ALTADENA — The first fights of the Golden Gloves boxing tournament were getting underway in the Loma Alta Park gym. Down the hallway, in an empty room, coach Fausto De La Torre sat in a folding chair facing Roger Gomez-Peralta, one of his amateur boxers at Villa Parke Boxing in Pasadena.
Away from the bustling gym, it was a quiet Thursday night as De La Torre began to wrap Gomez-Peralta’s hands in pristine white gauze.
“I try to calm his nerves,” De La Torre said. “I want him to go away from preparing for a fight for just 15, 20 minutes.”
It’s a peaceful moment that almost didn’t come to be. When Gomez-Peralta, now 18, was a kindergartner, he was diagnosed with encephalitis, a rare neurological disorder that causes inflammation in the brain.
One morning Gomez-Peralta woke up and told his parents he couldn’t get out of bed. His mom, Maria, gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he was trying to get out of going to school, and let him stay home.
When it became clear he had lost the ability to walk, they took him to the hospital, where staff recommended immediately that he go to Children’s Hospital.
“We started to panic,” Rogelio Gomez, Gomez-Peralta’s father, said. “They didn’t tell us anything and that we needed to take an ambulance. We thought it was something simple.”
Doctors told the family that no medications were available and that the last encephalitis patient they saw took more than 20 years to recover. Gomez-Peralta was hospitalized for a month, and although he remembers little from this time, his parents recall him being morose.
“He was letting go of himself,” his mother, Maria Gomez, said. “At one point the doctors told us he’s letting himself die.”
After nearly a year of physical therapy, Gomez-Peralta began to make progress. Through the therapy and encouragement from his family, he slowly regained mobility. He spent most of first grade in a wheelchair and with an aide who helped him with everyday…
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