I have had this Phal for several years but didn't know how to take care of it. It was a gift when I was young and I never repotted it out of it's sphagnum and original pot, just watered now and again. It never rebloomed, just put out leaves every once in a while and grew some air roots. Then it's leaves started looking bad (wrinkling) and I started looking into what might be wrong which is when I stumbled onto forums like this and proper orchid care. That was during the fall and things have all gone south from there. I trimmed off the dead roots (lots) and put it in bark but it continued to lose leaves (wrinkled, then went yellow and died). Eventually, on the advice of another forum, I cut off all of it's lower roots, leaving the air roots to act as its new root system. Things continued to go badly and now it has two leaves, both still wrinkled. One leaf is a little one that had started to emerge back last fall but then just stopped growing. The other leaf is starting to yellow very slightly. There has been no obvious growth and both leaves are still wrinkled.

So I guess my questions are, is this thing even alive anymore? It's not doing anything to tell me it's alive other than not being brown.

If it is alive, is there any chance it can be saved? I'm not asking if it's WORTH it, obviously I could go buy another Phal (in fact I have), but I want to try and save it, if it's possible, I think it would be awesome if I could get it to come back from this.

For the last week or so I've switched it into coconut coir/perlite mix, hoping the extra moisture might stimulate roots, but I'm afraid of rotting it. So now I just have the roots laying on top of the mix instead of being buried in it.

Here are some photos to help you decide

This was it at the start of this whole ordeal


and this is the poor thing now



Here are the roots:





More in the next post...