We haven’t done a “Throwback Thursday” in a while and I thought I would break out my favorite one ever! It’s such a great comeback tale that we’ll break it up into two parts: Part I today, Part II tomorrow…

I am often asked, “What’s the favorite story you’ve ever covered?”

There have been some great ones in the last year including the Texas Bombers’ “Fallen Soldier” Program and “Janie’s Inning” in Louisiana, but the one that always comes to my mind is the story of Dani Rae Lougheed from Arizona which I deemed as the No. 1 story of 2006 when I first started StudentSportsSoftball.com.

The reasons this impacted me so much is I got to know Dani and she was so personable and vibrant that to witness first-hand what she had to endure, with her fierce drive to succeed and overcome all obstacles, was really powerful to see.  I got to drive to Arizona and meet her and her wonderful family and be in the middle of many of the experiences you’ll read about below.

If Dani were a current player, she’d be a no-brainer Hot 100 pick, a fantastic athlete from a small school in Arizona who had it all going her way including a verbal to Arizona State the winter of 2005.

Then she started feeling something was off… and that’s where we pick up the incredible journey that Dani Rae would have to take…

[first published in Dec. 2006]

***

Signs of Concern

The first sign of trouble was the headaches.

Manageable at first, they grew worse, but Dani Rae Lougheed was a four-sport athlete and, well, good athletes become skilled at dealing with pain.

A self-admitted workout addict, the Phoenix-area senior would jog two to three miles at a gym near her Pinnacle Peak home before working out, but last June she became alarmed when, returning to her car, she stumbled and nearly blacked out.

“It was like I was looking down a tunnel,” she remembers. “Things were blurry and I felt sick and started hurling.”

After 15 minutes, the episode passed and she was able to get home, chalking it up to simply pushing herself too hard.

But an incident on the softball field during the July 4th weekend convinced Lougheed and her family there was something seriously wrong with the softball standout.

Playing for the Arizona Storm at the Independence Day tournament in Boulder, Colo., the speedy outfielder was on second base when the pitcher turned and picked her off.

“I thought she had the strongest gun (arm) I had ever seen,” she recalls, “but when I got back to the dugout everyone said it took me two to three seconds to react. That was when I knew there was more to it than just headaches.”

The physician father of a Storm teammate suggested that perhaps she had an ear infection or a slight bug causing vertigo. A subsequent trip to the doctor during the tournament cleared Lougheed of anything serious.

“Everyone was frustrated—me, my family, the coaches and teammates—because this was our last chance to qualify for nationals. We were down to 11 players and one girl who needed knee surgery was even playing and here I am sitting on the bench.

“If it had been physical pain, it would have been different, but I felt terrible—like I was letting everyone down. The Arizona State coaches came up and jokingly asked, ‘Why aren’t you playing?’ I didn’t know, but we were all concerned.”

***

An Ideal Life

Up to that point there had been little to be concerned about for the 17-year-old athlete who attended the small, family-oriented Scottsdale Christian Academy and had an idyllic home life with supportive parents, Greg and Carey, and as the middle child between her two siblings, Shalyn (20) and Logan (12).

Dani Rae was a 4.0 student equally successful on the athletic field. She played club soccer until the eighth grade, was a varsity volleyball player, ran the hurdles and sprints in track and was an All-State softball player.

She was tall, lean, athletic… and tough. During a track practice, she clipped a hurdle and landed awkwardly on her wrist, but didn’t flinch when she had to go straight to a softball game that afternoon. She promptly hit three triples and knocked in six RBI, but when she awoke the next morning, the wrist bone was noticeably out of place.

A visit to the hospital confirmed she had broken her wrist and a cast was placed on it, but the athlete argued with the medical staff that it’d be coming off in three weeks so she could play in the state tournament. True to her word, the outfielder sawed off the cast a few weeks later to lead her team deep into the playoffs.

Softball was her strongest sport and, though playing at the second smallest level in Arizona for a religious school of 1,000 that went from kindergarten to 12th grade, college coaches couldn’t help but notice her amazing on-field performances.

Lougheed helped SCA make it to the state championship game all three years she’s been on the varsity squad and as a sophomore, when she hit .625 for the season, knocked in the game winning hit that gave the Eagles the 2A title.

This past spring, she did even better as she hit .637 and earned All-State honors for the third straight year.

A member of the Storm program since she was 10, Lougheed had the speed to beat out infield hits and the power to bat cleanup. She admits, “I always seemed to perform well at recruiting tournaments,” and the college coaches took note.

By the winter of her junior season, she had several Pac 10 suitors, in part because of her academic accomplishments. Stanford was interested as was Washington and assistant coach Robert Wagner, who picked up the recruiting pace when he was hired by Arizona State, which is conveniently located only 30 minutes from the Lougheed home.

Last winter, on an unofficial tour of the campus Dani Rae accepted the Sun Devils’ offer, but confesses she had buyer’s remorse.

“So many times after I gave my verbal,” she explains, “I wondered if I didn’t commit too fast. It was the only unofficial trip I took, the only school I visited, and a lot of colleges kept saying, ‘We’re interested still.’ Still, I wasn’t going to revoke my verbal—that’s my word—and over time, with the way things went this year, I was so glad I chose ASU.”

***

The Diagnosis of the Brain Tumor

Not only after the concerning week in Colorado, a visit to the chiropractor raised another red flag: Dani Rae couldn’t stand on one foot without passing out.

The decision was made to get an MRI and the news came back that a mass was found on the back of the brain, a tumor the width of one ping pong ball and length of two. It was located in the areas of the cerebellum that control balance and nausea.

The teenager didn’t find this out right away, however.

