Companions in Courage (14 page)

Tom began his swimming career at the age of five. He wanted to do whatever his sister, Kathleen, did. She swam, so he swam.
And he didn’t rest until he beat her. At fifteen, Dolan won three titles at the Junior Nationals. When he was eighteen he
set the world record in the 400-meter individual medley as the youngest male member of the U.S. team. During his career at
the University of Michigan he set three U.S. records and was twice named the NCAA swimmer of the year. He won gold medals
in the 400-meter individual medley at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, as well as a silver medal in the 200-meter individual medley
at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

There is no question about Tom Dolan’s talent, but I am not sharing his story because of his ability. What inspires me about
Tom is that he has never let his physical handicaps deter him. His determination, fueled by his courage, pushed him to succeed
at what he loves.

Yes, he has passed out in the pool. Yes, he has had to use an inhaler to be able to climb out of the pool before he drowned.
Yes, he has had to grab lane ropes at times to keep from going under. Yes, he has scared his parents and his coach, Joe Urbanchek.
Yes, he developed chronic fatigue from his demanding work schedule.

And yet he lives a full and varied life. When Tom is not swimming, he is playing in his rap band, MC (Mass Confusion), or
hanging out with his friends. His zest for just being alive every day reflects itself in all he does. After the 1996 Olympics,
Dolan was interviewed by Broderick Turner, a thirteen-year-old. Broderick asked Tom what advice he would give to kids who
would love to appear on a Wheaties box. Dolan responded, “Don’t strive for that. Strive to be the best in your sport and to
be the best human being you can be.”

How has Tom Dolan been able to manage this delicate balance between life, competition, and death? He loves to compete. He
loves what he does. His motivation is so high that his breathing handicap, instead of serving as an excuse, became part of
what motivated him to excel.

So often we talk about life in terms of a baby drawing its first breath and a dying person exhaling his last. Think about
Tom Dolan for a minute. Why do we so often pay so little attention to all those breaths between the first and the last?

C
elebrities and sports heroes certainly get a lot of media coverage and have a tremendous impact on those who admire them.
But there is a special place in my heart for the quiet, lesser-known battlers that I see every day. They don’t make headlines,
but their lessons are no less powerful. One morning I was waiting for a plane and I read about a local boy who was playing
on his high school soccer team. Nothing unusual? Well, this young lad was playing with a walker for support. I thought, “There
must be thousands of folk like that, in every avenue of life, filled with personal, courageous stories.”

Monica Weidenbach is one of them.

Monica was a high school English teacher in western New York. She and her husband, Ed, shared a passion for golf. “The first
time I swung a golf club was in a crowded adult night school class. It was love at first whiff,” she said.

It didn’t take long for her to join in the quest of millions of golfers—take lessons to improve, get a hole in one, and make
it to a twelve handicap. Monica’s style was to respect her teacher, work diligently, and apply her never-give-up attitude.
By the summer of 1997 she was golfing at every opportunity. She joined a challenging local club and played so often that her
Jeep could find the course in the dark.

But later that summer Monica began to feel some back pain after a round of golf. Aging? An illegal bag bursting with wedges?
Not so simple. “The reality of my breast cancer in 1993 had returned with a vengeance. It had metastasized extensively throughout
my liver, my skeletal system, and even to the marrow of my bones,” she said.

The medical world presented Monica a grave prognosis with little hope. “I desired to live,” she said. “I was forty-five years
young, deeply in love with my husband, and filled with dreams, the least of which was to see my golf handicap in the low teens.
When you believe you are going to die, it is not far-fetched to review your life, take assessment of more than your golf handicap.”

Monica’s life assessment led to an inward journey toward meaning and found its roots in a deep faith in God. She knew she
was in a war. “I put on the whole armor of God and marched into battle and refused to even think retreat. Jesus was going
to be my Companion in Courage,” she said. Friends and loved ones helped carry the ammunition. Associates at her club established
a fund-raising tournament for financial and emotional support. “It was less the appearance of a generous check and more the
love of everyone involved that gave Ed and me the feeling we were not in this war alone.”

