The Brightest of Bright Moments, Part Two
by Steve McGill
My story begins in March of 1983, in the spring of my junior year at Malvern Prep — an all-boys Catholic school in Malvern, PA in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I was in the midst of my second year of running hurdles for the track team. Five months earlier I had quit the basketball team in order to run track during the indoor season as well as during the outdoor season. My decision to quit basketball was a tough one, and one that marked the first step toward becoming a well-respected and highly successful hurdles coach in my adult years, although there was no way I could’ve realized I was heading in that direction at the time. I quit because I didn’t like the coaches, I wasn’t getting much playing time, and, to be totally honest, I wasn’t willing to do the work required to develop my game. I loved basketball in a pickup-game kind of way. Though I had run track since the sixth grade, I hadn’t started hurdling until my sophomore year, and even though I wasn’t that good at first, I fell in love with it instantly. Sprinting over obstacles, and learning how to do it better each time I tried, sparked my curiosity and imagination. So despite the fact that my dad had coached me all through middle school, and despite the fact that both of my older brothers and my older sister had been or still were high school basketball stars, I didn’t want to play anymore. Going against everyone’s wishes and expectations, I found the courage to quit in October of my junior year, right before the season was about to start. On the first day of basketball practice, I did not head to the gym, but instead headed outside to the track for the first day of winter track practice. I was a hurdler now, not a basketball player, and I couldn’t have been happier.
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By March, my joy was starting to wane — not because I was losing my love for the hurdles, or because of anything having to do with my coaches or teammates, but because I was feeling tired all the time, making it difficult to get through workouts. I didn’t know what was wrong, so I decided to work harder. But I couldn’t. For whatever reason, my body wouldn’t let me. In races, the fatigue was becoming more debilitating with each track meet. In the longer hurdle race — the 300 meter hurdles, which consists of eight 36-inch barriers — I was “hitting the wall” sooner and sooner as the season wore on. In March, I was hitting the wall at the sixth hurdle. By April I was hitting it at the fourth hurdle. By May I was hitting it at the second hurdle. At that point, my coach and I agreed that I should drop the 300 hurdles and focus on the 110 hurdles heading into the championship season. What I didn’t tell my coaches nor anyone else was that I had become terrified of the 300 meter hurdles. I feared the fatigue I felt; it was a different kind of fatigue — an all-consuming exhaustion from which there was no coming back. No amount of willpower or determination or positive self-talk could compete with it. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew I needed to stop running the 300 hurdles.
Everything came to a head in our last meet of the season — the Inter-Academic League Championships on the third weekend in May. My coach, Mr. McAlpin, surprised me when he asked me near the end of the meet if I’d be willing to run a leg of the 4×400 meter relay, the last event. When he walked up to me, put the baton in my hand and said, “You’re in it, guy,” I panicked. Unable to see any rational way I could make it all the way around the track for an entire lap when I had been dying after 80 meters in my most recent 300 hurdle races, I stomped my foot and said to Mr. McAlpin, “I ain’t runnin no f*ckin 4 by 4!”
He kicked me off the team that very moment, and it didn’t help that our hostile exchange had taken place in front of several school administrators who had come to cheer on the team. I loved Mr. McAlpin, and felt awful that I had hurt him and embarrassed him. I agreed to run the relay, and he allowed me to. I didn’t run all that well, but to my own surprise, I didn’t hit the wall. That alone gave me hope that if I really worked hard in the off-season I would be able to get into the kind of shape necessary to have an outstanding senior year in both the 110 hurdles and the 300 hurdles. I had finished fourth in the 110s, and all three guys who had finished ahead of me were graduating, so I would be the man heading into my senior year. The possibility of being an Inter-Ac champion in my favorite event gave me all the motivation I needed to start training for the next year as soon as summer break began.
I had big plans for the summer. I was going to work my way up to three miles a day, lift weights, and keep my hurdle skills sharp. Mr. McAlpin let me take two hurdles home that I could use to practice in the backyard. The distance runs never materialized. I never made it up to three miles. Instead, I started with a mile and a half, at a very slow pace, the first day, and steadily worked my way down. By the end of summer break, I was down to half a mile. And instead of feeling less tired, I was feeling more tired than when I’d been running farther. The same issues I’d been having during track season were continuing. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get myself in shape. I couldn’t finish even the most basic workouts. The only thing I could do was sprint over those two hurdles over and over again. The rest between reps made hurdling manageable.
Meanwhile, in addition to the ever-worsening fatigue, I was dealing with other oddities. I occasionally would see bruises on my arms, or on my thigh, without being able to remember anything I might’ve done to have caused them. The bruises would disappear the next day, so although I noted that the bruises were weird, I decided not to worry about them. Even more annoying was a sort of whirring sound I would get in my ear, like the sound you hear when putting a shell against your ear, but not nearly so peaceful. It would last for hours without going away, driving me crazy. I’d tilt my head in different directions to try to make it go away, but that didn’t help.
When school started up again in September, I decided to go out for the cross country team. I liked running distance, and the story I told myself was that running with teammates would be easier than running by myself, and that I probably wouldn’t even notice any fatigue if I was running with my friends.
That worked about as well as you would think it did. At the beginning of each practice, we jogged about a half-mile to the edge of the woods where we would stretch before beginning the workout. The half-mile jog wore me out. My teammates were chatting it up while I was panting like a dog, trying to smile and act like I was chillin. I wasn’t chillin. I was dying.
