by Taya Kyle
David describes himself as a “weak kid” growing up. He acted tough, but in reality, on the inside, he was scared and unsure of who he was and what he should do. He remained that person until his first Hell Week. At that point, he realized the nutrition and exercise program he’d followed had “created a whole ’nother human being.”
The realization helped him turn things up another notch. Rather than running from challenges, he began seeking them out. He saw difficulty as opportunity—the “crucible of life” was a chance to become someone unique and different. Struggle made him better.
Not that he always won; no one does. But the process of testing himself became growth.
Then came his biggest challenge: his heart.
David was already a SEAL and an ultramarathon runner when he realized he was feeling excessively fatigued. He went to a doctor, who conducted a thorough examination but couldn’t find anything wrong.
Maybe it’s in your head, suggested the doctor, who wondered if David had PTSD or some other mental ailment.
“It’s not in my head,” replied David.
One thing I’ll say about SEALs—they don’t go to doctors unless something is really wrong. And I mean really wrong. So you know David was hurting very badly.
Still skeptical, the doctor sent him for an echocardiogram—sonar for the heart. The machine watches the heart as it beats, providing a thorough image of the vital organ’s functioning.
The test is fairly long; it lasted about forty-five minutes in David’s case. He and the technician spent the first half hour or so chatting and joking around. Suddenly, the tech grew silent. With a serious look on his face, he excused himself and left the room.
He returned a few moments later with a doctor.
Another doctor joined them. Then another. Before long, an entire pack of doctors, interns, and medical students had squeezed into the room to check on David’s tests.
The machine had found a hole in his heart, apparently present since birth, that allowed blood from one side to enter the other. In effect, “bad blood”—blood that had given up its oxygen—was taking a shortcut back out into his body without picking up the fresh oxygen it was supposed to carry. That lack of O2 was why he felt so run-down.
The condition was far more serious than David thought; there was no curing it with a nap. The wonder was how he had achieved so much with such a defect, which he’d obviously had from birth.
It took two operations to fix his heart. It was more than two years before he was released back for regular assignments as a SEAL.
Since leaving the service, David has tried to find new challenges, the Patriot Tour among them. Audiences love him, but the challenges he seems to like best are physical. When I spoke to him for the book, he was training to be a smoke jumper—one of those guys who jumps out of an airplane to fight fires.
Why?
Because he wants to do something that most people don’t.
And, he says, because smoke jumpers are some of the most extreme people on the planet, and hanging out with them makes him a better person.
“It’s not the Trident that makes you a superior human being,” says David, referring to the SEALs’ signature symbol. “It’s the guys next to you.”
David sees today’s society as too soft and challenge-adverse. In his mind, challenge is good for individuals and for society as a whole. He’s spreading that message, both in a recently published book (available online at his website), and in talks to groups. He gives about fifty a year, including the Patriot Tour. He uses his story to inspire others—his message to the audience is simple: if a severely overweight former airman with a heart defect can get himself into shape and become a SEAL, pretty much anything can happen if you work hard enough.
Set the challenge; embrace the struggle and the pain. Work through it.
There’s another message in his life story, though, and it has to do with his heart. Sometimes the biggest things holding us back aren’t those that we know, like a broken leg, but those we don’t know, like an undetected hole in our heart. It may take deep examination to find that handicap or barrier; very possibly, it will be obvious to no one else. Finding it sooner rather than later, and then dealing with it, may be the key to your success.
David’s perseverance led him to succeed despite his physical ailments. He was able to achieve a great deal largely because he refused to quit and realized as he went that he could make himself into a new person.
Also key: once he achieved that, he didn’t rest on his laurels or his backside; he kept going.
David gives money that he raises from speaking to groups that help others, most recently the National Smokejumper Association, which among other things has a fund to help families whose loved ones have recently died while working. But I think the most important thing about him is that he’s a one-man ripple effect, the stone that drops into the pond and pushes out the rings. Meeting him, listening to his story, people realize that they, too, have untapped strength and unrealized potential.
Maybe they’ll become SEALs or smoke jumpers. Maybe they’ll sit behind a desk all their lives. But whatever their goals, if they push themselves to reach them, if they push through the difficulties and persevere, they will become better human beings, in turn inspiring and encouraging others.
Eight
Belief
Matters of Faith
You don’t need to have a strong belief in God or be of any one particular faith or persuasion to overcome tragedy. There are plenty of examples of people from all cultures, past and present, overcoming dramatic odds to achieve greatness on both small and massive scales.
Having recognized that, let me say that, for me, faith has always been important. My beliefs have been Bible-based since I was a little girl. To paraphrase some advice my dad gave me as I was growing up, It’s not absolutely necessary to know the Bible, but it does make things easier. It’s a recipe for happiness.
