When a 13 year old starts swimming on a team in a lane with 5 year olds, it's more than evident to them that they are starting at the very bottom. There is no escaping it, you know you are slow. Everyone my age was swimming much faster, several lanes over. This was overwhelming to me at first, because when you haven't been a competitive swimmer, you immediately see how hard it is to swim fast. It takes a tremendous amount of work. You will find yourself pushing through a lot of sensations that are not always pleasant. For months I felt like I was drowning.
I remember grumbling to my father that Silver Streaks practice was really tough and he said, "Yeah, that's what boot camp was like for me, You'll get though it.".
As we would swim certain freestyle sets, there was a whistle blown randomly at any point. Mr. Silverman would point at you and say, "You! What are you doing there? You should be up here! Swim faster". He was very animated and passionate about going faster. White water was a phrase that was repeated a lot. If you had white water at your feet it meant you were kicking. If you watch any swim race on TV you'll see it. White water takes a lot of practice and when you build the strength in your legs, you will see it trailing behind you.
Always touching the wall at practice when you finished a set was a must. The clock doesn't stop until you touch the wall. Using the ladder to get out of the pool was a big no, no. Competitive swimmers pull themselves out of the pool over and over again. We would start some sets lined up fast to slow diving into the pool at one end and zig zagging down the lanes until we had reached the other side. You would then pull yourself out, to begin the pattern all over again. When you do this enough pulling yourself out of the pool eventually begins to become just a little bit easier.
Eventually something switched on in my mind. You could call it drive. I think some of this "drive" was also anger married with frustration that was the result of being slower than anyone else my age. The seeds of a competitor were beginning to be sown. Wanting and needing to prove myself to my coach grew and developed. I just wanted to be faster so badly.
Lane by lane I started to move over. However you didn't just tap someone's feet to advance. No one politely moved over to let you pass. Everyone held their position and they fought to stay ahead of you. So if you wanted to get ahead you had to pass them and then hold the position to move up in your placement. After 8 months I was in the lane with other kids my age or close to it. But I wasn't even close to being the fastest kid on the team. At one meet, I did finally win a ribbon. It was 12th place. I was so happy with this ribbon. It was the first award I ever got for swimming. It was comical how low the place was. I wasn't going to Silvers or JO's (huge competitions that happened toward the end of the season) I still had a long long way to go.
We had started swimming on the team in September of 1987 and around that time my mom had gone in for a routine physical. She was in good health with no complaints. Her doctor took a chest x-ray during her physical each year as standard practice. However in 1987 she got a call after the exam to come back in. He wanted to take another x-ray at a different angle.
Shadows were found on my mom's lungs so she was sent to a Pulmonary Specialist who decided to treat her without a diagnosis. She was given prednisone and x-rays were taken every week for a month. The prednisone did nothing to fix my mom's mysterious condition but it did give her mood swings, horrible hunger and her face blew up like a balloon. Her personal care physician advised she go off the prednisone because she started to have adverse reactions to it. It took a month to tapper off. There were whispers by relatives in my house that cancer was a strong possibility. It was a pretty scary time.
Shadows were found on my mom's lungs so she was sent to a Pulmonary Specialist who decided to treat her without a diagnosis. She was given prednisone and x-rays were taken every week for a month. The prednisone did nothing to fix my mom's mysterious condition but it did give her mood swings, horrible hunger and her face blew up like a balloon. Her personal care physician advised she go off the prednisone because she started to have adverse reactions to it. It took a month to tapper off. There were whispers by relatives in my house that cancer was a strong possibility. It was a pretty scary time.
A Thoracic Surgeon was consulted at White Plains hospital. He wanted to do an open lung biopsy with an incision that would go across a large portion of her upper body. She was told that she would lose half of one of her lungs. A close family friend advised my mom to seek a second opinion and it was that advice that ended up saving her future lung function. The doctor who gave the second opinion turned out to be Dr. Alvin Teirstein, at Mount Sinai. The lung biopsy that he preformed took out a small piece of lung tissue through a small incision. I think the term he had used in referring to the surgeon in White Plains was "Rambo".
Dr. Teristein had suspected what my mom had but wanted to get confirmation first. He himself had only seen about 10 patients with it. So until the results of the lung biopsy were confirmed we wouldn't know what we were dealing with.
This medical nightmare had plagued my family for many months. The prednisone had made my mom really sick so trying to handle getting kids to meets on the weekends was proving to be too much. My father had a high pressure job in the city and didn't want to give up his weekends to sit in swim meets. Our family lived on one salary and the weekends were my dad's time to repair the house and take care of the property. My mother didn't want to go to meets without my father. A lung biospy was scheduled. My grandmother had traveled down to our house to help while my mom was in the hospital and then several weeks later she had a stroke. My dad's father... well his health started to fail. His mother didn't handle this well because in her mind she was suppose to die first. Eventually something had to give and going to meets on the weekends proved to be too stressful for my family.
I had just started to open up to kids on the team too and felt like I would start to make friends. This is when my family had made the decision to pull us off of the team before the season ended. It was an unusual move for my family because I was always taught that "we don't quit". I remember wanting to quit skating lessons half way through because within one lesson I wasn't skating like Dorothy Hamel. My mom informed me, "We don't quit, you're finishing the season".
When my parents came to me, they asked me how I felt about leaving the team. I didn't fight to stay and that was a regret of mine. As a fourteen year old kid you don't always know what is best for you. I don't know if fighting would have made a difference in this situation either. I was exhausted after practice and doing my homework was a struggle. (There were reasons for this but I wouldn't find out until 20 years later). Mr. and Mrs. Silverman wanted us to stay, suggested car pooling to elevate the stress but it was to no avail, the decision was made and my sister and I were taken off the team.
When the results of the biopsy had come in we found out my mom was walking around with Benign Metastasizing Unterine Leiomyonmas. In laymans terms she had uterine tissue growing in her lungs and it is very rare. In some cases, the uterine tissue grows and lung function is impacted. In her case she was extremely lucky because all they did was monitor her for years and it never became a problem. However she can't receive any type of hormone therapy.
Eight months on the Silver Streaks was the extent of my age group swimming background. A door had closed but soon another door would open.
