My first word was ball. I’ve always loved sports, especially basketball in particular. I would run around in my backyard and throw a football with my dad for hours. Sports are my life. My happiness.
My dad has always pushed me to join a sports team, but I always resisted. I was nervous and afraid of commitment. Honestly, I still am. Through elementary and middle school, I never played a sport that I was uncomfortable with and I knew everything that happened and could happen. So I searched for another outlet that I was comfortable with.
I started volunteering at my middle school summer camp, where I built amazing relationships with so many different people. Everything was going perfectly.
Then it didn’t. The day was August 16, 2024. I felt faint. Dizzy. A hole was burning in my heart. My arm felt fuzzy. Something was wrong. “Tell someone,” my brain screamed. Luckily, my dad was working in his new job as an administrator and he brought me to his office, where I drifted in and out of consciousness, fainting and hallucinating.
We drove to the ER in Chelsea where doctors ran tests on me and performed scans of my chest. We stayed there for a few hours before we were told we needed to be transferred to Mott Hospital. That’s when I knew this wasn’t just regular heartburn.
When we were finally transferred to Mott, I was afraid to even stay a night. That fear quickly vanished as things got more serious. My worries shifted to my actual health as more and more doctors, specialists, and department heads came into my room on the 11th floor.
Within the first two weeks or so, I had a big decision to make. Get a picc line inserted into my arm, which would eliminate the need for blood draws with needles. With the picc line, there were multiple tubes and one of them was for drawing blood. If I didn’t get the picc line, I would constantly be getting blood draws which are always a struggle.
Word got around through my parents’ messaging, and I was lucky enough to meet a couple of Michigan football players who came to visit me in the hospital. Those moments I will never forget because they were people who I looked up to really cared about me and what I was going through.
Yet again, sports helped me in dark times to give me hope for the future.
Days turned into weeks. One day, my parents and I had a meeting with many specialists, including the Medical Director of the Pediatric Heart Transplant Program at Mott Children’s Hospital, Kurt Schumacher. It was stressful. What felt like years was only a couple of minutes. Then I heard it: “Eli, we are diagnosing you with heart failure,” Schumacher said.
Tears welled in my eyes, rendering me blind. This means that I would either need surgery to modify the heart or a totally new heart. The situation was dire. I needed a transplant. In my time in the hospital, I learned that only about 10 heart transplants are performed every year.
The day was Sept 18, 2024. It was 3:30 pm when Kurt Schumacher came into my room. He got to the point fast. He told me they had found a heart and surgery was scheduled for 9:00 am the next morning. I was so happy, scared, nervous, relieved. I didn’t know what to expect. I called everyone I knew. That night, I went to bed restless but hopeful.
It’s honestly hard to forget something of this magnitude. Around an hour before entering the operating room, I was rolled to the 3rd floor, where I was prepped by doctors telling me what to expect. Some were passing by and wished me good luck. I was going to need it.
It was around 9:30 a.m. when I had to say goodbye to my parents and I was sent off to the operating room. When I got there, I looked up to see so many machines and doctors; I was obviously overwhelmed. I was told to lie back as one of the doctors hooked me up to anesthesia, and she told me to count back from 10.
Ten…nine…eight…seven. I woke to little droplets dripping into my mouth. I made it. Barely.
In the days recovering, I stayed three days in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where most transplant recipients spend a couple of weeks. I was determined to get out of there. After being in the ICU, I stayed for nine more days recovering and learning what I needed to do to keep healthy. But in those moments, my only goal was to get back to being myself.
I spent hours in physical therapy, stretching, moving, retraining my body to get my strength back. In the months following, I started playing basketball again, as well as introducing myself to rock climbing again. Sports has given me an outlet even in the darkest of times.
