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November 3, 2011"The Zeitgeist Chronicles" (New Orleans)
November 7, 2011
South Lafourche junior Dylan Danos stood true to his promise.
He swam in the district meet.
More than a year after being forced to give up his favorite sport, the 16-year-old Larose native returned to the pool last week and gave the Tarpons a boost in the 50-yard freestyle.
The time wasn’t what Danos had hoped, he finished 40th in the race with a time of 32.55 seconds.
“As soon as I got out of the water, I went to my mom and said, ‘Mom, you’re going to hate me for saying this, but I think I could have done better,'” Danos said with a laugh. “I was expecting to have a better time.”
“I know he’s disappointed in that time,” Dylan’s mother Angie Danos said with a laugh. “But it’s like I told him, just being there and swimming, that’s what was important.”
Danos’ return to the water symbolized something more than seconds or hundredths of seconds.
His return symbolized victory, not in the race, but in the Tarpon swimmer’s fight for survival.
A lifelong sufferer from cystic fibrosis, Danos needed a double lung transplant surgery to stay alive.
Despite the grind, which has taken the Tarpon from normal teenage life to a Houston hospital, he vowed to himself and also his teammates and coaches that the disorder would never permanently keep him from the water.
“He had one dream, before the surgery. Before he left, he told me, ‘Coach, I want to be back for district to swim the 50 free,'” South Lafourche swim coach Corey Callais said. “I knew he’d come back, but I really thought he’d hit the water next year.
“You look at his time, it might not have been the most impressive time, but like I told him, ‘Bud, you just won this whole meet just because you got in the water. You hit the water and that’s what this meet was about.'”
“Today … was just amazing,” Danos said. “I’m so happy to be able to be back.”
Dylan is the only child of Troy and Angie Danos.
He was diagnosed with the disorder when he was three-months old.
“It’s just a genetic disorder that affects the lungs,” Danos said, explaining the ailment. “That’s mainly what it does.”
For the majority of his life, Danos was able to go about his business as a normal child, minimally feeling the effects of his illness.
“For most of my life, I was OK,” Danos said. “It was manageable.”
“His family, his dad and I, his grandparents, his cousins, whoever, we’ve just always encouraged him to do his best,” Dylan’s mother said. “When he was feeling well, we’d encourage him to try anything he wanted to. We went on trips and we just did anything we could that the illness would allow us to do.”
From his earliest days, the Tarpon junior said he had one love, a love that he still has to this day.
“Since birth, practically,” Angie Danos said. “He’s always been fishing, really anything. Our family does a lot of things on the water.”
“Anything with water,” Dylan spouts with a bright smile. “I love being around water.”
Danos joined the South Lafourche community’s local youth swim team when he was 4 and swam throughout his childhood.
“I’ve been swimming for as long as I can remember,” Danos recalls, still smiling at the thought of his beloved water. “I remember going to the beach when I was a little baby and swimming in the Gulf and stuff. … It’s always been just such a big part of my life. I just love being around the water so much.”
Danos progressed in his beloved swimming and became a member of the South Lafourche swim team as a freshman.
He had success.
He was one of the team’s more promising freshman swimmers.
“Freshman year was a very good year for me,” Danos said. “I was able to do well and I had a lot of fun doing it.”
But in Danos’ sophomore year, things started to change, the once manageable disorder was becoming increasingly unmanageable.
Danos uses the word “manageable”, which downplays cystic fibrosis’ impact on his life.
The truth is this kid’s always been a fighter.
Danos spent times in and out of the hospital as a kid, battling the disorder’s affects on his body.
His mother shares some of the struggles Dylan faced as a child.
She said he was able to stay strong in the face of adversity because of those challenges he’s faced since he was a kid.
“He’s had disappointments that maybe other kids didn’t have,” Angie Danos explains. “You maybe have plans, a sleepover or a school activity and then he’d get sick and you’re in the hospital. It’s those times of just disappointment and having to deal with that at an early age that gives him his maturity. I think his maturity comes from that.”
Callais remembers Dylan’s first two years on the team, recapping the struggles his swimmer would face during and following practices, adding that he agrees with Angie’s thoughts about Dylan’s inner strength.
