Cardiac problems become gift from heart of fire chief ’s son
Walking out of the doctor’s office after learning that he would need heart surgery for the fourth time, 16-year-old Sean White noticed that his mother was taking the news harder than he was. He put his arm around her and said, “Mom, we got this.”
The words stuck, and within a day or two 1,000 green rubber wristbands were on order, each bearing the logo “Team Sean: We Got This!” punctuated by shamrocks. The idea was to trade each band for a $1 donation to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay, where White was to have his surgery.
There were plenty of takers. White is a third-generation Irish Catholic from St. Stephen’s parish in the Sunset District and a student at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory, which is known historically as SH. His mom had a customer base of her own: she is San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White.
Between the two of them they sold out their stock of 1,000, so ordered a second load of 1,000. By the time of White’s June surgery to repair a faulty aortic valve, Team Sean wrist-
bands could be found on wrists in several states plus Canada, Argentina and Ireland. Giants pitcher Jake Peavy wore one in the dugout, and White was still wearing his when he was wheeled into the operating room on June 14.
He was zipped back up five hours later, out of the hospital in five days, and by mid-July was coaching baseball. On Aug. 8, when he goes in for a checkup, he plans to deliver more than $2,000, collected mostly in $1 bills. The donation will buy art supplies and video games for Child Life Services, which furnishes rooms for sick kids and their families while under treatment at Benioff.
Money goes to UCSF
But that won’t be the end of the “We Got This!” campaign — not by a long shot. There are still some Team Sean wristbands to sell, and another 1,000 can be ordered.
“Ever since the beginning the plan has been to raise as much money as possible for UCSF,” says White, who now has a social media advertising tool at his disposal.
The night before his surgery, two members of Team Sean — Sophia Del Carlo and Chloe Novellos — surprised White with a “We Got This!” video. It’s already been viewed 1,200 times on YouTube.
When school reopens Aug. 17, and word-of-mouth kicks in, that number could double or triple in a day because the 4minute film is edited like a music video to “Dance With Me Tonight,” by Ollie Murs and “Can’t Stop the Feeling” by Justin Timberlake.
The video is comprised solely of 32 of White’s friends being filmed in a variety of locations, from getting out of bed in the morning to flipping pancakes for breakfast to sleeping in class to playing after-school sports to rolling down hills and frolicking on Ocean Beach. They all interrupt whatever it is they are doing to look into the camera and deliver the line, “Hey Sean, we got this,” without anybody having to say what it is they got. There are no doctors, no other narration, not even a mention of the wristband campaign.
Singing and dancing
White himself appears, having been filmed surreptitiously while singing and showing his dance moves. He is headed for heart surgery but still looks like he could be the mascot for the Sacred Heart Fightin’ Irish, with freckles going every which way.
“Sean is very open and has a lot of friends and talks very openly about his challenges,” Hayes-White says. “He’s a confident kid who has no problem showing off his scars.”
There are more than a few to show off. White was born with Shone’s Complex, a rare congenital heart defect that restricts the flow of blood on the left side of the heart.
Structural heart defects occur in 8 of 1,000 live births, and Shone’s Complex is marked by a narrowing of the aorta. Survival rates are high, but the aorta and aortic valve must be repaired and widened as the patient grows.
White’s first surgery, when he was 2 weeks old, was an emergency thoracotomy that saved his life. By age 2 he’d already had three operations, and by age 12 he was serving as a spokesman for the condition at UCSF.
But there is always another operation looming. When a growth spurt took White to 6 feet and 180 pounds by his sophomore year, he knew his heart could not keep up.
“It mainly hurts when I am exercising,” he says. “It came up when I was at baseball practice and we were running the bases. It became hard to breathe.”
A visit to Dr. David Teitel, chief of pediatric cardiology at UCSF, confirmed the diagnosis. Teitel told him he needed a third open-heart surgery, but could play baseball and postpone the operation until summer vacation.
That gave him most of a school year to market his wristbands. Charity wristbands are not an original idea, of course, the most famous of them being Lance Armstrong’s yellow “Livestrong” bands. That campaign sold 80 million of the wristbands for cancer research before the acclaimed cyclist admitted to cheating and the bands were pulled from the market.
Armstrong had an international marketing campaign behind him. White’s marketing campaign went like this: “Hey, we’re trying to raise money for UCSF after I get open heart surgery. Would you want to help us out and buy one for $1?”
Wristbands spread
Few could resist that. By the time the second batch was ordered, Team Sean bands had spread through the Catholic high schools, from SH, which is across the street from St. Mary’s Cathedral, to St. Ignatius and Mercy in the Sunset, Riordan in Sunnyside, and down to Serra in San Mateo.
White’s teammates and coaches on the SH junior varsity baseball team wore the bands, but White “never brought up his condition as an excuse for anything,” says coach Dominic Franco. White was the team’s No. 1 starting pitcher and won five games, on a team that went 11-11. But it was a game White lost that sticks with Franco.
Toward the end of the season, in May, SH went to San Jose to take on second-place Mitty. Before the game, Franco mentioned to the Mitty coach, an old friend, that his starting pitcher was facing open heart surgery in a month.
White pitched a complete game, which SH lost 2-1 on an error. “I’m a grown man and I actually cried over how much effort he put out there,” says Franco. After the game, the Mitty coach told his players about White’s condition and they lined up just to shake his hand. “Every one of them said good luck on your surgery,” says Franco.
White did not have his supply of wristbands with him, but it would have been an easy way to sell 20 of them and crack the San Jose market. His older brother Riley played rugby for Santa Clara University, so his team all wore them. So did the baseball team at USF. The principal at St. Stephen Catholic School, which Hayes-White and her three sons attended, sold 150 of them.
“If you are walking in the Sunset or at Stonestown (shopping center) and you see kids walking by with that wristband, it means something,” says Del Carlo, who always carries an Apple iPhone 6s in her back pocket. She spent six weeks shooting snippets of 30 of White’s friends, all bigmouthed sophomores, and
White never found out about the shoot.
The night before his surgery, Del Carlo and video editor Novellos drove up to wish him well at his home across from Stonestown. Del Carlo asked White if she could use his laptop to check her email. She clicked on the video, which opens with the freckle-face White mouthing the lyrics “you’re crazy and I’m out of my mind.”
“It really helped me a lot to know my friends were going to be there for me when I needed them,” says White, who figures he watched the video at least 30 times that night. The next morning he showed it to his surgical team, and when he woke up in the recovery room, he watched it again.
Healing powers of support
A day later, Del Carlo visited White in the hospital. His room was already crowded with nurses and Fire Department officials, but he treated Del Carlo like a famous filmmaker. So did the others. They’d all seen “We Got This!’’ and wanted to meet her.
Del Carlo brushes off any adulation. The video wasn’t about her, she says. “It was for Sean to realize how much support he had and how brave he is.”
White wears a fresh scar that runs from just below his neck to just above his ribs, and he knows that is not the last one. At some point his repaired aortic valve will need to be replaced.
“Hopefully,” says the Fightin’ Irishman of Sacred Heart, “I shouldn’t have to have another surgery for 15 or 20 years.”