Monica proclaimed her faith and believed that through God’s love and his Word she would be healed of her cancer. Her style
of playing competitive golf was a perfect fit for her battle with the disease. “I did not underestimate my opponent, but I
did not allow his reputation to paralyze me. I knew about playing one shot at a time—now it was conquering one round of chemo
drugs at a time, never looking too many holes ahead, and always believing in victory.”

At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, she found a healing environment on the cutting edge of medical
treatment and also rooted in hope, compassion, and mercy. For a year and a half Monica traveled from Buffalo to undergo treatments.
High doses of chemotherapy and other protocols were in themselves deadly, not to mention the grueling ordeal of a liver biopsy
and various other medical tests. Because of a compromised immune system, she suffered through
E. coli
and blood staph infections that threatened her life.

“The details of what I lived through in those eighteen-plus months is not fit for print,” she said. “That I lived through
it is.” And she continued to find solace in golf. “Sometimes, due to the medicine my feet and ankles were so swollen I could
not get my shoes on. Ed would cut up my old sneakers and make a way for me to play.”

Monica completed her clinical trial treatments in October 1998. Her faith had overcome the obstacles. Her courage was rewarded.
The violent reactions to treatment, the loss of hair, the painful travel while sick, and the constant complications never
dampened her faith. In fact, let it be known that she became the cheerleader for others at NIH and many relied on her faith
and spirit for their own upbeat attitudes.

The fall of 1999 found Monica playing the game she loved with a renewed passion and outlook. She was golfing better than ever,
her temperament milder and her competitive spirit more intense. She earned a spot on the club’s Inter Club Team and enjoyed
the sport in a way not possible before this all-out confrontation with a pernicious ailment.

Monica won many battles, but cancer eventually won the war in February 2000. Though she never felt comfortable with the label
of “courageous,” I saw it differently. Her faith refocused her life toward the promises of God, and her courage allowed her
to follow them. At the funeral service, Monica’s spirit of giving was everywhere. Most descriptive of her love for others
were the words of her stepson: “For three days now I have listened to the words of those of you who loved Monica. I would
walk around and overhear someone say, ‘She was my best friend.’ I would walk to another corner of the room and hear again,
‘She was my best friend.’ In the midst of her battle she made us all feel special to her.”

Standing
Tall

M
emorial Day. Washington, D.C. A Vietnam veteran named Phil Hebert stops Aimee Mullins. He removes his Purple Heart from his
jacket and pins it on Aimee. Then he takes her hand and touches his skull, where the shrapnel still lies.

He tells her, “You have more courage than most people I know.”

Aimee tries to refuse the medal but realizes, “This is what it’s all about, this whole idea of being inspirational. This is
just what I wanted to do.”

The thought sticks with her through the evening.

“That night at dinner I cried and cried. This guy gives me a medal that is the symbol of courage and I look at us. Him, a
guy who got shot in the head at nineteen, and me. And I think, We didn’t ask for this. So is it because of courage that we
go on? What else are we supposed to do? Give up? No. No. You don’t give up till your heart stops beating.”

Cool, confident, charming, and talented, Aimee might well have been viewed as another golden child, born to privilege and
success. Today we know the qualities within her, but at the beginning the issue was what she was born without.

Legs have two weight-bearing bones, the tibia and fibula. Aimee, of Laurys Station, Pennsylvania, was born without fibulas.

For her parents, Brendan and Bernadette, the options were dire and direct opposites. They could let their little girl spend
her life with deformed legs and webbed toes, or they could elect surgery to amputate their baby’s legs just below the knees
and replace them with prostheses. Even with the operation, there was no guarantee she would ever walk.

