Indomitable Spirit

I WAS THREE years old when I stepped into my first taekwondo class. Now 22, it’s been years since I last practiced, but the martial art’s five tenets are fixed in my memory: courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, and indomitable spirit, the most important to me.

Indomitable spirit is the long-term courage and perseverance that keeps me pushing forward. With every obstacle and hardship, I always fall back on my mental strength.

To play lacrosse at Stanford seemed a pipe dream when a former assistant coach said I wasn’t good enough. I was, and proved it. As my collegiate career draws to a close, I can say that my indomitable spirit carried me on the field, and armed me with the ability to endure the challenges I would face.

I learned this early and the lessons have become a guidepost at each turn when the future seems murky and there is no other way out. My indomitable spirit is there, pushing me onto the right path.

When I was nine, I was tested for a second-degree black belt along with all the adults in my class. I had to kick through a stack of thick wooden boards. I was small and skinny. There was only one other child in our class -- a male student who was two years old, probably a foot taller and very strong.

I went first, and I did it. I kicked through the boards. He was next -- it was the same test for both of us – and he couldn’t do it. Time after time, the boards remained intact with each strike. Everyone was watching. Eventually, our instructor talked to him and calmed him down and after about 10 tries, he finally did it.

It’s not hard if you really believe you can do it. This was a mental test rather than a physical one: Believe in yourself and in your spirit, and channel that belief. Your mentality and inner strength can allow you to achieve what you want physically, even more than the physical strength itself.

I’ve always looked up to my older brother and tried to do everything he did, including playing lacrosse, a sport I’d never heard of before. For Christmas, my parents bought my first lacrosse stick, so I didn’t have to use my brother’s old one anymore. I was in seventh grade, and this also was when my first real life challenge began.

LIKE MANY ADOLESCENTS, I had some acne, and I was especially self-conscious. I started taking an antibiotic, doxycycline, to clear my skin.

Eleven months later, I was in a hospital bed for a week. I couldn’t walk without a shooting pain in my foot. I never had an injury before or missed a day of school for being sick in my life. I always was healthy and fit – to this day, I still hold the state of Arizona running record for the 5K by a 7-year-old girl. I always was the fastest and had the most endurance in my class.

And now this … severe ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory colon disease that was triggered by the acne antibiotic. I felt lucky there wasn’t anything wrong with my foot – it was just a remote manifestation of the inflammation in my colon. The immediacy of being able to walk was more important to me than a disease I knew nothing about.

Over the next two years, I tried every medication possible -- everything that usually works for this diagnosis -- but nothing helped. My symptoms only got worse and were compounded by horrible side effects. One of the medications caused me to have pancreatitis, a disease in which the pancreas becomes inflamed and leads to severe pain, vomiting, and can become life-threatening.

I couldn’t breathe and I woke up multiple times a night to throw up. I had chest pains. Bloody stools. I had to use the bathroom every hour. The rest of the time I just lay on my bed with cramps.

I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I was at a point where it didn’t seem like there was very much hope at all. Most people were getting positive results from these medications and I was getting worse. Diarrhea was constant. I quit cross country running because there were no bathrooms nearby.

My doctor discussed surgically removing my colon. I couldn’t gain weight or absorb nutrients. My parents confronted me one day because they thought I had an eating disorder.

I ate at every chance I got and happily loaded up the grocery cart with my favorite snacks, but it backfired because it just meant I had to run to the bathroom more often. I tried gluten free, dairy free, and both combined. I started lying to my mom about how much I weighed — I didn’t want her to be scared.

I was a freshman in high school and severely underweight: 85 pounds. I kept all of this hidden. My friends just thought I was quiet. I never missed a lacrosse practice or competition. My freshman year at Xavier Prep, I was the MVP of the varsity lacrosse team. I wanted to play lacrosse in college, maybe at Stanford. But my health still got worse every day, with no treatment in sight.

Honestly, what probably kept me going was not telling my friends at school. Everyone treated me normally. No one thought anything was wrong. When I went home, that’s when I had to deal with it. But outside, no one knew my life was in danger.

I went to great lengths to hide what was going on. On a trip to the national under-15 tournament in Orlando, Florida, with my club team, we went to Disney World. That was one of the perks of going each year.

My team was in line for Splash Mountain and the line was really long, snaking through tunnels and passages. All of a sudden, I immediately had to go to the bathroom, and it was not close. I tried to run, but it was pretty far and there was a line for that too. I didn’t make it.

I went into a handicapped stall, threw away my underwear, put on my shorts, cleaned up, found my teammates, got back in line, and went on the ride. We got off and everyone was so excited and having fun. And then everyone went to the bathroom, and immediately noticed the smell. “It smells so bad in here,” many of them said.

No one knew what had happened, and certainly no one had traced it to me. Still, I pretended to be oblivious and lied about how much fun I had on the ride. But, inside, I felt embarrassed and humiliated.

And this wasn’t the only story like this. Others were just as painful.

