» Tough survivor:
Madison native Kim Norvell celebrates life after cheating death
For Madison native Kim Norvell, wife of University of Nevada football coach Jay Norvell, every day is a gift.
“I know that I’m fortunate and that I’ve been given a gift, and I need to use my gift.” KIM NORVELL
With her folksy Midwestern accent and the spunk that has defined her life, Kim Norvell wants to make two things clear from the start. First, she’s exceptionally lucky. And, second, don’t feel bad for her.
Yes, Norvell was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at 6 months old, and doctors said she’d most likely die before first grade. Yes, she’s a cancer survivor after having 13 inches of her colon removed. Yes, every day is a struggle as her morning routine includes coughing for the first hour she’s awake to shake up her organs before she can truly start the day. Yes, she suffers from survivor’s guilt after watching many of her closest friends die in excruciating fashion. Yes, she’s moved 11 times in the last three decades because she is a coach’s wife. And, yes, she rarely sees her husband when the sun is up because his job requires 14-hour days.
But, for Kim Norvell, the wife of University of Nevada Wolf Pack football coach Jay Norvell, every day is a gift she was not expected to receive nearly half a century ago. At age 49, Kim Norvell has outlived every expectation for a CF patient. Babies born with disease in the 1960s weren’t expected to get past kindergarten, let alone attend prom, walk down the aisle at their wedding or become a parent. Kim Norvell has done each of those things, and, in a lifetime defined by life-altering bad breaks, her optimism has been indestructible.
“I can honestly tell you she’s my hero,” Norvell’s father, Bob Fehrman, said.
As Jay Norvell has worked to construct a program built on toughness – the team’s motto is #NevadaGrit – nobody associated with the Wolf Pack is tougher than his wife, Kim. Because of her illness, not a day passes in which she doesn’t struggle – more than she’ll ever let on. But, she doesn’t allow for self-pity. There is only the next step to walk, the next task to complete, the next challenge to tackle.
“I feel very fortunate that I’ve lived this long,” Kim said. “I sometimes almost feel bad. I’ve lost a lot of friends to CF. A lot – in very painful, hard-to-watch ways. For whatever reason, I’m still here. I’m so grateful to God for that. I know that I’m really lucky, but sometimes I feel guilty that I have what I have. I have really sick friends, and I just lost another one a couple of months ago. You try and figure out, ‘Why am I so lucky and she’s not?’ I know that I’m fortunate and that I’ve been given a gift, and I need to use my gift.”
That gift is life, which Norvell has been determined not to waste. She sees her purpose being three-fold. She is Jaden’s mom, Jay’s wife and an advocate for others with CF, a rare genetic disorder that affects the internal organs, specifically the lungs. She has been the backbone of her family and the prop that kept her husband pushing when he repeatedly came close but failed to secure a head-coaching job. When Norvell takes the sideline on game days, he understands he only gets to coach the sport he loves because of his wife.
“I would not be here at this level or have the opportunity to be a head coach without her,” Jay said. “We’ve gone through this whole thing together. You talk about toughness and grit and handling all the things coaches’ wives do behind the scenes, picking up and moving at a moment’s notice, raising a child, running the household and never complaining about anything, that’s my wife. She’s amazing.”
Defying a death sentence
Bob and Delores Fehrman met in kindergarten and went to Catholic school together until graduation.
They married young, and Delores — everybody called her “Dee” — gave birth to their first and only child when they were both 20. Kim Fehrman was born in Madison, Wis., a beautiful blue-eyed baby girl. She was sent home with a perfect bill of health. But around 6 months of age, something seemed wrong.
“She had diarrhea all the time,” Bob said. “We were changing diapers like crazy. So, we took her to our doctor and he said, ‘I can’t tell you what’s wrong.’ ”
The case was sent to the University of Wisconsin and, after a night of tests, Kim was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, which is caused when both parents have the defective CF gene. Only 30,000 people in the United States have the disease, which today can be detected before birth. But, in 1960 — Kim was born in 1968 — the median age of survival for CF kids was 6 months. Kim’s parents were told their baby could very well die before first grade.
