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As doctors figure out if they can save his life, language arts teacher Luke Neal — in a hospital gown — is looking into a webcam on his laptop and going over vocabulary words.

“La-bor-i-ous,” says Neal, his face puffy and his eyes yellow, during the segments, which he posts to the class Web page. “It means requiring a lot of work. You might say, 'I’d rather wash the dishes than take out the trash for a week because that would be more la-bor-i-ous.’

“Let me hear my class say, la-bor-i-ous.”

The 28-year-old liver transplant recipient and Aycock Middle School teacher has been in a Triangle-area hospital for almost two weeks.

His body is rejecting the liver he got two years ago.

“The worrisome part is I want to be in my classroom teaching,” Neal says of Room 109, which has a substitute. “The scariest part has been not knowing what’s going on (with my body).”

Enzyme levels that should have been between 25 and 30 climbed past 800 earlier this week. Doctors pumped steroids into him and the number dropped — but only briefly.

Nothing is working.

“I’m not at end-stage liver failure, but it is a possibility,” says Neal. “I could very well walk away in a week or so, or I could very well never go home.”

* * *

When Luke Neal was 8, he re-created the downtown Richmond, Va., skyline using plywood.

“Even the cars moved around,” says his mother, Trish Cass.

Neal considered dropping out of high school like his brothers, who were in and out of trouble. His brothers, however, wouldn’t let him.

High school teachers guided him toward college.

He started at A&T in 2001 with the dream of becoming an architect.

He developed an interest in teaching after a summer as a camp counselor.

During his senior year, he set up a mentoring program at Aycock, which later hired the English major to teach sixth-grade language arts.

Principal Valerie Akins gave Neal an incentive to move up to eighth-grade language arts this year: an all-boys class, which intrigued him. He calls it the Cool Dude Academy. Neal selects books and texts they can relate to — such as Hill Harper’s award-winning “Letters to a Young Brother.”

“Some of them were students with some behavioral and academic challenges and he was able to do in a short time what teachers have not been able to do (for them) in the nine years they have been in school — and that’s to light a fire,” Akins says.

His ideas spill over to his other classes: Students produce 20-second video skits to reinforce words and their meanings.

“He says he never wants us to be somewhere where someone uses a big word and we don’t know what it means,” says eighth-grader Carlos Callands Jr.

Neal’s students recently had the biggest growth in reading in the school on state-mandated tests.

“He has been influential and impactful,” eighth-grader Patrick Hardie, who was also in his class in sixth grade, says through a grin.

* * *

It was while preparing for end-of-grade reading tests in May 2009 that Neal experienced the first signs of what was to come.

He was on his way to pick up snacks for a classroom “poetry slam” and began sweating profusely in the car. He grew dizzy and began throwing up. He had struggled with fatigue in the weeks before.

“I felt like my brain was shutting down,” he said.

The diagnosis at the emergency room: acute liver failure.

Neal prefers not to discuss the medical circumstances, but liver failure can result from a number of factors — from genetics to liver tumors, hypertension or hepatitis, among other things.

Within hours, he was losing consciousness and was transferred to a transplant hospital. Doctors put him in a medically induced coma until a liver became available.

* * *

Neal was back at work for the start of the 2010 school year — with a 56-pill daily regimen of anti-rejection medications he would have to follow forever.

Doctors wanted him to take the year off, even a semester. Neal wanted to get back to his kids.

“I pushed myself, probably beyond my limits, on the first day of school,” Neal said. “At the end of the day, I laid on the (classroom) carpet and passed out.”

A housekeeper, who nearly had a heart attack seeing him lying there, woke him up.

Neal said he had probably been there for two hours.

He felt stronger in the days that came. His doctors adjusted his medication.

“I think that gave me too much confidence and maybe that’s where I got a little lax,” he said.

Two weeks ago, as students surrounded him at the end of the day, two looked up at him and said — “Mr. Neal, your eyes are really yellow.”

By the end of the day he was in an emergency room in Greensboro, waiting for a bed to open at the transplant hospital.

A biopsy revealed extensive liver damage.

* * *

“Sorta panicking again,” Neal wrote last Monday on his Facebook page. He had been in the hospital almost a week.

By Thursday he was being moved into a germ-free environment and placed on a “rabbit serum” therapy called thymoglobulin, which could build healthy white cells and increase his immunity.

Neal isn’t on any transplant waiting lists.

Candidates have to be placed there by their doctors, and they must be well enough to survive the operation, among other things.

He passes the time motivating students through his laptop. He almost leaps from the bed with excitement while talking about a field trip he’s planning for the Cool Dude Academy to an outdoor classroom along a mountain trail.

The effort is sometimes draining.

“He’s fallen asleep a couple of times and it’s dropped to the floor,” Kristal Taylor, an aunt who has slept at his bedside, says of the laptop.

The prospect that he might not be around for the kids brings him to his reality.

“I do a better job of not crying about it — better than I used to,” he admits.

If only former student Patrick Hardie could remind him of what the teacher said to him two years ago, when Patrick had trouble with testing because of a lack of confidence — something the student has since overcome.

“I would tell him to remember in sixth grade when he told me not to give up on myself  — I would tell him not to give up on himself,” Patrick says.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com