Cross country teammates recover together from illnesses

JASPER, Ind. (AP) - Maybe Noelle Weyer and Grace Mehringer would be more impressed by what they've each overcome, if the other one weren't sitting right there also.

Few people their age - let alone two teammates on the same cross country team - have endured what Weyer and Mehringer have over the past few years. For Mehringer, the diagnosis of a type of ovarian cancer in her junior year. For Weyer, a puzzling and painful condition called Nutcracker Syndrome, so rare that an average of 1.2 people are diagnosed with it per year.

Separately yet together, the Jasper High School seniors have been through it all. The discomfort. The harrowing diagnoses. The doctor visits and MRIs and CT scans and hospital stays. The recovery process in which walking again - forget running - qualified as a small victory.

Weyer and Mehringer both delineate their own specific timelines in matter-of-fact tenors. Yet as the two sit a few feet away from each other after Monday's practice, each one sounds more impressed by the comeback journey of the other.

Mehringer first steals a glance at Weyer, and a smile washes over her face as she continues.

"I'm definitely impressed with her," Mehringer says of Weyer. "She's one of my biggest pure role models . just to look how much she went through and how it was similar to me, it's definitely someone to look up to."

Moments later, Weyer reciprocates.

"I'm super proud of her," Weyer adds about Mehringer. "Every race, I see she does better. . I just wish I wasn't in the same race as her, just so I could go and run up to different parts of the course to cheer for her."

There's plenty to applaud in both comeback stories.

Weyer's path

For sometimes weeks at a time, oyster crackers and water were Weyer's sustenance.

It was all she could keep down. Sometimes, she couldn't even do that. In September of 2014, Weyer was enduring stints of throwing up and passing out. They receded for a while, long enough for her to run with the Wildcats on the first day of November.

In December, the spells returned.

"And didn't stop," Weyer says. "I was just passing out constantly."

They occurred on the order of hundreds of times per day. Doctors weren't sure the root of the issue. Weyer once had 13 MRIs scans in one day. She went to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis for about a week and left with the doctors saying they were unsure and needed to do more research. Whatever it was, it was advancing, to the point Noelle had a shoebox full of pain medications she had to take - and she had to do so every hour throughout the night, prompting her to have to haul her mattress into her parents' room so mother Holly could wake her on the hour.

"It was super frustrating, because (doctors) said it might be Nutcracker Syndrome, but they didn't really know, so they were assuming that it was a mental thing, and so they didn't really believe me what was happening and thought I was faking it," Weyer says. "But then obviously it started getting a lot worse, so then they started to believe me. But it was really scary. And I know I scared my parents."

In the nonstop spells of passing out, Noelle's mom and sister, Julie, had to rouse her quickly, because if she was out for more than 15 or 20 seconds, she'd be risking brain damage.

Weyer tried school a few days in early January but couldn't hack it. (She didn't go back to school until April.) She then visited a pediatrician and was urged to get checked out by someone else, and that led her to the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. About a week later on Feb. 20, 2015, she had surgery to correct the syndrome that had caused aneurysms in her kidney and spine.

Had Weyer waited until Feb. 21 or 22 for the operation, it may have been too late.

"They said my vein was so tight, it was like a violin bow, and that if I waited another day it would have burst and I would have bled out," Weyer said of the Nutcracker Syndrome, so named because the compression of the renal vein is akin to the squeezing of a nutshell. "But by that time I was passing out 200 to 300 times a day. I was losing respiration, (my heart) wasn't beating at all. My heart rate would go down to three beats per minute."

Following the operation, a few teammates - Mehringer included - dropped by Weyer's house to visit and bring ice cream. Chocolate with cookie dough, Weyer's go-to flavor. What she really itched for was regaining familiar activity. A couple weeks post-surgery, Weyer tried walking from her front door to the stop sign on the corner and back. It took her about a half hour. She next tried circling the whole block. Took her a whole hour.

Frustration banked for Weyer, who'd been a fixture on Jasper's state finalist teams in both 2013 and '14. Yet the jaunt to the stop sign eventually turned into a block, then a half mile. Then 1 mile, when Weyer showed up at a track meet in the spring with the intent only to cheer on friends, then tried running a mile.

She zipped through it in seven minutes. A signal the Noelle of old was back. With her father, James "Moose" Weyer, assisting Noelle through extra training on early mornings and weekends - she came home after running in the Crawford County Invitational and did an extra 45 minutes of core and strength work, then did upwards of three hours of running and strength training - she's rediscovered her velocity and posted the best time of her cross country career (21:32) in a meet earlier this month.

All the miles feel a little sweeter these days for Weyer, who recalls the moment everything finally felt right again.

"Mine was this year," Weyer recalls. "It was our first long run, and I did 7 miles in 61 minutes. I called my dad after practice; I was so excited. That was just a huge breakthrough for me."

Mehringer's journey

Like Weyer, Mehringer's stomach hurt. Not the sick-to-your stomach variety. A sharp pain. It wasn't constant. It tended to be only when she moved.

Given the discomfort was the come-and-go variety, Mehringer wasn't inclined to rush to a doctor. Her mom, Laurie, forced the issue.

Right away, Grace had an ultrasound on her abdomen area. For Grace, the severity of the findings were tempered only by the obligation to be the strong one.

"I'm a big worrier, but my mom's a really, really big worrier," she says. "So the first appointment I was having my ultrasound and they were like, 'There's this big (mass),' and they were measuring it and it was like 14 centimeters. I started to freak out, but when they told my mom, I could see her face, so I just kind of acted calm, so I didn't really think about it as much."

Plus, there wasn't really time. It was just nine days from Mehringer's initial exam to her surgery at the Simon Cancer Center in Indianapolis to scour out dysgerminoma, a Stage 1 ovarian cancer. Since her operation was near break for the Thanksgiving holiday, she missed only five days of schools before being allowed to go back - but she was ushered back to activity slowly, not allowed to lift her backpack or books for six weeks following surgery.

Running was likewise a gradual re-immersion. Mehringer recalls the days just beyond surgery, when medical staff tried to get her to walk short laps near her room.

"That was a struggle," she recalls.

She took on more, and tried snippets of jogging - six minutes running followed by six minutes of walking, at first. Progress was a nonlinear process.

"Whenever I was running on the treadmill, my running speed was like 11-minute miles and that was the fastest I could jog for the first while. That was really frustrating, and then I kept felt like I was getting worse; not being able to get better," Mehringer says. "For that first week, that was especially frustrating. But then I just kept going."

And going and going, to the point where Mehringer was not only back for track season last spring, but she turned in a best time in the mile (6:04) that topped her prior best of 6:09 from the last time she'd run track as a freshman. With cross country, she's breached the 21-minute mark again, turning in times comparable to her best seasons as a freshman and sophomore.

More importantly: "I feel good" on runs, Mehringer assures.

Mehringer's got the all-clear now: she's in remission, and her first semiannual follow-up exam over the summer revealed a clean report. In the grand scheme, Mehringer's health scare popped up and died down in relatively short order. But in that fragile stretch where Mehringer's physical and social spirit waned, at least one person in particular could empathize with the process.

"My mom would text people (when they asked to come over), because I didn't like to look at my phone," Mehringer recalls. "Noelle was there for me, I remember. She came over, because I didn't want to leave my house. We just had like a movie night.

"It was really nice to have her there for me, and kind of knowing what it felt like."

Adds Weyer: "Knowing you have someone who's also going through something like that, is just a lot easier to deal with."

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Source: Dubois County Herald, http://bit.ly/2cKichr