| Subject: Lutheran Iron Man - Part II |
Author:
D. A. Senter
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Date Posted: 09:08:14 10/23/04 Sat
This ordinary teen was like no other
Lutheran High's Iron Man never gave up hope
Sprinkled among a week's worth of accumulated emails were messaged references to "Ryan Ott" or the "Lutheran Iron Man" or "A Ryan Ott update."
Before opening any, I tried convincing myself it was good news. Maybe he'd made the baseball team after playing football for the first time last fall. Maybe he'd earned an academic scholarship or recognition for courage.
He'd have deserved it. Maybe you remember what his football coach said about him in a December column. Lutheran High School gave Ryan Ott the Iron Man Award even though he didn't qualify by the usual standards of strength and endurance.
"We loosened the parameters," Nathan Robbins eloquently explained, "but we raised the bar."
They raised it, all right. I hoped that someone else had done as much, and maybe that's why someone was writing about Ryan Ott again. Maybe the leukemia hadn't come back.
"It should be cured this time," Ryan had told me in December, wrapped in the security of his faith and a new blue-and gold football letter jacket. "I know it will be." Why? "I know God will heal me."
He was sure of little else. Leafing through my notes, I was reminded by the 17-year-old boy speaking from those pages how shy and unassuming he could be, his voice gentle and gaze uncertain, most of his answers prefaced with a tentative "I guess ..." as if he'd never considered the possibilities.
But he was certain that God would heal him. He believed it even after the cancer came back on Feb. 6.
He went back to the hospital for the invasive chemo treatments that had turned his veins brittle and made him throw up in his sheets, and he developed what appeared to be a stomach virus. But he got better, and the doctors sent him home. Then the sickness returned. Worse, his blood count fell dangerously low.
His attitude never faltered, said his mother, Esther. The day before he went back in to the hospital for the last time, he even practiced with the baseball team. On the 13th, a Saturday, a group of teachers from the high school visited with dinner and talk of football and next year's senior trip.
The teachers left, and not 10 minutes passed. "And then he was gone," Esther said. Just like that.
Doctors figure a blood vessel burst in his lungs. An autopsy was ordered, not that an explanation would help much now. His mother wasn't prepared for the worst that can happen to any parent. In Esther's case, it might have been harder because she had come to believe in Ryan so much.
Talking about him in December, she described a kid "so full of life, even as a baby. He was always into everything. He never walked. He skipped everywhere he went. He loves life. He loves people. And he's a teenager, too. Strong-willed. We butt heads sometimes on the things he wants to do."
Ryan was like any kid, and he was like no other. He loved football even though he wasn't much good at it, not as a 5-10, 155-pound lineman getting in 10 to 15 plays a game. His mother, who once hoped that he'd hate it, loved what football did for him, calling it "the best thing he's ever done."
Courage and perseverance are words that come easy and cheap in sports, but every once in a while someone puts them in perspective. Ryan never gave up. "To the end, he knew he was going to be OK," Esther said. “To the very last minute, he was so hopeful."
No, God didn't heal him. Robbins said some of his classmates are having a hard time with that, many questioning life's fairness. So what do you tell them?
"God healed him," Robbins said, "just not in the way we prayed for or imagined." Esther takes some small comfort in that. No more chemo; no more hospitals. No more agonizing hours watching her boy suffer. . In the five years Ryan lived with leukemia, the Otts took his deadly fight day-by-day. Now, Esther and her 19-year-old daughter, Lauren, deal with his loss the same way. Only their boy isn't around to help. "Ryan was such ... I don't know... he was really the energy in our family," Esther said.
This is the rest of Ryan Ott's story, told too soon. He leaves a grieving family and friends, as well as a letter jacket and a legacy.
Not that he died young, but that he lived so well. "He was a happy kid," his mother said, softly.
The two articles on Ryan Ott were written by The Dallas Morning News staff writer Kevin Sherrington, with the first one appearing Dec. 14, 2003, and this one in the March 23, 2004 edition.
E-mail ksherrington@dallasnews.com
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