“My Mom didn’t know how to tell me,” Dani Rae laughs now. “She waited two days before calling me into the living room. She said, “A mass has been found on your brain,’ and my reaction was I laughed. I don’t know why, I guess I didn’t know how to react. Maybe because it was so complicated, that’s all I could do. It’s not like I had wax buildup in my ear.”

Strangely, the doctors’ initial plan of action was to wait before deciding the next step.

“When I called the doctors for an appointment,” says Dani’s mother, Carey, “they set a date for a month out. That’s when I decided to take her and the MRI films to the emergency room myself. I knew once they saw what was on the films they would have to admit her.”

“I guess they figured that because the tumor was unattached, it wasn’t life-threatening and there wasn’t that much pain,” Dani Rae reasons.

But that would immediately change as the headaches became increasingly dehabilitating and so unbearable that Lougheed was taking to an emergency room, where she waited from four o’clock one warm July afternoon until one in the morning.

“I remember a revolving door of doctors and hanging out with my Dad eating pizza,” Dani Rae reflects on that anxious evening.

Suddenly, the verdict was announced: the teenager would be admitted to the Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix and be operated on by one of the nation’s top neurosurgeons, Dr. Robert Spetzler.

“It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to think about it and worry,” says Lougheed. “That was a good thing. I just felt a sense of peace, that it would be OK. Plus, the doctors made it sound like the process would be routine. I thought I’d fall asleep, wake up and be back to where I was. I was the strongest, athletically, I’d ever been and thought I’d bounce right back.”

***

Surgery and Complications

After a delay of two days, the surgery took place in mid-July and lasted six and a half hours. Lougheed woke up in the MRI machine and promptly threw up all over the attending nurse.

Taken to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with tubes in her neck, hands, arms and one draining brain fluid, she again vomited and it became apparent she wouldn’t be “bouncing back” anytime soon.

The next week was spent in the ICU and the neuro ward, which wasn’t the most restful place to recuperate.

“Where I was, the people were restrained and tied to the beds; some had mental problems or were disoriented. One night, a girl walked into my room with restraints dangling from her arms and legs. She asked me and my Mom, ‘Do you know where the washer and dryer are?’ All of sudden, a nurse flew in, grabbed her and took her back to her room where she was tied to the bed.”

Dani Rae was released to go home, but the trauma from the surgery led to unpleasant complications.

The nausea continued and, in fact, grew worse as the athlete would throw up three or four times per day. With a matter of weeks, Lougheed had lost 30 pounds.

A month after the surgery, the once-durable athlete became so dehydrated she had to return to the hospital and was placed in the ICU for a day.

One week later, she returned to the hospital for a third time.

A pick line—a temporary tube to administer medication— had been inserted into her arm, but Dani Rae developed an allergic reaction to an antibiotic which caused hives and pain so bad she couldn’t sleep for 48 hours.

This, the tough athlete would later admit, would be the darkest period of her life.

“I remember looking at my Dad and he had the most helpless look on his face,” she recalls. “I had strep throat and chemical meningitis on top of the allergic reaction and I was really hurting. The hospital gave me drugs stronger than morphine, but could only administer them every six hours. After four hours, the medicine would wear off and the heavy nausea and migraines would return. I would be sweating and shaking, ill from all the medicine, and I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry anyway and if I would eat, I’d throw everything up.”

Eventually, she improved enough to go home, but the nightmarish ordeal was far from over. The blinding migraines and crippling nausea continued and just one week later Dani Rae returned to the hospital for a fourth time.

This trip, however, appeared to be much more serious.

“The doctors decided the mesh put on the brain to close the opening was being rejected and some muscle would have to be taken from my right leg to cover it. They said it was extremely rare (the rejection), only the second or third time this had happened, and they wanted to put it in a medical journal. I was like, ‘Just my luck!’”

For the first time in months, though, fortune seemed to smile on the teenager. Expecting to wake up after the surgery with “pain in the leg the doctors said would be worse than anywhere else,” she was surprised to learn that the complication instead had stemmed from a loose stitch that allowed brain fluid to leak.

After four days of recovery in early September, including three more in ICU, Dani Rae again was deemed fit enough to go home, but the patient and her parents weren’t so sure.

“My Mom was terrified,” Lougheed explains, “because every time I had gone home, I would get sick.”

“Before Dani was released,” adds Carey Lougheed, “I told the doctors I was not excited, but petrified to bring her home. As I explained to them, they saw her when she was medicated and the symptoms had calmed. I witnessed the migraine pain so severe that Dani Rae screamed in agony with uncontrolled vomiting. She would say she either felt like she was dying or wished (it to be so) and there was nothing I could do to help.”

A pattern would develop after each return trip from the hospital where Shallyn would help Dani Rae take a shower and rest on the bed after taking medicine.

This time, however, two hours after returning to their home 40 minutes from the hospital, the young athlete began shaking and throwing up so violently that it became obvious she was worsening by the minute.

Just halfway down the street, the decision was made to drive back home and call an ambulance. For the fifth time in roughly two months, and only four hours after being released earlier in the day, the teen was rushed to the hospital.

“Ironically,” Dani Rae states, “the ambulance ride took longer than the car drive would’ve. They couldn’t turn on the lights because it wasn’t an emergency and couldn’t give me medicine in case I would need surgery, so I was pretty miserable.”

After the bumpy, endless ambulance ride, Lougheed made it to the hospital shaking with a 104 degree temperature but, amazingly, was told she couldn’t be admitted right away… she’d have to wait her turn.

“That was the worst I’d ever been,” Dani Rae says, her voice tailing off. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to die.’”

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Click HERE to read Part II of Dani Rae’s story including her recovery and where she is today…