On her first birthday Aimee had surgery. At two she learned to walk with heavy, wooden artificial legs. She underwent several
more surgical procedures when she was three and five and endured her last one at eight. She would stay in the hospital for
weeks at a time, then undergo five to six months of physical therapy after each visit.

In this hard soil, the seeds of Aimee’s spirit and uniqueness began to grow.

“The doctor would bring his medical students to my room just to see me do all the things they said I’d never be able to do
and to tell them, ‘Keep an open mind.’” She would have added, “And keep an active body.” It was difficult to keep her in her
wheelchair even during the months of her physical therapy because, as she puts it, “I hated that feeling of being confined.”

As a kid she played kickball and tag with her brothers and some thirty cousins. Later she swam, played soccer, skied, and
biked each morning to deliver the paper. “When she got up and started to go, there was no holding her back,” her mom says.

The family loves to remember her first visit to the beach at age seven. Aimee, in her usual full-of-life spirit, charged right
into the surf. A crashing wave sent her flying and she was driven underwater. When she surfaced, she had removed her wooden
legs and tucked them under her arm. “I just kinda hung out that way, just floating,” she says with a laugh.

Aimee never had time to think of herself as a victim. She would roughhouse with her brothers, take her licks with the rest.
There was no coddling. Those artificial legs took an awful beating. “My parents didn’t try to shield me from physical and
emotional scars, which is why I’m not afraid of being wounded now,” she remembers. “One thing I love my parents for was that
I was never segregated or sat down as a little kid and told I couldn’t do something. I’d just go.”

While the world outside her home was not as understanding, Aimee was taught to turn setbacks into personal victories. In elementary
school a teacher recommended home schooling because Aimee’s presence was “improper” and “a distraction to the other kids.”
She was asked to have a monitor on a biking trip because they were afraid she might slow down the class and not finish. An
elementary school gym teacher wanted Aimee taken out of her class because one day, as Aimee danced with a friend, her leg
snapped in half and the other kids screamed. And, of course, she was teased about her “wooden leg.” But Aimee always showed
them what she was really made of. She finished the bike trip with the others, and one day for show and tell she just took
off her legs, held them up, and said, “See, they’re not wooden.”

All of this made Aimee stronger. Her sense of humor and perky spirit helped her acceptance of the prostheses, and her attitude
made things easier for others. “I used to enjoy jolting my substitute teachers by flipping a bolt and turning my feet backwards
when they weren’t looking,” she recalls with a laugh.

To this day Aimee sparkles with fun and fantasy. “I want to be a Bond girl. Think about it—I have metal components in my legs,
so when I go through airport security I set off the alarms. But when they realize why I’m beeping, they let me through. What
if I had weapons in my legs? I could take one off and pull out an Uzi! Legs Galore—that would be me!”

In 1993 Aimee was awarded one of three full-ride college scholarships from the U.S. Defense Department and matriculated at
George Washington University. She had never formally participated in track and field, but she became aware that just a few
blocks from campus was one of the most renowned coaches in collegiate track, Georgetown’s Frank Gagliano.

Says Gagliano, “I received this call out of the blue and frankly, I don’t remember the details. I field a lot of calls, but
this was different.” In his thick New York accent, “Gags” recalls that twenty-fifth day of August 1995. “Aimee said that she
was a double below-the-knee amputee and that she wanted to run track.” He was deeply touched. “Fine. Meet me at the track
at noon.”

A few weeks before the call, Aimee had run in her first track meet. It was an event for disabled athletes in Boston. She signed
up for the long jump and the 100- and 200-meter races. To her astonishment, she won all three.

While at GW she would run to Georgetown to work out on the track and take a cab back to class. In January 1996, Aimee transferred
to Georgetown and became a walk-on on the track team.

She competed in the 100- and 200-meter races in meets where minimum times were not required to enter. At first her times were
slow and her stamina restricted by the extra energy needed as an amputee. But Aimee was committed to success.