“Back in those days, most of the doctors didn’t even know what cystic fibrosis was,” Bob said.
CF is a chronic disease, meaning it never goes away. People with it can’t absorb vitamins A,D, E or K, which leads to osteoporosis. Each case is different, but many with the disease suffer from arthritis and asthma. When Kim was a child, digestive enzymes were available that helped break down her food, which her body couldn’t do without help. Her parents had to do airway clearance so she could breathe.
“That entailed basically hitting me,” Kim said. “You take your hands and you cup them and you have eight areas that you hit, literally pound as hard as you can to try and move your secretions in your lungs. You’d be upside down and sideways and they’d do all these things for 45 minutes three times a day.”
Labeled as “failure to thrive” when she was 6 months old, Kim not only reached the first grade, she became a cheerleader for two sports while attending Sun Prairie High School, whose chief rival was Madison Memorial, the school Jay attended, although the two never met in high school.
“She was very active growing up,” her father said. “We had really good friends, good neighbors, good people around us. She would play with the neighborhood kids and nobody would say, ‘Oh, my God, what’s wrong with Kim?’ Even when she did feel bad, she would say, ‘Don’t boo hoo me, Dad. I’m fine.’ ”
Stubborn to a fault, Kim was determined to surpass all expectations. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. When she was in school, in 1991, she met Jay, who was a young assistant coach for the Badgers after a brief NFL career. They were married six years later.
“When we first met, I used to tease her about how her high school used to cheat us when we went over there to play basketball,” Jay joked. “We kind of had this rivalry, and we got to know each other and fell in love.She ended up coming with me when I went to Iowa State to coach, and we got married.”
Their journey has taken them from Wisconsin and Iowa, to Indiana and the Bay Area, to Nebraska and Southern California, to Oklahoma and Texas, to Arizona and Northern Nevada. Each time Jay took a new job, it was Kim who had to move the household while raising a kid and trying to manage her own fragile health, which ebbs and flows depending on how hard she pushes herself each day.
“She’s kind of a miracle patient,” Kim’s father-in-law, Merritt Norvell, said. “Most people who have CF, by the time they’re 30 years old, they’re dead. And you have to be tough being a coach’s wife because coaches move and you have to take care of the house, take care of the kids, take care of the moving and it all falls on the wives. There are a lot of wives who can’t handle it. She’s handled it well in addition to being sick on top of that. It’s a challenge, and we’ve been really blessed that she’s still here with us.”
Meeting cancer, beating cancer
In 2007, with Jay coaching at UCLA, Kim went in for a routine colonoscopy. Doctors discovered cancer.
“My first thought was, ‘It’s a very bad time to get cancer,’” Kim said.
That’s because it was the middle of football season; she was about to host Thanksgiving dinner; she was dealing with pesky tenants in their home in Nebraska she was trying to sell, all while raising an 8-year-old, Jaden, and dealing with the effects of CF.
“I actually wasn’t going to tell Jay until after the season, but my friend said, ‘Kim, you have to tell your husband you have cancer,’ ” said Norvell, who had surgery to remove the cancer along with 13 inches of her colon.
Kim laughs at that story today, but it also epitomizes her. She’s selfless to a fault, putting everybody but herself first, which oftentimes gets her in trouble. Kim is supposed to sit and wear a vest for 45 minutes three times a day for airway clearance, which helps her breathe. She usually only does it once because she’s so busy.
While the medicine for CF has improved, the median survival is only 37 years for women and 40 for men. The quality of life decreases a little every day as lung capacity shrinks and other organs suffer. There are very few people Kim’s age with CF. While the pain of getting around each day can be difficult, the pain of watching her friends die year after year has been worse.
“It’s hard because everybody dies,” Kim Norvell said. “I’ve lost probably 90 percent of
my friends. I know so many people who never went to prom, never got married, never had a baby or got to do all of the things in life that I’ve had the privilege to do, and there’s guilt associated with that. I’ve had to detach myself from the CF community to some degree because it’s so tough to see your friends die.”
