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Football family helps former ECU coach


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By Nathan Summers
The Daily Reflector

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Although no one can win his battle but him, Frank Orgel is thankful he's not fighting it alone. Not by a long shot.

The former football coach at East Carolina, Auburn and Georgia is recovering with high hopes from stem-cell surgery — the best weapon he's got to topple the motor neuron disease that has robbed Orgel of much of his mobility.

But the trying process has been aided by members of Orgel's considerable coaching family tree. The staggering expense of the former coach's medical needs has been supplemented — mostly thanks to word of mouth — by Orgel's former teammates, players and fellow coaches.

In addition to the physical trappings of such a procedure, it's a surgery that requires some long, hard miles to get.

Orgel first flew to San Diego, then proceeded 60 miles south to a Mexican biotherapy hospital, where Orgel said he was injected with more than two million cells.

Becuase the surgery is not legal in the United States, it is also not covered by any insurance. That means the grueling journey to get the surgery he hopes will be a lifesaver was only half the battle. Now, as Orgel recovers and hopes the cells will respond, he must face the familiar burden of financing his ordeal.

"I'm doing all I can do," said Orgel, who served as a linebackers coach in the mid to late 1970s at ECU before the Warner Robbins, Ga., native moved on with head coach Pat Dye to Auburn. "I had a stem-cell implant a few weeks ago and at this point, it's kind of wait and see. But I've had a lot of former players and coaches that have rescued me."

Orgel said the stem-cell process included a series of intravenous doses and several shots over a two-hour procedure.

It will be much longer before Orgel knows if the implant was successful or not in repairing tissue and muscle.

"It will take a few months to see what it's going to do," he said. "In the meantime I'm on a strict diet, I'm taking supplements and doing physical therapy."

Former Pirate staffer and current Greenville resident Ken Hutchison teamed with Dye recently to hammer out a fund to help Orgel finance his treatment for the disease.

Now, Orgel said support for his fight has become galvanized, making a high-risk procedure seem worth it.

"The insurance doesn't cover it. Sometimes you have to do things you don't have a choice about," Oregl said. "There is no cure for what I've got. That means you're in a bind."

Thanks to the efforts of Dye, Hutchison and former ECU players like Terry Gallaher who have kept tabs on Orgel over the years, the word is out, and suddenly the coach has an army of people on his side while he waits.

Orgel said the phone calls, letters and visits have buoyed his spirits and spurred what, so far, has been an impressive rebound. Already, Orgel said he has trimmed his pain medication from about 10 pills a day to just one.

While he admits it's still questionable whether or not the injected cells will restore mobility in the left side of his body, he said he's enjoyed the lift he's gotten from so many names and faces from his football past.

Some have even been household names.

"This past Thursday, Bo Jackson came in and spent about three days with me," Orgel said of the former Auburn and NFL great. "He had to come to Atlanta for a meeting, so he came here to see me and I got him on a couple of quail hunts. I went out on the Jeep with him."

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