Giving Thanks
By David Villavicencio
HurricaneSports.com
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – Ronnie Walker and Todd Stanish are Miami Hurricanes to the core.
The two former Miami football players love their alma mater and were in attendance for the Hurricanes’ 44-28 victory over Virginia on Saturday.
Walker and Stanish were proudly donning their Miami gear and celebrating with fellow former players as the Canes charged back to beat Virginia on Senior Day. While the two former players were thankful to be back supporting their team, they are most grateful to be alive.
“I used to come all the time and this spring actually I got sick and I’ve been missing most of the games,” Stanish said. “I wasn’t going to come back until the Notre Dame game but, I said ‘ahh I gotta go. I gotta go’ so I came for the Virginia Tech game. I’ve been here ever since. It is special to be here. I’m very grateful and blessed to be here.”
Stanish, who was a halfback on the 1983 Miami Hurricanes team that won the program’s first of five national championships, was at the pool one day and began to feel faint before he fell down and his girlfriend noticed his hands and feet were shaking, so they went to the emergency room.
“I found out I had some blood issues but they were all related to the liver,” Stanish said. “Some hemoglobin issues. That’s why I actually fainted because my hemoglobin was so low. I went through several stays at the hospital, having the transfusions. I said ‘you gotta do something about this. I can’t live like this.’ So, we eventually decided on doing the transplant.”
In late August, Stanish was fortunate to get a match for a donor after about a month on the transplant list. After losing about 70 pounds since he was diagnosed with liver problems, he has gained back about 10 and getting stronger every day.
“I feel great,” Stanish said. “It’s totally night and day from what I felt before. I can never ever say enough ‘Thank Yous’ to my donor and their family. They sacrificed a lot, and I’m grateful for it. My family is able to benefit. I understand their loss and I’m sorry for that, but at the end of the day, they saved somebody’s life and they should be proud of that.”
While Stanish’s transplant was within the last six months, Walker had a heart transplant over a decade ago and is so happy to have gotten an opportunity to continue living his life.
“My diagnosis was one where I wasn’t expected to live five years when they diagnosed it and that was back in 2004,” Walker said. “I’m still here today, 13 years later, by the grace of God and I’m so grateful for it.”
A former defensive tackle at Miami, Walker played for Pete Elliott, Carl Selmer and Lou Saban from 1974-78. Following his playing career, he went into personal security work and was with a client in St. Maarten when he felt like something was wrong.
A former collegiate athlete, Walker could not keep up with his client on their hikes through the mountains in St. Maarten. So he called his mother, who is a nurse, and she feared it was something related to his heart and suggested he get to a hospital as soon as he got back home.
“When I got back to the U.S., the first thing I did was I went to church,” Walker said. “I kid you not. I took a taxi to church. It was on a Sunday. I went to church and I prayed. And I prayed for my soul and I asked God to forgive me. I repented because I had a feeling of an impending doom that came over me that was overwhelming. And I knew something was seriously wrong. So as soon as I did that, I jumped in a taxi from church and I went straight to the hospital.
“In the hospital, the guy took x-rays and he said, ‘Man, you know, you’ve got a big heart.’ I said, ‘Yeah, people tell me that.’ I was just joking and he looked at the x-ray and he said, ‘No, it’s really big and that’s not good.’ They gave me some blood thinners and stuff and let me go.”
Shortly after, Walker had a stroke and that incident led to a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. Doctors treated his condition with medication for as long as possible, but Walker’s heart continued to weaken until the doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital told him he needed a heart transplant. Walker was placed on the transplant list and had a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) put in to help his function until a donor match was found.
“When I was diagnosed, my condition was so bad that it’s so weak that I needed something to help it pump,” Walker said. “That helped me in the sense that it gave me an opportunity to still live a semi-normal life. I had enough strength to get up and walk. I wasn’t bedridden. And I had the LVAD to keep me stable until my heart came. But you never know with a heart. In my situation, I was blessed. I was only on the list for a month before I got the call. And that’s extraordinary considering how many people. But because my situation was so dire, that I had to have the LVAD, it bumped me up the list. So, once they put me on the list, I got a call less than a month after I was on the list.”
“I give praise and thanks to God,” Walker said. “It’s by His grace that I’m here and that a young man was 19 years old who made the contribution to me to get me to get that life. So, I’m eternally grateful for that.”
Walker noticed immediately that he was able to breathe better after his heart transplant. While his physical health was much improved, he went through a bit of a psychological battle following the transplant.
“It was a very hard thing for me to wrap my brain around, the fact that somebody died for me to live,” Walker said. “I told my mom and my wife, I said, ‘Listen, you know what I think about this. I don’t want anybody to die for me to live.’ I had to grasp the concept that I had no control over it. Only God could control and if somebody died it’s because God allowed it to happen. And if God allowed it to happen, and that heart was given to me, it wasn’t going to work unless God allows it to work. But it was tough. I had to get a little psychological help on that one.”
Walker felt guilty that someone had to die for him to live, especially someone so young. He reached out to the donor’s mother and learned that the young man was a very giving and caring person. The donor’s mother told Walker of a time that she sent her son to go shopping and he came back with nothing because he saw someone who needed the money more and gave it to them instead.
“Even now when I talk about that, it just makes me want to melt,” Walker said. “It humbles me to a point where I understand that this kid got it. At such a young age, he understood what the meaning of life is. It is to serve others. So now, I aspire to give the grace that this young man gave. All my life I was self-serving, it was all about me, I was more narcissistic. That changed me a lot, the way I look at life and the things that I try to do now. I try to build myself for others. I try to make myself available for others and to do for those around me in whatever way possible. To give hope to them, to speak to them and let them know that if God could bring me through what I went through, that he can do it for you. Any of us, he can do it for all of us. His grace is sufficient for everybody. I’m just happy, I’m overjoyed, I can’t complain about anything. If I die today, I have no complaints. So, every day for me is a gift.”
With a new heart in his body, Walker seemed to be headed back to living a healthy life until another health scare popped up. But his new outlook on life combined with treatment from his doctors helped him defeat that, too.
“After the stroke and the heart transplant, I had prostate cancer,” Walker said. “Fortunately, at the University of Miami – the best center – they treated me and the cancer went into remission. It’s been one close call after the other. But I’m still here so now I have a different perspective on life. I can truly say that today I’m so much more appreciative of things I took for granted before. For me, it’s been a miraculous journey.”