AS A SOPHOMORE, my monthly blood tests showed abnormal numbers for my liver enzymes. My doctor wanted to rule out liver disease with a biopsy. I was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare bile-duct disease, with no cure and no treatment. In most patients, PSC leads to liver failure within 10-12 years of diagnosis, and the chronic inflammation usually causes additional complications such as cancer.

My mom cried. I told her it would be fine. At the children’s hospital in Phoenix, my doctor told me I would never be able to play competitive sports with this disease and life prognosis, and that I should consider a colectomy, which meant I would wear a coloscopy bag the rest of my life. Through research, my parents discovered a story in Stanford Magazine about a Stanford doctor, gastroenterologist Kenneth Cox, who was successfully treating children who had my disease off-label with an existing generic drug. My mom asked my doctor to try this treatment on me. He refused, because it was "experimental.”

He was not my doctor after that. We switched to Dr. Cox.

Coincidentally, since Dr. Cox was at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, my doctor visits were combined with the summer and winter Stanford lacrosse recruiting camps.

Finally, as a high school junior, some good news: After a year of being on a new experimental treatment, I had no symptoms. The progress in both my diseases reversed and I gained 35 pounds of healthy weight. But things were not perfect—a Stanford assistant coach told my club coach that Stanford wasn’t interested in me. I was too small and not good enough.

I still went to camp the winter of my junior year. And, for the first time, the coaches knew my name. At the end, they told me I could be on the team if I got into Stanford on my own.

I know an easier path to college lacrosse would have been Division III. I was small and coming from a state that was weak in the sport. Even my parents encouraged me to look at smaller schools.

But I ultimately decided I wouldn’t be satisfied joining a team or going to a school that had a ceiling. I liked the challenge of having room to grow. I might start out the smallest on the team or not the smartest in a class, but I knew that my potential never would be limited.

Until I asked a friend to read my college essay, no one outside of my parents really knew what was going on. I had always been a private person, and all this made me distance myself even more from others. I didn’t want to be embarrassed and didn’t want pity.

I knew college lacrosse wasn’t going to be easy, but I couldn’t have predicted the combination of mental and physical trials that I would encounter. As a freshman, I immediately felt inadequate playing with such talented and aggressive teammates. I struggled to add to the team with my skills, but I knew no matter what, that I would work hard and persevere.

I always crushed the team conditioning. I beat myself up if I didn’t finish first in sprints. I got to the field 30 minutes early, at 6 a.m., to make sure I was warmed up. No matter how many times I got knocked down in practice or felt like I wasn’t good enough, I reminded myself how hard I fought to be here. My spirit is strong even when my body struggles.

We wear GPS and heart rate monitors that track, basically, how hard we’re working. We wore them throughout training and in games.

Early in my sophomore season, we had a meeting in the locker room. The coaches pulled charts of everyone’s numbers and put them on the wall. Mine were the highest in everything, way beyond everyone. I had no idea. I was just playing hard in practice, because that’s what I always do.

One of the coaches said to the team, “Areta’s working her hardest every single day in practice and it’s showing. We will always find a place for her because of this.”

They moved me from midfield to attack and started me in the next game. I didn’t know my effort had been noticed, especially because I hadn’t been playing. But that really stuck with me, that hard work really can pay off. It’s not for nothing. I worked hard, and because of that, I got an opportunity.

That’s how I got here.

EVERY TIME I step on the field to play, I feel lucky. Every time I walk into my locker room, I feel lucky. I feel lucky that my family could afford to fly me to California to find doctors who gave me a new chance at life. Most people with my diseases live their lives in between their homes and the hospital. They don’t have the luxury of playing competitive sports.

In the PSC world, I am a poster child for grants to get funding to study the disease. I’m in contact with other patients and doctors from around the world because my life gives them hope. But on the field, I am just a player who feels lucky to have a chance.

Now, I’m a senior. I still take medication three times a day (390 pills a month), get monthly blood tests, and yearly colonoscopies and liver MRIs. In addition, I have tendinitis and tears in both of my hamstring tendons for which I will have surgeries after the season. Because of my hamstring injuries, I was relegated to bike workouts instead of sprint conditioning and I’ve been limited in weight training. I’ve had countless other less chronic injuries, including a cracked rib early this spring. I played through all of these injuries with the help of dynamic kenisio tape.

Some people look at me like I’m fragile, like I’m not up for a challenge. Some teammates have offhandedly said that I was “lucky” for not having to do a run because it was so hard, or that I was “lucky” I get to go inside and bike and get out of the cold. I know they had good intentions, but I didn’t ever feel lucky for being held back from competing. Tendinitis is not life-threatening, doesn’t make my mom cry, and doesn’t require me to remove my organs. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a mental test too.

My spirit still is being challenged, but if it’s never challenged, I wouldn’t be able to say it’s indomitable.

When you’re told you can't do something, it makes doing it that much more special. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the inner strength that I began to learn when I was three years old in taekwondo. I’m grateful for the things that I can control, and I know that overcoming an obstacle just means that I’ll meet another one.

Physical strength can only get me so far, but with an indomitable spirit, there will always be a way.