked if I could do a Jeep parade for Jacob’s 15th birthday,” said parade organizer Bridget Tanguay. “So, I posted to a couple of private groups, and it got shared.”

All told, in maybe half an hour, 117 vehicles drove past – engines roaring, horns honking, drivers and passengers cheering and waving.

“It just turned out so huge. I am just ecstatic,” Tanguay said.

It was all to honor Jacob Reindl, who turned 15 on Sunday, and who lost his sight to a brain tumor.

“About two years ago, we went to some doctors and found out that I had a brain tumor, and then we had my surgery,” Reindl said. “I had lots of headaches.”

According to Reindl’s mother, Coralee Ramm, beginning in January 2019, Reindl started having some serious behavioral problems in school, as well as the headaches. At first, the doctors who saw him thought he was reacting to the food he ate, or was maybe manifesting mental illness. Only after Reindl started losing his sight the following July did physicians take the possibility of a brain tumor seriously, Ramm said.

“I honestly thought it was a brain tumor the whole time,” Ramm said. “We had a CT scan that night, and found out he had a big brain tumor. About the size of a baked potato.”

“All of it’s gone,” Reindl said of the tumor.

It took four surgeries and treatments to clear out what Ramm said was a hemangiopericytoma, which according to the National Institutes of Health’s rare diseases website, is a very rare, slow-growing tumor of the small blood vessels. It wasn’t malignant, but it was treated like it was, Ramm said, so in the process, the forehead bone was removed to get at the tumor, was killed by radiation treatments and will be replaced with a specially-made piece of plastic during a fifth surgery later this year.

That’s why Reindl wears a bright blue helmet – because part of his skull is missing.

As a result of the first surgery, Ramm said Reindl also lost his vision and sense of smell, and is having to learn to read braille and walk with a cane. He’s also managed to resume his studies at Endeavor Middle School and made the honor roll this year, she said.

“He’s above where they thought he would be at this point. He’s doing excellent,” Ramm said. “He’s stronger than I am. I still get weak sometimes. I have my emotions.”

“It’s easy,” Reindl said of the adjustments he is making to his new life. “You just gotta want to do it, and that makes it a whole lot easier to have a positive attitude to get through everything.”

Reindl said he’s not completely sightless. He can distinguish between light and shadows, and some days he can see a “pinhole” of light and other days something much bigger than a pinhole. In fact, it’s possible he may regain his sight, though no one really knows right now.

“And I have days where I can count my fingers,” he said.

It’s hard for a young man who likes to work with his hands. In fact, sitting in the family’s gravel driveway is an old purple Jeep Reindl has been working on.

“It’ll take a while, but we’re getting there,” he said of the Jeep sitting next to a lime green demolition derby car. “It’s hands on, and it’s learning everything about what you drive.”

“Anything hands on I like to do,” Reindl added.

However, until Reindl gets “his forehead fixed,” Ramm said he’s going to have sit out his favorite physical activities — skateboarding, riding his bike, and four-wheeling, especially with the Sand Scorpions ORV Group down at the dunes.

“It’s going to be a quiet summer,” she said.

Reindl said he’s been learning to play the guitar and ukulele, though in the process, he’s also learned not to try and read braille with the same hand he fingers the fretboard with.

“That puts callouses on this hand,” he said, wiggling his left fingers. “As long as I put the callouses on (the right) hand, I’m good.”

Ramm said the Sand Scorpions ORV Group, of which the entire family have long been members, have become the family’s “rock, our support” and reached out to other four-wheeler groups and communities across the country for prayer and support.

“We have people praying in Colorado, people praying in Florida, people who don’t even know us who have heard through the grapevine who are praying, and we hold on to that,” she said.

“Amen to that,” Reindl added.

And that means there’s always people checking in on them, Ramm said, which Reindl explained can get a little annoying at times.

“Even though they get on her toes. And my toes. They’re always checking on us. Everywhere I go, they’re always checking on us, ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’” he said.

And right now, both Ramm and Reindl hold on to the hope of with the tumor removed, and a surgery for a “new forehead” scheduled, something resembling ordinary life can resume. Reindl gets head scans every three months to make sure the tumor hasn’t come back, and so far, so good.

Because Reindl just turned 15, and despite the last several years, he is upbeat, optimistic and can see an entire life in front of him waiting to be lived.

“If it’s raining out, I still see the sun,” he said. “There’s a lot more to achieve.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.