Living for Today

My father used to tell me that he lived in denial when it came to my health. He would not accept the fact that I was limited because of the genetic disease I was born with. He told me, that like a baseball player, I could change my statistics based on my efforts. My father told me that I had to look at the positives in anything. The problem was I couldn’t figure out what the positives were to having a life-threatening disease.

Being born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that affects the respiratory, digestive, and reproductive systems, my parents were told I probably wouldn’t live to see my teens. I had to do an hour of treatments each day along with taking about forty pills. Thanks to aggressive treatments, hard work, and a little luck along the way, I was able to prove those doctors wrong. I have become an avid weightlifter, a graduate of a four-year college, a full-time employee, a runner and an author of three books, including Alive at 25: How I’m Beating Cystic Fibrosis (Longstreet Press, 2001). I am also the chairman and founder of a softball tournament that has raised over half a million dollars to benefit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in memory of my sister Wendy, a co-founder of our family foundation. I am also proud of being an Olympic Torchbearer in 2001. In September of 2002, I married my soulmate Andrea who amazingly had faced many of the same challenges I did.

Andrea was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and thyroid cancer in her mid-twenties. Still through hard work and treatments, her MS is no longer progressing and her cancer has not come back. She has raised thousands of dollars for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and in June of 2004, she too ran with the Olympic Torch.

We appreciated all of our accomplishments, but we’d trade them all in just to have children. It brought me back to what my father always told me. I couldn’t think about the odds, rather I had to do my best to improve them.