Resilience: Faith, Focus, Triumph

Book by Mourning Alonzo Wetzel Dan

THE WAKE- UP CALL

The kid wouldn’t eat. Not a bite. There was nothing his father could do. Doctors, nurses, and even fellow patients tried and got nowhere. For almost two weeks, no food. “I think he was giving up,” said Brian Mossbarger of his ten-year- old son, Zach. Of all the setbacks in a lifetime of setbacks, this was the most crushing for the father to watch.

And this from a dad who found Zach unresponsive at the tender age of three weeks old, rushed him to a small- town Ohio hospital, had doctors set up a medical helicopter to a bigger facility in Toledo, and was told, brutally, “Don’t expect him to survive the airlift.”

Zach did survive, but his was a difficult life. He was in and out of hospitals, doctor after doctor, treatment after treatment, surgery after surgery, infection after infection. One thing and then another; every solution brought a new problem. He suffered from chronic kidney failure, and by the age of eight the self- conscious boy had scars all over his body and two six- inch tubes coming out of his neck to serve as a temporary catheter; then, at nine, he started regular dialysis. The schoolkids were predictably cruel.

Eventually doctors settled on a transplant. Brian, thirty- five, a tough machine repairman at an aluminum factory, was a perfect match. The trans­plant took place on Valentine’s Day, 2007, at the University of Michigan hospital. For nine days, the kidney worked. Then it didn’t. Vascular rejection, the doctors said; the worst possible kind.

And so Zach stopped eating. Doctors had to tube- feed him. “He thought the transplant would be it for him,” Brian said. “When it didn’t happen, he was really depressed.”

No one knew what to do, what to say. In a small- world way, they found someone who might. Brian’s older brother worked with a guy who knew another man whose mother, Shari Rochester, was Alonzo Mourning’s assistant. The story got to Shari and she told Alonzo, told him about the vascular rejection, about the not eating. Alonzo said, “I have to meet this kid.”

The Miami Heat were scheduled to play at the Detroit Pistons in a few days. Alonzo set it up so Zach, who hadn’t left the hospital in six weeks, and Brian could visit him at the game. A doctor came along, just in case. On April 1, outside the Detroit visitors’ locker room just before the game, they wheeled small, frail Zach in front of big, strong Alonzo, two transplant survivors, two kidney patients sharing a look of mutual understanding and respect. Then Alonzo knelt down and flexed one of his massive biceps at the awestruck kid.

“You want some of these, you’ve got to start eating,” Alonzo said. “I had a transplant too, and look at me.”

They talked some more. Took pictures, signed autographs, and ex­changed phone numbers. Then Zach got wheeled out to courtside seats and stunned everyone.

He asked his dad for a hot dog.

A hot dog? Yes, the boy needed to eat, but something as nutritiously empty as a stadium hot dog? The doctor shrugged. “Go for it. It’s something.” Brian got Zach a hot dog. Then a half hour later Zach asked for nachos. A large order, no less. Brian got Zach nachos.

Back at the hospital everything seemed to change. The kid ate. The kid smiled. The kid started thinking positive.

“He had been so down,” Brian said. “Then it all changed.”

Three weeks later, doctors tested his creatinine level–the key stat for all kidney patients, where the lower the number the better. Zach had been hang­ing around a too- high 2.1. The test came in at 1.6, an incredible improvement. Unbelievable, really. So they tested again. The creatinine was 1.6. Again. Over a month after rejection, was this kidney finally working?

Dumbfounded, the doctors huddled and decided to push the issue. They took Zach off dialysis, just to see. The next day he registered a 1.1. The next 0.8, normal for him. No one knew how it could have happened. Within days, Zach was out of the hospital.

“I’m not real religious,” Brian said. “But one of the things Alonzo kept saying was ‘Pray for it and everything will come out the right way.’

“How do you thank a guy like that, who has no clue who you are but steps into your life and helps out, calls, prays, offers advice and hope? What can I say about him?”

Brian said this from the side of a fishing hole in northwest Ohio, his old kidney going strong in his son’s body. Dusk was coming fast and father and son were having a long, carefree time. The ten- year- old boy looked like any ten- year- old boy, laughing and jumping around as he caught a bass.

