Miracles, Mysteries, and the Minnesota Vikings

When life hit me hard, I flew out of bounds. But at least Stefon Diggs didn't.

“This is the sickest I could ever be,” I thought to myself (naively) as my Dad pushed me in a wheelchair through the airport. I was now too sick to live by myself, so he had come to bring me back home to Minnesota. Everything we passed—people walking in every direction, vending machines filled with headphones, the line for Panda Express—all felt like a blur. Telling myself that things couldn’t get worse was a coping mechanism I used at the time. I told myself the same thing in a different wheelchair at the hospital, and again lying on the floor of my parent’s basement.

Weeks went by and nothing changed. I spent my days lying on a bed at my parents’ house, too sick to get up or go out or walk around. I’d spend my days staring at the ceiling, or out of a window at the bone-white winter landscape that could make one cold just by looking at it.

Every week my dad would drive me to the doctor. And every week when we went, purple and yellow hats, scarves, and shirts surrounded me. It was for the Vikings. I knew they were having a great season, winning nearly all their games, but being home made it different. The hope of a Super Bowl was palpable throughout Minnesota. Or, at least in the doctor’s office I visited weekly.

The Miracle

Then the day of the playoff game arrived. While most Minnesotans watched the game on the edge of their seats, I spent the entirety of the time on the floor. I was feeling abnormally terrible that day, and didn’t even have the strength to go upstairs to watch the game with my family. I lied on the floor, barely conscious and quite weak.

Things were not looking good for the Vikings at the end of the game. Ten seconds remained on the game clock and they were down. Out of timeouts, they had no choice but to start a play and throw the ball in the air, hoping for a miracle. Case Keenum threw the ball towards the right sideline, aimed at a crowd of Vikings and Saints players. And as if in slow motion, up rose the hands of Stefon Diggs as he leaped in the air to catch the football and make a miracle run into the endzone as time expired. “IT’S A MINNEAPOLIS MIRACLE!” the announcer exclaimed.

My family screamed and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mustered all the energy I had to get up and see it with my own eyes. Stefon Diggs immediately threw his helmet off and stared at the crowd. He couldn’t believe it either. A few minutes later, he stood on the Viking’s bench, arms folded, with a poker face that hid his absolute bewilderment he had just shown a minute before. Every camera in that stadium was on him. He was invincible.

The Mystery

I wasn’t invincible. Blood tests and biopsies brought no answers. The best doctors in the world had no advice for me other than to wait. “It’s most likely just going to take time for your liver to heal,” she said. “It’s going to take a few months, at least.”

The Vikings helped remove me from the incessant itch that irritated every inch of my body. The yellow stripes that lined their purple jerseys were a pleasant break from the grotesquely yellow skin I saw when I looked in the mirror. Their miracle victory was a satisfying distraction from my mysterious illness.

But that’s all they were—a distraction. My life was only pain, and nothing else. Sometimes I could forget the pain for a few hours—maybe the length of a football game—but when the TV turned off I could always feel it again: the pain, the itch, the foggy mind. My life was either pain or a distraction from it.

The doctors told me it was probably a virus that found it’s way into my body and severely damaged my liver. A tiny, microscopic being that got in and nearly killed me.

The Aftermath

I think of Stefon Diggs jumping up to catch that ball, knowing full well that a man who had trained his whole life to bring him to the ground was running full speed at him from behind. But he got out of it.

Those months were the hardest of my life and it all came from some tiny, bumbling germ. I don’t know where it lived—on a doorknob I touched, on a fork I used, on a girl’s lips I kissed—but some germ from somewhere nearly killed me. And now I can’t help but think where its friends live. Are they on that desk my laptop is on? Are they in between the buns of the sandwich I’m about to bite into? It’s a terrifying reality to live in; a terrifying thought to think of. But those germs are all around us everywhere we go. And they’re all running at us at full speed, ready to put their shoulder down and knock us out of bounds.