“He swam those first two years with the use of one-third of one lung,” Callais said. “He would come and [it was just] total heart. He would come and practice until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”
During Danos’ sophomore year, the ailment began to accelerate its affects on Dylan’s lungs.
Swimming was becoming more and more difficult to enjoy, even for this lover of the water.
“Half a lap and I’d just be exhausted, completely out of breath,” Danos remembers.
“He’d come home and he’d just sleep for hours,” Angie Danos said. “He’d be completely out of it.”
Doctors told Danos to stop swimming, saying the physical activity was too much for his already limited lung capacity to manage.
“He told me, ‘You really need to stop, you’re going at it way too hard,'” Danos said.
He didn’t heed the warning at first.
When asked why, Dylan’s answer is simple: People do crazy things in the name of love.
“I had to keep going, you know, for the team,” Danos said. “I’d push myself to keep going just because I love it so much. It’s hard to give up something that you truly love and you enjoy doing because of what’s going on around you that you can’t control.”
About a week after the doctor’s warning, Danos decided he couldn’t continue, opting to give up the sport.
“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he remembers.
“It was a struggle,” Callais agreed.
Around the same time Danos gave up swimming, he also was placed on a waiting list for a pair of lungs.
It was an eight-month wait, but on Aug. 3, he got the call and under went the operation.
Everyone in the Danos family and the South Lafourche community understood the operation’s complexity, showering Dylan with prayers.
His family said that support, as well as Dylan’s mentality helped ease them as they prepared to face the operation.
“He had made up his mind,” Dylan’s mother said. “Even the morning they took him into surgery, he turned around, waved and smiled. We knew that for better or for worse, he had made up his mind. He was going for it.
“It just made it a little easier on us as his family, knowing that he had made up his mind and that doing the transplant was something that he had decided on.”
Doing the surgery was indeed Dylan’s choice, a decision he said he doesn’t regret making.
It was the only way he’d ever be able to get back into the pool for the district meet, which was a primary motivator in his decision.
“The day I left, I told Coach, I was like, ‘No matter what happens, I don’t care if I’m a month out or if I’m a week out and I’m not swimming, I promise you I’m going to be here watching,'” Danos remembers. “To think that I’d be back and even have a chance to swim again, it’s great, much less being in the pool and actually doing it.
“Swimming is just everything to me. It’s my life. It’s what I enjoy. It’s a dream I could have never fully given up.”
Getting back into the pool wasn’t without bumps and bruises for Danos.
The operation went off without a hitch, but post-surgery aches pained the Tarpon.
To get lungs into a patient’s body is not exactly an easy process for anyone, much less a teenager that’s hardly 100 pounds.
“I was hurting,” Danos said. “My chest cavity is so small and they had to open it up for 14 hours. Right there, it was sore.
“Honestly, it’s still not back to normal, but I’m getting there.”
Always modest, he quickly puts a smile on his face of those around him.
“It was nothing I can really complain about,” he quirks.
“Dylan walked no more than a couple of days after the surgery,” Angie said. “He was determined from there and his lung function has been going up every week.”
Dylan had the operation performed at Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital. While recovering, his family stayed in either a hotel or later in an apartment in the Houston area.
“The whole hospital from the beginning to the end, they’ve been wonderful,” Angie Danos said.
The rehab process was sometimes difficult.
No matter how tough things seemed to get, he never doubted a full recovery was in the cards.
“That never even crossed my mind,” Dylan says, still smiling.
“He understands the severity and he always understood what could happen,” Angie Danos said. “But he just always sort of had it in his mind that he wasn’t going to let this defeat him.”
If one hasn’t yet noticed, Danos has an uncanny ability to remain optimistic in the face of adversity.
He says he’s able to do so through his family and his swimming teammates.
The South Lafourche community has been with Danos through every step of his recovery. His teammates even visited him in the hospital and kept constant contact.
“Friends,” he says pausing, almost taken back by the thought of his closest allies. “People in the community, people at my school, especially my teammates. Everybody just came together and they helped me get through this. They are who helped me stay strong.”
“He’s amazing,” Tarpon swimmer Alex Compeaux said. “He’s a huge inspiration to all of us.”
“We love him,” Janie Gautreaux said. “We all get so much strength from him.”