“You just have to stay positive and believe and never lose hope,” Brian said. “That’s what I’d tell other parents. That’s what Alonzo kept telling me.”

With that he went and unhooked his son’s fish.
Your life can change in a single instant, at the most unexpected time in the most routine manner. One second you have a list of concerns and challenges and plans to deal with. The next sec­ond that all seems trivial and God is laying down a challenge–a chal­lenge you never saw coming.

Mine came courtesy of a ringing telephone while I was asleep. I was taking a rare midday nap. Unless it was a game day, I was the last guy to spend the afternoon sleeping, especially with another NBA season to prepare for. But I was exhausted, suffering from what I believed was a combination of a lingering flu and extreme jet lag.

At my doctor’s suggestion I had gone in for some medical tests, a precautionary biopsy, but I didn’t believe anything serious was wrong, maybe a thyroid condition, or a virus. Maybe I was just ignoring the signs, but I really wasn’t very concerned. At worst, I figured, I’d take some pills and get back to getting ready for the fast- approaching NBA season, one in which I had my eyes on winning the championship. After all, I was the healthiest person I knew–thirty years old, six foot ten, 255 pounds with just six percent body fat. I benched over three hundred pounds with ease. I worked out with hundred- pound dumb­bells. I was a professional athlete, coming off a season where I was first team All NBA, a runner-up for NBA Most Valuable Player. That sum­mer I had been named USA Basketball Player of the Year after we won gold at the Sydney Olympics. With defense as my specialty, my reputation as a player was as perhaps the toughest and hardest- working one in the entire league.

At that point, in September of 2000, I felt invincible, like I could leap tall buildings. Nothing ever fazed me. I kept telling myself, even after my doctor had suggested those tests, that I was just under the weather, the understandable fallout of recent events in my life. A gru­eling NBA season had led straight into summer with the Olympic team. With Dream Team IV, I had toured Asia before hitting Aus­tralia for the Olympics. At the same time, life at home was blessed but hectic.

My wife, Tracy, was pregnant with our second child, and part of the deal I made with her was that I could fulfill my dream of being an Olympian as long as I promised to make it back for the birth. I tend to push things and believe everything will work out, so we had looked at the Olympic basketball schedule, found a couple of open days and decided to have the labor induced on a Saturday right in the middle of the games. That way, I could fly back to Miami with my mother- in- law and my first son, Trey, be at the birth, and then fly back to Australia and not miss a single game. USA Basketball was on board with the plan and NBC was even going to send a camera crew along. Nothing makes for great television like a new baby. It was all set.

But two days before the induction, the baby decided to come any­way. My wife started feeling labor pains and was in the shower singing to her, “Baby girl, wait for Daddy. Wait for Nana and your big brother.” By the time she got out of the shower, though, she knew she couldn’t wait. She called me and said, “Look, it’s time; it’s coming.” I dropped everything. We grabbed the next flight from Sydney to Los Angeles– fourteen hours in the air–and then jumped on a plane from L.A. to Miami, which is six more hours. The trip from L.A. came on the pri­vate jet of the owner of the Miami Heat; if he hadn’t been so gracious, we probably wouldn’t have made it.

That trip seemed to take forever. The last few hours, my wife was in the delivery room still singing to the baby to “wait for Daddy, wait for Daddy,” but it was getting close. Tracy’s sister, Lisa, was at the hospital, and in between contractions she was staring out the window looking for us to pull up. She finally said, “I see a limo, they’re here!” I went racing up and my wife was just bawling because she couldn’t believe we had made it, and within half an hour Myka Sydney–named after the town hosting the Olympics–was born. It was one of the greatest moments of my life, holding this little baby girl in my big hands and gaining that immediate love that only being a parent can provide. I was so overwhelmed I forgot to even be tired.

Talk about a whirlwind. I have so much faith in God, I never wor­ried that I would miss the birth. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I arrived from the other side of the world, camera crew in tow, with twenty- five minutes to spare. That’s the mentality I had, the trust I had in God. We all spent a great night together and then, less than twenty-four hours after reaching Tracy, I he...