After two days of that I quit the cross country team. Instead, I did hurdle workouts by myself on the track. Mr. McAlpin, who also coached cross country, grew frustrated with me. One day he saw me grabbing a couple hurdles from the shed and said to me, “You need to put those damn hurdles away and get yourself in shape.”
I didn’t put the hurdles away. It looked like I was being defiant, but the truth was the fatigue that had dogged me the previous spring track season was still stalking me, still terrorizing me. Hurdling over two hurdles was the only thing I could do without falling apart. Back in those days, the coaching philosophy, even for sprinters and hurdlers, was that the autumn was the time for building endurance by running miles. Nobody in the known universe was hurdling in the fall except for me. But it was all I could do, so I kept doing it.
By October, I was feeling fatigued even when I wasn’t training. One day toward the middle of the month, I was walking to the second floor for class when I had to stop in the middle of the stairwell to take a break. Kids were whizzing past me while I was crawling up step by step like a 100-year-old man. When I finally reached the top, I didn’t walk to the classroom. First, I sat against the nearest window ledge, catching my breath, feeling like I had just run a marathon.
That’s when I finally acknowledged that there must be something wrong with me — I couldn’t be that out of shape; there had to be something else going on. That day, when I arrived home after school, I talked to my mom about setting up an appointment with a doctor. “Is it that bad?” she asked. One of my character traits — and I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing — is that I internalize my feelings a lot. If I’m going through a struggle, I’ll try to work my way out of it by myself. I don’t like making other people worry about me, especially the people who are closest to me. So I often look like I’m doing perfectly fine when I’m not. In most cases, I can work my way through the dark passages without alerting anyone to the seriousness of the situation. But when I can’t, when I do reach out for help, that means I’ve reached an endpoint.
So, nobody knew of the turmoil I was going through beyond the fact that I was tired often. During the conversation with my mom, who was working on a dress she was making (she was a seamstress), I happened to look down at her hands, and noticed something weird — her palms had a reddish tint to them. I looked down at my own palms. They were pale. There was no blood in them.
My mom made an appointment with my dad’s doctor, who worked at Riddle Memorial Hospital in nearby Media, PA. The appointment was scheduled for the last week of October, two weeks away. I panicked internally when she told me. I could be dead in two weeks, I thought, which turned out to be a much more accurate statement than I realized.
For the next two weeks, I did nothing athletic. I told Mr. McAlpin about my symptoms and he advised me to rest until I saw the doctor. He wasn’t too concerned, saying that I probably had a vitamin deficiency of some sort. Hearing him say this reassured me that once I saw the doctor, I’d be back training in no time, and that my goal of being the best hurdler in the league was still attainable.
I met with my dad’s doctor, Dr. Leunissen, on a Friday. After a blood test, Dr. Leunissen told me and my parents that my blood counts were very low, so they wanted to keep me through the weekend. Instead of feeling alarmed, I felt relieved. I was sick enough that I would need to stay in the hospital for a few days. Now I had proof that I wasn’t just being lazy and selfish when I didn’t run the 4 by 4, and when I would always grab hurdles from the shed instead of running distance. I could say, “Hey, Mr. McAlpin, see?”
When Sunday came around, Dr. Leunissen entered my room while my parents were there and said, “We can’t treat what you have here. We’ll need to send you either to Hahnemann Hospital or Children’s Hospital.”
Say what? They couldn’t treat what I had? I had something? It wasn’t just a vitamin deficiency? My mom and dad felt that CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) would be the best option, as it had a reputation as one of the pediatric hospitals in the world. I nodded, looking down at my pale palms, thinking to myself that I was too old to go to a kiddie hospital. But what choice did I have?
At CHOP, Dr. Elias Schwartz, the Head of Hematology, sat down with me, my parents, and my sister Jo, and informed us that I had aplastic anemia, a rare blood disease characterized by bone marrow failure. My bone marrow, for reasons unknown, had stopped producing blood cells, so I was steadily running out of blood. That explained the constant and ever-worsening fatigue; it also explained the whirring sound in my ears and the occasional bruises.
Dr. Schwartz, a kind, gentle man, spoke directly to me as he explained that I had a severe case. Treatment options, he said, would include a bone marrow transplant if I had anyone in my family who was a compatible donor. Otherwise, they’d have to resort to experimental options.
Despite the explanation, I didn’t feel too concerned. If Dr. Schwartz had diagnosed me with leukemia, I might have felt the proper amount of fear and dread. But I didn’t know what aplastic anemia was. And what he said about bone marrow failure didn’t resonate with me. I didn’t know what bone marrow was. I vaguely knew that people with anemia were tired all the time. I was tired all the time, so it made sense.
What did scare me was the realization that I couldn’t return to school the next day; I couldn’t get back to hurdling any time soon. I would be staying in the hospital for an undetermined amount of time. I was sick for real, and there would be no quick fix.
After I settled into my room, and my parents and sister had left, I leaned forward, held my head in my hands, and cried. I don’t know if I was sad, scared, confused, or a combination of all three. I just knew I didn’t want to be in this hospital. Jo, who apparently had stayed behind before leaving with our parents, rushed to my side, gave me a big hug, and assured me everything would work out.
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