He’s in Control After Losing It Years Ago : Prep basketball: El Toro’s Jason Senik, who at 9 was struck by a virus that left him with no feeling in his entire body, today is the Chargers’ leading scorer and rebounder.

By the time a boy reaches the fourth grade, he has mastered the art of the Phantom Illness.

For as long as there have been math tests and history homework, mothers have heard reluctant-to-rise sons explain why they can’t get out of bed and trudge off to class.

But mothers can pick out a phony excuse as easily as a kid can fake a cough. Get up, get dressed, get going.

Jason Senik didn’t have a phony excuse, though. The problem was, Senik didn’t know what he had. All he knew when he woke up on a regular fourth-grade day eight years ago was that his feet were numb. No feeling at all.

That’s something a mother listens to.

“It wasn’t like I told her I had a headache or something and wanted to stay home and watch TV,” Senik said. “My feet felt like they were asleep and wouldn’t wake up. It didn’t hurt, but it just felt really weird.”

By the time Senik and his mother got to the doctor’s office, the numbness had spread to his calves. The diagnosis was quick, but not painless: Senik, then 9, was afflicted with Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Guillain-Barre is caused by a virus which attacks the nervous system, destroying nerve endings throughout the body. Victims are left with no feeling or strength.

As is usually the case with Guillain-Barre, the virus spread quickly through Senik’s body as he lay hospitalized, leaving him without any sensation within a matter of days.

“I was lucky because a lot of people who get it have to be put on respirators, and it can kill older people,” Senik said. “I could still breathe on my own, but it still scared me. It wasn’t fun.”

Today, Senik shows no signs of having spent nearly a year of his life relearning how to control his body in movements as simple as opening and closing his hands. Now a senior at El Toro High School, the 6-foot-7 Senik is the Chargers’ leading scorer (14.1) and rebounder (7.6) and a top small-college basketball prospect.

In South Coast League play, Senik is averaging 15.1 points and 10 rebounds, and continues to impress El Toro Coach Tim Travers.

“Jason has been absolutely consistent,” Travers said. “Last year, he surprised me because I didn’t expect him to contribute a lot, but he was mentally prepared to play every day and became our sixth man.

“He got the Most Improved Player award last year, and he’s kept building on that.”

As suddenly as the Guillain-Barre virus attacks, the body begins making repairs to the nerve endings. Ten days after being hospitalized, some feeling began returning in Senik’s extremities, and he was allowed to go home.

But he was far from recovered.

“Even after the feeling started coming back, everything was really awkward and out of sync,” Senik said. “I lost a lot of weight and was a really sickly-looking kid. It took a long time, almost a year, before I could do most things for myself.”

El Toro assistant coach Darren Teasck can relate to the frustration and difficulty of rehabilitating from Guillain-Barre. Teasck, who played at El Toro and graduated in 1988, was stricken with the virus the summer after graduation.

Like Senik, Teasck spent 10 days in the hospital before going home to begin therapy. Unlike Senik, Teasck knew a little about Guillain-Barre before it attacked him, because Teasck and Senik grew up on the same street in El Toro.

“I knew Jason when he was going through therapy, and I remember watching him go from crutches to walking to playing basketball,” Teasck said. “It seemed then like it must have been really hard on a 9-year-old kid to have to go through that. Well, I was 18 when it hit me, and I can tell you, it’s hard on anybody.”

Senik and Teasck laugh a little now when talking about the tedium of having to re-teach themselves how to stand up and hold onto a fork, but they haven’t forgotten the initial sense of helplessness.

“I had to have a teacher come to my house for my whole fourth-grade year because my body wasn’t ready to go to school,” Senik said. “When I was well enough to go outside and shoot baskets, the other kids were scared of me. They saw me on crutches and how skinny I was and they didn’t want to be around me.

“Right now, it doesn’t seem like (the disease) was that big a deal, but sometimes when basketball practice gets long and boring, then I think, ‘Hey, I was on crutches and could barely walk,’ so it changes your perspective.”

Among the colleges recruiting Senik are Azusa Pacific, Southern California College and Wheaton College, a NCAA Division III school in Wheaton, Ill.

“I visited there last month, and it’s really cold,” Senik said. “There was snow everywhere and it was numb feet all over again.”

But, as Senik knows, those kind of numb feet come alive fast on a gym floor.