The more I have looked to it for answers, the more I see he is right. It is a recipe for happiness, but it takes faith to believe it and courage to live it.
I proudly call myself a Christian and am drawn to seeing how others see God in their life.
If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know it goes without saying that I’m not perfect. I could be the reason for the saying “I love Jesus, but I cuss a little.” I’m working on it. Often I’ve failed to measure up to the standards I set for myself. But one of the most reassuring beliefs for any Christian is the promise of redemption. God loves all of us, and if we turn toward Him and ask for forgiveness with true conviction, it will be granted.
Not that we won’t pay for sins, just that salvation won’t be denied on account of them. Not only is it reassuring, it’s demanding. If we can be flawed and forgiven, we must accept the same is true for everyone. Even murderers, if they seek forgiveness.
Those are my beliefs, though. I won’t force them on you or even think less of you because you don’t share them. It’s my responsibility to live them, not yours. You must follow your path.
Sometimes, people are tempted to measure their faith against others. They ask, does this person believe the way I do? Do they believe as strongly as I do?
Or conversely:
How can this person believe at all? Why would anyone?
Both are an attempt to judge others—a right that belongs to God, not us. The sentiment was best summed up for me by a pastor: “I hold neither the keys to heaven nor hell.”
Or, to use an agnostic or atheist version: “I am not an Almighty; it is not mine to condemn or save.”
I don’t take anyone else’s faith as a challenge. And I decided a long time ago that I am absolutely fine with my faith being challenged. I wouldn’t base my life, earthly or eternal, on anything I hadn’t studied and found to stand up to the challenge of science or academia, let alone the peaceful exploration of other religions. Freedom of religion, not freedom from it, is one of the best parts of America.
Lead
with Love
The Collins Family
As a parent—as a mom—I can’t think of anything worse than seeing a child suffer. My own kids, God bless them, are healthy, but let one of them get hurt playing or even come down with the flu—I’m sure parents everywhere understand exactly what I feel.
How much worse it must be, then, for parents of children who get a disease like cancer. Even with an array of dedicated professionals to help the family through, even knowing that in many cases there are cures—it takes extraordinary strength to persevere.
But what if the child’s disease is not well-known? What if there’s not an army of professionals standing by to attack the disease?
What happens then?
Susan and Chris Collins met in high school—teenage sweethearts.
But it wasn’t quite love at first sight. In fact, just the opposite.
They met on Chris’s first day as a sophomore transfer when he swaggered into class. His long, curly hair framed a good-looking face atop a tall, athletically slim body.
“Who is this cute new guy?” said Susan from her seat.
Perhaps she said it a little too loudly, because the cute new guy—Chris—walked directly to her and said, “The best thing you can do is sit down and shut up.”
Ouch.
The mutual animosity softened in the months that followed, giving way to a grudging and then solid friendship. Romance followed, and by senior year, they were going steady. Four years of college and courtship led to marriage in 1986.
After high school, Chris became a professional ballplayer, working his way up in the Angels’ organization while Susan finished an accounting degree. While still in the minors, Chris hurt his pitching arm; eventually he needed Tommy John surgery. Unfortunately, despite the operation and a lengthy rehab, he ended up blowing out his arm again and reluctantly gave up his career.
What do you do when your dream ends?
You get another one. Chris went into golf, finding work at different clubs as a pro and slowly building a new career from the bag room up.
Susan, meanwhile, was crunching numbers as an accountant in Florida, where the couple had made their home following Chris’s Tommy John surgery. It was a good climate for baseball and a great one for golf.
It wasn’t a bad one for raising a family, either. Susan suffered two miscarriages before the successful birth of their first son in 1990. Three years later, they conceived Christian.
At first, everything looked A-OK. Then one day during a routine ultrasound, the tech had trouble getting a good image.
“I’m having trouble with the hands,” she explained to Susan as she worked the machine. “Hard to get the image.”
Just one of those things, thought Susan, until the next morning. She was taking the last bite of her Wheat Chex before heading out to work when the phone rang.
It was her doctor.
“There’s a problem with the baby,” he said.
“Problem?”
Choking down the food in her mouth, Susan listened as the doctor told her Christian’s hands were deformed.
There might be other problems, too. More investigation was needed.
They scheduled a more sophisticated ultrasound at a facility two counties away—it was the closest place available. The distance wasn’t as bad as the wait; it took a week to find an opening. That week was filled with anxiety, trepidation, and pleading as Susan tried to get an earlier appointment but couldn’t.
The new test showed that the fetus had no thumbs on either hand.
“You got plenty of time to get rid of it,” said a doctor coldly.
Neither Chris nor Susan had given abortion a thought to that point, and they reacted immediately.
Not an option.
