| Subject: Lutheran Iron Man - Part One |
Author:
D. A. Senter
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Date Posted: 09:00:13 10/23/04 Sat
Real life at LHS - Dallas, TX
Lutheran Iron Man trying to throw the biggest block of his young life
Ryan Ott doesn't wear his letter jacket so much as wrap himself in it, the collar snug at the back of his head, hands stuffed deep in the pockets.
"It's really nice," he says, smiling down at the garish blue and gold colors of Lutheran High. "I enjoy having the football on there." The shiny little symbol means more to Ryan than it would to most kids, probably. Kids who don't have leukemia, anyway.
Kids who don't lose their hair and throw up in their sheets and wait on tests to see if the cancer is back.
Normal kids. The kind of kid Ryan Ott wants to be.
He’ll never be normal, though. His coaches at the tiny North Dallas school recognized the difference last month at their first football banquet, when they honored him with the Iron Man Award. Under normal criteria, Ryan wouldn't seem to qualify for any football awards, much less the Iron Man. A 5’-11”, 155-pound junior, he wasn't one of Nathan Robbins' biggest or toughest players, only a reserve lineman averaging 10 to 15 plays a game.
An Iron Man makes all games and practices, too, and Ryan missed some of both. “We loosened the parameters," Robbins says of the award, "but we raised the bar."
How high? At one midweek practice, Ryan told his coach he'd be out three days.
Ryan: "I've got to get chemo through a port."
Robbins: “What's that?”
Ryan: "It's a hole in my side."
Robbins: “What?”
Ryan lifted his shirt. A big gauze bandage plastered up under his right rib cage glowed blood-red. "Don't worry, coach," Ryan told him." I’ll be back out there Monday."
Always, -he came back. Even when his mother, Esther, hoped that he'd hate it. Even when the chemo and the heat and the running, running, running weakened him to the point of exhaustion, he came back.
"Sometimes I didn't want to get him out of bed," Esther says, her voice soft almost tired. "It'd be six o'clock in the morning in the summer, and as he'd trudge from his room, I'd think, 'This is stupid.' "
But you can't tell your boy that, not when it's his dream. Doctors told Esther that Ryan could do whatever he wanted as long as he was willing to suffer it. He'd suffered enough, Esther figured. Ever since he was 12 and looked down at his legs one day and asked his mom why he had red freckles, he's suffered somehow.
On that Saturday five years ago, they were simply red freckles. The following Monday, for all Esther knew or hoped after seeing his doctor, it was an allergy. By Tuesday, in the car on the way to Children's Hospital, Ryan seemed to sense his mother's unspoken fears. "Mom," he said, suddenly, "I hope I don't have leukemia."
Esther still can't believe that he made the connection. "I almost wrecked the car," she says. Her shock only deepened and spread, pooling in her soul, when doctors finally told her it was leukemia. "The first thing I thought, it was a death sentence;" she says. "I couldn't think past that."
Soon it was simply a matter of adjusting to the day-to-day process of keeping him alive. Treatments started immediately after the diagnosis. Within weeks he went into remission but remained on chemo, alternating pills and injection, for 2 1/2 years.
Nearly a year passed without any treatment at all. Then last year, with the spring, the cancer came back.
Before the first round of treatments, doctors told the Otts that Ryan had a 70 to 80 percent chance of recovery.
And now? "I think they're probably not as good," Esther says, softly. "To be perfectly honest, I haven't asked." Ryan doesn't want to know the numbers, either. Instead, he and his mother and 9-year-old sister, Lauren, have faith in the treatments, chemo so harsh now that he lost his hair twice and his veins turned brittle, forcing doctors to use the port in his side to administer the medication that would save him. The weekly treatments are scheduled to run through the spring. "It should be cured this time," Ryan says. "I know it will be." Why? "I know God will heal me."
He'll keep playing football, that much is sure. Lutheran will play a full varsity schedule next fall after Robbins put together a program in six months, two years ahead of schedule. Playing a half-varsity, half JV schedule, and all its games on the road, Lutheran went 6-1 this season with 28 players.
Only four had ever played before, and none enjoyed the new experience more than Ryan. He misses football. Of all things, he misses the hitting the most, a funny thing when you see a slender boy in glasses and a bulky letter jacket, a boy whose brassy blond hair has grown back thick and wavy as the battle between his illness and cure recedes.
A boy who misses football. Esther didn't know a thing about it, but she can't wait until next; season, either. "I've seen such a change in him," she says. "This really gives him something that he's a part of. Lutheran had a team for the first time, and he was part of it. “This is the best thing he's ever done.”
And not just because of the award that came with it. After the school's first Iron Man was announced, and the bar raised, the crowd at the football banquet rose in applause, a gesture so moving that Esther found herself unable to look at Ryan for fear that five years of emotion would loosen and unravel.
And Ryan? For a kid who only wants to be normal, a letter jacket with a shiny little football was comfort enough.
"He wears it all the time," his mother says.
***********************************************************************************************************
This article was written by Kevin Sherrington, reporter at the Dallas Morning News, and appeared in the Sunday, Dec. 14, 2003 edition. E-mail:ksherrington@dallasnews.com
Junior Ryan Ott not only beat the odds to play on Lutheran's inaugural football team, he won the Iron Man Award.
Photo by LOUIS DELUCA / Staff Photographer
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