“Dylan has always adored his friends and he loves being around his friends,” Angie Danos said. “He loves just being at school, actually. [Having to be away] was hard for Dylan, actually, because school isn’t a guarantee for him to be there, so he just cherished every moment he had.”
With his community by his side every step of the way, Danos recovered enough to get back into the water six weeks after his surgery, one of the best days in this young man’s life.
“When the doctor said, ‘OK, you can swim now,'” Dylan says with a huge grin. “That night, I came home at 9 o’clock and just jumped in the pool. I swam like four laps non-stop the first time I was back in the pool. … The whole time, I was just thinking to myself, ‘God … this is great!'”
Dylan actually even has an added perk, his swimming is helping in his rehab.
“That swimming is helping him to get into good shape with his lung,” the mother said. “He’s very excited about that.”
Danos’ lungs are now free from the disorder, but he’ll live with cystic fibrosis the rest of his life.
He said he takes anti-rejection pills every day to make sure his body continues to cooperate with his new lungs, a process his doctors say is going well.
“His lung function this week was at 93 percent,” Angie Danos proudly declared. “You or I would have trouble getting that score on a lung function test, so they are very pleased with that.”
The teenager also takes medication to assist his pancreas, which is another target for the disease.
“There’s like 15 pills I’m on right now day and night,” Danos said. “The doctor apologized and told me, ‘Look, I know that’s a lot of pills to have to take.’ I said back, ‘Look, don’t worry about it. I can breathe now. I don’t mind swallowing a few pills.'”
Doctors say the long-term prognosis is good and that everything is going smoothly without so much as a hitch.
“Everything’s going great,” Danos says, scarred across his chest from the operation.
Danos said he never realized how bad his situation was, because he dealt with it mostly his entire life.
With two new lungs, he’s able to fully understand what the early part of his life was like.
He relates the struggle through his favorite topic, swimming.
“When I swam those first few laps, I was able to catch my breath easily, like it was nothing,” Danos said.
The Tarpons trudged forward without Danos, saying he was a source of motivation for the team throughout his time away.
Winning district championships isn’t an easy task.
South Lafourche’s boys won their ninth-straight title in 2010 without their teammate. The girls followed suit and won their seventh-straight.
No one wanted to break the chain. Adversity is nothing, not compared to what Danos was facing, anyway.
“It’s like I told our kids, swimming in cold water, it’s hard to breathe,” Callais said. “Think of Dylan for every year of his life.”
The South Lafourche swim teams began 2011 and continued their winning way.
But challengers also lifted their skill level and last Monday’s district meet figured to be hotly competitive.
A week before the meet, Callais sat in his home when he heard a knock on his door.
The promise made more than a year ago was on the other end of the door.
Several years of struggle, eight months of waiting, a handful of months in the hospital and two new lungs later, Danos was home.
Callais thought it was to attend the Tarpons’ homecoming festivities.
Danos was back to swim.
“He said, ‘I’m back,'” Callais said. “I thought it was for the dance, but he said, ‘No, coach, I’m back. I’m here, ready to swim.'”
Danos returned to his wheelhouse, the 50-yard freestyle.
His return inspired his teammates.
Led by Dylan’s first varsity swim since his sophomore year, the Tarpon boys won the district title for the 10th-straight year and the girls won their eighth-straight title.
“Seeing him here, there was no way we could lose,” Tarpon swimmer Nicholas Guidry said.
“Talk to my teammates,” Danos said humbly. “We just won the district championship. They are the story here.”
His modesty aside, last Monday’s story was about Dylan, who overcame the odds and made true on his comeback journey.
“That’s always been his goal from day one, to get back into the water,” Angie Danos says, pausing to catch her breath in awe of her son’s feat. “And sure enough … he did. … He’s disappointed in his time, but we’re just thrilled that he got in that water and did his best.”
“It was just unbelievable,” Callais said.
That might be true, but Dylan was just doing what he loves to do, swim.
“I’m no hero,” he says. “I’m just like anyone else. I just love to swim. Anyone would do the same thing to protect something they love.”
South Lafourche swimmer Dylan Danos smiles at the Cut Off Youth Center Pool. Danos, a 16-year-old Larose native, was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as a newborn — an ailment he’s fought his whole life. CASEY GISCLAIR