“We were both still processing,” Susan remembers. “We were in a fog. On the way home, we passed a baseball field and it hit me. Baseball had been such a big part of our lives, and I thought, this child won’t be able to throw a baseball and do normal kid stuff. How bad is it—will he be able to hold my hand?”
The doctors they spoke to weren’t sure what caused the abnormalities or what else to expect. With little to go on, Chris and Susan braced themselves for other issues. The doctors made a guess that the disease might be related to a blood ailment, but they could not be definitive. The family lined up donors in case the infant needed transfusions at birth.
As Susan’s due date approached, she told friends and coworkers of the baby’s problems. The reaction ran the gamut, from sympathy to outright cruelty. One suggested she just “get rid of it” with birth only a few weeks away.
As cruel as that sounded to Susan, it’s a common conversation during pregnancy. There are many tests mothers take to determine if their fetus has abnormalities. One reason is to prepare the parents, but the other is to give the option to abort. It takes courage to make the decision the Collins family made.
What Susan and Chris didn’t get, with the problems Christian had, was the one thing she really needed: information on what to expect. No one knew, not the experts, not random acquaintances. Everything seemed a dark, unspeakable mystery.
A few weeks before she was due, Susan sensed that the baby had stopped moving. When her doctor insisted nothing was wrong, she called his partner, who scheduled a C-section for the next day.
The fact that Christian had stopped moving turned out not to be critical, but it was definitely a sign of trouble to come. As soon as he was born, Christian was moved to the neonatal intensive care unit and given a battery of tests. They found he had an issue with his heart, only one kidney, fused vertebrae, no appreciable pituitary tissue. . . .
The list went on.
“Basically, they found problems in every system, except his eyes,” says Susan. Each day brought a new test and more gloom.
His parents did the best they could to cope.
“Every time we got a new report, we said, OK. OK. OK,” says Susan, remembering the onslaught and their efforts to simply keep up. It helped tremendously that Christian had a sparkling personality. “He had character, even as a little monkey in the NICU,” says Susan before bragging on her newborn son’s silver-gold mohawk.
He was cute but very small. That happened to be a clue to his condition, but neither his parents nor his doctors knew that yet.
Conflicting theories rose from the puzzling results of the tests. As the specialists puzzled it out, Chris found a doctor in Boston named Peter Waters who could operate on their son’s hands. Though he taught at Harvard and was among the world’s experts at pediatric hand surgery, he always seemed to have time to explain and sit with the family.
Acting on suspicions based on his experience, he initiated tests that revealed that Christian was suffering from Fanconi anemia. By the time the diagnosis was confirmed, the little boy was two years old and had had five surgeries to correct the problems associated with his hands.
Fanconi anemia is a genetic disease that mainly affects the bone marrow and the production of blood cells. (There is a similarly named disease, Fanconi syndrome, which is a rare kidney disorder. The two are not related.)
There are three types of blood cells. Red blood cells distribute oxygen throughout the body. If our blood vessels are a transportation system, the red blood cells are the delivery trucks. White blood cells help the body fight infections; they’re like an army in our body, kicking out invaders. Last but not least, platelets are a special kind of blood cell that clots to stop bleeding—construction crews to patch things up when you’re wounded.
A shortage of any one of these cell types creates huge problems. A shortage or imbalance of all of them, especially before birth and soon after, is catastrophic. Vital organs may not develop properly. Hearing and sight can be impaired. Cancer—leukemia, especially, but others that primarily affect the head, neck, and urinary system—often occurs.
The condition was first named in 1967 by a Swiss doctor, Guido Fanconi, whose work linked with earlier discoveries and really started what
eventually became a wave of research into the disease and its related affects. But even by the time the Collinses’ son was diagnosed, information was still relatively scant.
Chris was with his son in Boston when the doctors revealed the diagnosis. The hospital library had a single book about the disease.
Knowing he couldn’t finish it before having to leave, Chris “borrowed” it and brought it back to his hotel room.
“I think there’s a little more to this,” he told his wife that night after reading through much of the book. The condition was not just life-threatening but dramatically life-shortening as well.
Still looking for information, Susan decided they should seek out the best experts. She found Dr. Arleen Auerbach, one of the pioneer researchers in the field. Dr. Auerbach told them that there was a wide range of symptoms and mutations responsible for the disease.
She also added, ominously, that she had never seen a child with symptoms as severe as Christian’s live past four.
I don’t know what my reaction would be if someone told me that about one of my children. I have no idea what I would do. I hope it would be something similar to what Susan did:
Dig in.
Not give up.
Refuse to surrender.
Fight.
Help him survive. Find a cure. If there is no cure, fight even harder.
That was nearly two decades ago now; Christian is not only still with us—he has thrived.
But we’re getting ahead of the story.