Do Something.

"When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, while you live and the manner in which you lives.”-Stuart Scott

This was just one quote from a very moving speech by Stuart Scott at the ESPY's as he accepted the Jimmy V Perseverance Award. For those of you unaware, Stuart has been battling cancer for the last 7 years. He has used the opportunity of having cancer to give himself a platform. How many of you had to read that sentence again or missed it all together? Yes, he has used cancer as an opportunity. Interestingly, Webster defines opportunity as a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. Often times I think we hear the word opportunity and immediately our mind defines that as positive- the opportunity for a better job, a bigger house, to travel somewhere…but what about the opportunity to struggle, opportunity to experience hardship, the opportunity to battle a disease like Stuart Scott. You see, the other half of the definition of opportunity is that which makes it possible to do something. That’s what Stuart’s speech did for me, he reminded me that whatever it is we’re going through we get to choose how we will “live”. We get to choose how we will face the circumstance. We get to choose what we will do because of the circumstance. The circumstance makes it possible to “do something”. 

There are two very defining moments in my life that give me the desire and passion to want to “do something” every day. One of those was my son’s father falling 25 ft onto concrete. He suffered a traumatic brain injury among other things such as a collapsed lung, bruised kidney, maxiofacial fractures, not to mention only the survival part of his brain was alert. His face was disfigured from the fractures sustained in the fall. He had to be strapped down to his bed because in that situation, it’s flight or fight for your brain. There were times he wanted to do both. The thing that saved him was being such a tremendous athlete. The doctors believed his muscles cradled his bones well or he would have suffered many more injuries. We spent several weeks in the hospital. I’ll never forget the day the doctors came into his room after we had been in the ICU for 15 days with no change. They gently told me we’d have to figure out what to do with him since he could remain like this the rest of his life. How do you respond to news like that? The things that run through your mind…I’ll tell you what I did, I yelled at him. Sounds crazy and selfish to some degree I guess. I sat there and yelled at this man that couldn’t understand a word I was saying, this man that was in his own world, this man that was the father of my precious boy. I told him he couldn’t do this to Jake, he couldn’t do this to all his students that counted on him. Believe it or not, later that day he sat up and asked, “Is this a nightmare?” The doctors couldn’t understand how he snapped out of his semi comatose state. The rest of our journey would be uphill but Jake would have his dad a part of his life again.

He had to have prisms put in his glasses because the double vision sustained from his brain injury was so bad and it would be permanent. In the end, he lost 6 months of short term memory and he had to learn all about his life again. He had to learn how to breathe on his own again, how to walk again, what year it was, who all the people were in his life. When we went home, I had to remind him daily about who he was and what he liked and didn’t like until it became his normal again. We would make daily visits to the tennis center where we ran tennis clinics. I taught him how to feed balls again and his students did their best to come sit with him so that he could “teach” them. Several years later, he’s teaching tennis again, has a great junior program and teaches several lessons every week. But we had to “do something”. The opportunity to endure a traumatic brain injury taught us something about perseverance. It made it possible for us to walk through brain injuries with others since we were familiar with all that it took from us and all that it added to our life. 

The second defining moment in my life came when I had a near death experience in a kayaking accident. The river crested that day and the kayak I was in got sucked into a tide pool. I hit my head on logs and ended up vertical under a big pile of debris several feet under water. I had a life jacket on but the strands were tangled and wrapped all through the branches. I fought so hard to try to get free so I could get to the top of the water, but it was no use. I realized I was going to die that day. I quit trying and I prayed. I asked God to forgive me for all the wrong I had done in my life and I asked Him to remind Jake every day that I love him. Then I quietly allowed the most peaceful feeling to wash over me. The next thing I knew, I woke on the side of the river. The person I was with said I floated up out of the water with arms stretched out. I had no pulse and I was under for at least 3 minutes before I popped up out of the water. I gently opened my eyes. I never spat out water and never gasped for air. Just woke as if I had been taking a nap on a lazy afternoon. I realized I was given another chance to live. I was given an opportunity to do something. So, that’s what I attempt to do everyday. I try to “live” and I try to inspire others “by the manner in which I live”. The reality is we’re all on different paths in this journey, we all face different giants in our life, the only way we get to beat them like Stuart Scott said is to not allow those things to define us. We can choose to defy the odds. We can choose to “do something”.