WITH A SECOND HEART, TEEN MAKING THE MOST OF HIS SECOND CHANCE
NEWKENT— No question is more natural when a health setback strikes, especially in the prime of life, than why me?
Juan Mikel-Jones asked himself that often when he was diagnosed this past November with a heart condition called viral cardiomyopathy that weakened his heart and led to a heart transplant in January. He was just 16 at the time, had virtually never been sick and was a two-sport athlete at New Kent High.
He had just completed his first varsity football season and was competing for a starting spot on the Trojans’ perennial Bay Rivers District champion wrestling team. The fatigue and nausea that landed him in Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center following wrestling practice on one No-
vember night had come seemingly from nowhere.
“I was scared, speechless really,” Mikel-Jones said. “I had always been healthy, so of course I asked, why me.”
Nine months later, Mikel-Jones, a 5-foot-11, 205-pound junior, is nearly three months into his second varsity football season with the Trojans. He is playing full-time on the punt team and rotating into three or four series per game on the defensive line, making a tackle here, a sack there and never shying away from contact against the big offensive lineman facing him.
In a few weeks he’ll be back on the wrestling mat where his coach, Mike Faus, thinks he’ll again compete for a starting spot. The question Mikel-Jones asks himself now is much different.
“Why not me?” Mikel-Jones, who turned 17 on Sept. 30, said of the heart transplant. “God has his plan and picks his best warriors to carry them out.
“I’ve learned that I can overcome anything with his power and healing spirit, and discovered that I can push myself past my limits and be better than I’ve ever been.
“I can be an inspiration to my little brother Jeremiah (age 9) and little sister Kristina (6). They’ll say, ‘My brother actually did this, he’s the best of the best, and I want to be like that.’ ”
Mikel-Jones is inspiring many more than his siblings. Among them is Paul Cash, the emergency medical specialist who first evaluated Mikel-Jones at Sentara when the illness struck.
“I’m astounded he’s done so well and come back so fast,” Cash said. “I could tell the minute I saw him he was in big trouble. If he’d have stayed in the condition he was in the night I saw him, he would’ve died a week or10 days later.”
The viral cardiomyopathy Cash diagnosed had enlarged MikelJones’ heart and greatly weakened its ability to pump blood. He suggested he be transported to the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, where doctors stabilized Mikel-Jones prior to his transfer to the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville.
Mikel-Jones spent four months at U.Va, undergoing a 12-hour surgery in December to implant a battery operated mechanical pump (a left ventricular assist device) to help the main pumping chamber of his heart pump blood to the rest of the body until a heart was found for the transplant. He received the heart transplant during a 14 ½-hour operation Jan. 24.
Cash says he most admires the attitude Mikel-Jones displayed in the months following the transplant when he spent months isolated in a room while receiving immune suppressive drugs.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in my lifetime that is as mentally tough as Juan (pronounced Jew-on). ...Your whole world is a small room where everybody is wearing a mask around you, your blood is being taken three or four times a day and you are taking pill after pill after pill. It’s a tribute that he never lost sight of the goal that he was going to get back to where he was before.
“He remained incredibly focused and was willing to endure anything that came his way if it was a choice to get him back to where he was.”
Soon after the operation, MikelJones was running, first a quartermile, a few weeks later a half-mile, then adding a quarter-mile every three weeks until he was up to 1.5 miles. Before long he was lifting weights and, a couple of months after his April return home from the hospital, he was ready to rejoin his football teammates.
His father Woodrow Jones, a single parent — Mikel-Jones’ mother died when he was 4 — was hesitant about letting his son play football again, but only briefly.
“It was nerve-racking at first, but then I thought that if God was going to take him, he’d have taken him in the hospital,” Woodrow Jones said. “I think God has a purpose for him, to help God’s people.
“So I thought, ‘Why not let him play football if he decides to?’ He’s a man after what he’s been through, a young man. He’s God’s miracle.”
Woodrow Jones asked MikelJones one thing: “Can you handle the contact?” Mikel-Jones’ reply was: “Yes dad, I can.”
New Kent coach John Fulks says he was concerned early on about how Mikel-Jones would handle hard contact. Fulks’ heart raced when Mikel-Jones remained on the turf in pain after a play in the season-opening win over Colonial Heights.
“It turned out he was kicked in the shin,” Fulks said.
Now, rather than trepidation about playing Mikel-Jones, Fulks misses him when he’s not around. Mikel-Jones missed the Trojans’ game on Friday at Smithfield because of a road trip to meet a role-model for the engineering career he hopes to pursue.
“We’re excited that Juan is able to enjoy this aspect of his life and bringing such a positive attitude to practice every day,” Fulks said. “It’s great to have a young man on the team who is eager and approaches every single day as a blessing.”
“Blessing,” Mikel-Jones feels, is the perfect description for his life. His faith, he says, is the reason he asks “Why not me?” instead of “Why me?” when tackling a difficult task or an opposing ballcarrier.
“Everything I do is because of God’s power,” he said. “Anything else that comes my way is no big deal, because I’ve faced the biggest challenge in my life already — it can’t get any harder.
“I’ve learned that you have to try and make life as positive and happy as you can, because you’re only going to get one life. Some people don’t get second chances, but I got that second chance and I’m not going to waste it.
“Wow! I’m actually playing football this year. God is amazing.”
“Some people don’t get second chances, but I got that second chance and I’m not going to waste it.”
— Juan Mikel-Jones, New Kent football player who underwent heart transplant surgery