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Photo courtesy of Darin White.
Just two months after undergoing open-heart surgery at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, Samford University student John White crossed the finish line of the Tour De Cahaba — a ride he’d dreamed of completing during the darkest days of recovery. A fixture on campus and a former competitive cyclist, John trained for the event before and after his procedure with 5 a.m. rides through Homewood.
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Photo by Solomon Crenshaw, Jr.
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Photo by Solomon Crenshaw, Jr.
John White didn’t simply want to survive the second open-heart surgery of his life. His desire, as it has been throughout his 21 years, was to thrive.
Hence, John, an avid cyclist, sought assurance that he could return to the road, riding his electric-assist bicycle.
“Honestly, the whole time before, like pre-surgery, I was asking … how soon after the surgery will I be able to ride again? It meant that much, at least to me, to be able to start riding again after surgery.
“Every time, every meeting, we would always ask the pre-surgery team, 'So how soon can I ride the bike after?’ And they would always say, six to eight weeks.”
Just shy of 10 weeks after undergoing a nine-hour surgery on May 6, the Samford University senior completed the 35-mile course of the Tour de Cahaba on July 13.
Photo by Solomon Crenshaw, Jr.
The accounting major didn’t tackle the longer courses of 45 and 65 miles and didn’t settle for the shorter treks of 10 and 20 miles. He just wanted to be able to ride, which was not a foregone conclusion for someone born with a severe heart condition.
John, the youngest of seven children in the White family, was born with Ebstein anomaly. It is a congenital heart defect in which a malformation of the valve separating the top and bottom right heart chambers disrupts blood flow through the heart.
“The way it works is the right side of your heart, which doesn't have as much work as the left side, it had a deformed tricuspid valve,” the Vestavia Hills resident said. “It was like attached to the walls. I had my first open-heart surgery when I was 10, and the surgeon in Michigan basically created a valve out of my tissue, which was very new at the time.”
All this from a fellow who changed his Samford major because he didn’t like anatomy.
“It worked,” John said of the surgery. “It was great. The problem is, it stayed that size. Right now, the valve that is currently pumping is a 10-year-old-sized valve. That's what caused the need for a second surgery.”
Surgeons at Vanderbilt closed a hole in John’s heart, an atrial septal defect (ASD). Speaking with the precision of his surgeons, John described the procedure.
“They closed that and they redirected my blood from like my head, down to my nipple line,” he said. “They redirected it with a Bidirectional Glenn. They took the vein that comes from the upper half of your body into your heart, they cut it and just went straight to the lungs.”
John’s father, Darin White, is the Margaret Gage Bush Distinguished Professor and the founder of the sports industry program in the Department of Entrepreneurship, Management and Marketing at the Brock School of Business at Samford. He attributes a lot of his son’s recovery to John’s commitment to keeping himself physically fit.
“The more fit you can be going into a surgery like that, the better,” he said. “He had a nine-hour surgery ... and within 72 hours he was walking out of the hospital. A lot of that's because of all the work, the hard work he put in ahead of time.”
That hard work included getting up much of the spring semester at 5 a.m. and doing 20- to 30-mile bike rides to get fit before he went to class at 8 a.m.
That kind of commitment is not lost to the elder White, who is a former soccer coach at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.
“I coached for more than a decade, so I'm definitely all about hard work,” he said. “But (John) showed a lot of maturity and a lot of dedication to get up day after day. But John did, and he did it consistently over a long period of time. That's what put him in the best position possible to have success in the surgery.”
John took a “been there, done there” approach to his most recent surgery. His surgeon agreed with that assessment.
Photo by Solomon Crenshaw, Jr.
“He said there's like a 99% chance, or 95% or 99% I can't remember, of it going well,” the accounting student said. “Even if it went poorly, the worst that would happen is having to revert it to normal and then figuring out a new solution. There wasn't a lot of major worry, it was just possibly having to do another heart surgery, which would be more annoying than anything.”
John’s goal to resume cycling mirrored his desire to return to the soccer field following his first surgery. He was a goalkeeper on a Briarwood club squad his dad coached.
Playing for his father and only as goalkeeper were the nonnegotiable conditions of him playing soccer. He could play in goal because that position required less running to tax his heart; the elder White was the coach so he could assess his son’s condition and, if needed, he is certified to administer CPR.
“My cardiologist had to fight for me to be able to play soccer because it's such an extreme activity on your heart,” John said. “There's a whole council that looks over to approve or deny. She would always have to go to bat for me so I could play soccer.”
With his latest surgery behind him, John can look forward to completing his final year as a student at Samford. He is also anticipating getting married, as he is engaged to Irondale’s Claire Calfee, a marine biology major at Samford.
Just like anyone else.
“Everyone asks me, man, you must feel so accomplished,” John said. “I just like pushing myself honestly. I've done it before. When I was 12, I played soccer and I didn't think much of it either. I don't really view what I've had done and my heart problem (as a) hindrance. It's just there, but I'll keep trying my best.”
