If you pay close attention around here, you may have noticed -- or maybe you didn't! -- that I wasn't around much in January, February, and March. Somehow, they didn't stop the College Football Playoff just because I wasn't around to write about it. How rude.
This is why I wasn't around then.
On the night of Dec. 22, my wife Tracy, a beautiful, 38-year-old mother of three, collapsed in our home. What we thought at the time was a normal bout with the flu at some point turned into viral myocarditis. She spent eight days in a medically-induced coma, remaining alive via machines I didn't know existed until they were the only thing separating my family from total oblivion. At some point during her coma, Tracy experienced a stroke that localized in the upper portion of her spinal cord, paralyzing her from the chest down. Because she was bed-ridden with all the focus on her heart, we didn't learn about her paralysis until the middle of January. We have an idea, but we'll never know exactly when the stroke took place, and the why will be explained through a lengthy conversation with God, in His time.
Devastating as that news was, and is, we still find ourselves on the right side of a miracle. Tracy was later told she was down to her last five minutes before the first life-saving machine was put in place. She survived two surgeries beyond that, both installing more life-saving machines. The stroke stopped at her spinal cord and did not touch her brain. Her sharp mind, her warm personality, her dry sense of humor, her priceless memories, and her resilient spirit all remain intact. She also retained the use of her arms; they're not as strong as before, but we're getting there. After a 109-day journey through three different hospitals, we brought Tracy home on April 9. She's in her home office on a work conference call as I type this.
That's our last four months distilled into two paragraphs, and it leads me into what I really wanted to write about today. Consider these lessons learned while walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
-- I do not write hoping to make you feel sorry for us. We've thrown ourselves so many pity parties that our Party City punch card qualifies us for free balloons. We have received an unimaginable amount of support throughout this ordeal. Family, friends, coworkers and strangers stepped up for us to an unbelievable degree. This journey was, and still is, very hard, but we have not lacked for support for one single moment since Dec. 22. I particularly want to highlight three important people here:
- Scott Roussel. Most of us say we want to help people, but are only willing to take so many steps out of our own paths to help another along their journey. (I consider myself one of those people, for the record.) Scott is the other kind. Scott and I have talked on a daily basis for nearly 15 years. Not once in that time have I ever heard him mention a movie he's going to see or a TV show he watched the previous night. This man spends his time pouring into those around him. On the daily, he's hosting his parish's new priest for dinner, taking a friend who's going through a hard time out for lunch, or hosting a party for his kid's swim team. And we haven't gotten to the hundreds of coaches, DFOs, ADs, and the like that he's helped on their professional journeys. That is how he spends his time: with and on his people. Scott has been an endless well of support and encouragement for me. When I first called him on the morning of the 23rd, he offered to immediately drive from Baton Rouge to our home in suburban Fort Worth to be with our kids, and he wasn't offering just to offer.
- Doug Samuels. The hardest working man in show business. Doug is the engine that keeps this site running, and is also a successful high school football head coach, and is also also the husband and father the rest of us aspire to be. And not in that order.
- John Brice: No longer with us... here at The Scoop, but still living and breathing. The best teammate I've ever played with. Like a great point guard, John is happy to dish an assist and a high-five, and quick on his feet with a compliment or a good-natured ribbing when it's earned.
I am eternally grateful for many people in my life, and the list doesn't get far until it reaches these three men.
-- I have certainly witnessed every color on the rainbow of emotions since Tracy collapsed, and interspersed with the fear, despair, anger, and self-pity were moments of indescribable, overwhelming joy. When Tracy was at her lowest, I felt God's presence at its highest. He used His instruments to hold me close, and in those moments I remember desperately hoping for Tracy to wake up for all the obvious reasons, but also so she could see what I'd seen: how loved, valued and cherished she is. One might think the lowest lows and the highest highs are separated like peaks and valleys, but I experienced them more as intersecting portions of the same spectrum.
-- I bring this up just because I find it interesting. If you believe at all in karma, one might think there'd be a "My wife is in the hospital" get-out-of-jail-free card. Turns out, such a card doesn't exist! One morning in January, my car got a flat tire driving our 7th grader to school. When getting that tire repaired, I was told I needed two new ones. A few weeks later, that same car's battery died and needed to be replaced. Our 7th grader got moved from his school's A basketball team to B while his mom was in the ICU. My X account got hacked while Tracy was in her coma. On the day we brought Tracy home, my mother-in-law backed into our garage door and shattered her car's back windshield. As the great philosopher Post Malone once wrote, "Life, it goes on. What can you do?"
-- One of the hardest things for Tracy to hear from well-meaning people are "God gives his toughest battles to his strongest fighters." I didn't ask to fight this battle, she thinks, my life was already hard enough as it is. Another: "I don't know how I'd go on if that happened to me." Her internal response: What choice do I have? Neither of us consider ourselves anything other than ordinary people. Our pre-marital classes did not include a "How to survive a life-altering diagnosis" handbook. Millions of people live with spinal cord paralysis every day. We never imagined we would be among them, but these are the cards we've been dealt. Resilience is our species's superpower, and these past four months have been the hands-on lesson we never imagined we'd get.
If you haven't already, one day you will receive the news you never thought you'd get. The sun will come up the next morning. Then you'll figure out a way to keep going. And when you do, you won't feel special, either, just human.
Tracy has been home for nearly two weeks now as I write this, and our family of five is settling into our new routine. Our sun still rises each morning. This routine is longer and harder than we ever imagined it would be just four months ago, but it's ours. And we are incredibly grateful it.