She’s been active in fundraising for CF in every community the Norvells have lived. She stresses the need for people to donate their organs because CF patients are often in need of transplants. She marvels at the fight she sees in others who have the disease without seeing the inspiration she is to many.
“She’s a fighter and she always will be,” her father said. “She never complains about anything. I think being around a lot of people who have gone through what she’s gone through has made her stronger.”
Kim cherishes friendship, so it’s even more difficult to see those close to her die. As the wife of the head coach of the football team, she has the unofficial role of “head wife.” When her husband was hired by Nevada last December, Kim pulled out a notepad and called friends who had been wives of head coaches to get their advice on how to help the other wives of the team.
On most days, Jay leaves for work around 5 a.m. and gets home around 8 p.m. His assistant coaches have similar schedules. That leaves the coaches’ wives to do everything non-football for their families, and Kim does whatever she can to support those women. She has weekly Wednesday gatherings for the ladies, who say Kim’s support has been crucial in their lives. When Kim was in the hospital over the summer following sinus surgery and a moving truck arrived at her house with the family’s kitchen supplies, the other wives sneaked into the home to unpack everything.
“She would have done the same for us,” said Brooke Graham, the fiancee of Wolf Pack running backs coach David White. “She’s a very strong woman. To be able to fight her disease and raise a 17year-old and be a coach’s wife, it’s amazing. She does it all and keeps a smile on her face. She’s awesome, and she’s one of the nicest and toughest ladies I’ve ever met.”
Every day a blessing
Kim Norvell likes to joke that she’s not a morning person. It’s not that she doesn’t like getting up early. But after lying in bed throughout the night, it takes a while for her lungs to start functioning properly.
She wakes up congested and spends her first hour awake coughing and getting downstairs, where she hooks herself up to her vest to do her airway clearance. She takes her handful of pills and eventually starts the day. She has to limit her chores and not overwork herself, a challenge that is difficult because she likes to stay active and has sworn against ever asking people for help.
She had to quit her volunteer shift at St. Vincent’s Food Pantry because her body couldn’t handle standing for 31⁄2 hours. It’s not a perfect life, but she’s glad she has it. Your future is always murky if you have CF. You can get a cold one day and be gone two weeks later, Norvell said, so she doesn’t take a day for granted. She’s proud of her son, a senior at Bishop Manogue who is a talented rapper. She joked she doesn’t like some of the words he uses in his songs, but she also took him to see the movie “Straight Outta Compton.”
“Those were my guys,” she said about NWA, the seminal rap group that movie depicted.
Kim has loved her time in Reno. It reminds her of home in Wisconsin. People are kind and funny and inclusive. They’ve welcomed her family, and she’s made many close friends in the short time they’ve lived in Northern Nevada.
“Real friends who I can share my heart with and trust,” she said. “That’s important to me.”
The Norvells’ marriage is built on support and sacrifice. When her husband fell short of earning a head-coaching job after several interviews, Kim told him to keep pushing and broke into tears when his offer finally came from the Wolf Pack. When Kim’s mother died of a heart attack at age 63, Jay Norvell flew out to Wisconsin in the middle of Oklahoma’s season to be there for the funeral.
“Jay works sun up to sun down seven days a week, but he’ll be there in a minute for anything she needs,” Kim’s father said.
Said Jay: “We know how serious my wife’s condition is, and every day’s a blessing. We just try to live our lives every day and enjoy each other. She’s very, very special to me, and we feel very blessed for her health.”
Kim finds it symbolic that on the fifth anniversary of her mother’s death, her husband was introduced as Nevada’s head coach, a lifelong goal achieved on a day that had previously brought somber memories.
Asked if she feels unfortunate that she has a disease that never let her live a normal life or fortunate that she has lived so long despite the initial diagnosis, Kim Norvell chooses the second option. After all, she made two things clear from the beginning. First, she’s exceptionally lucky. And, second, don’t feel bad for her.
“You can’t walk around and mope,” she said. “You have to live life the best you can. I’ve tried hard to do that. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way as far as forgetting to take care of myself or putting other things first before my health, but it’s a life lesson, and I know God is not done with me yet.”