NEW PALESTINE — Life as a 13-year-old is full of changes.
You enter your teenage years, and you begin to prepare for high school, but nobody expects to receive life-changing news at that age.
For New Palestine Junior High student Addison Herald, that’s exactly what happened in October of 2022.
A discovery of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, a cardiovascular disease that affects five in every one million children, took away her favorite thing in life — softball.
“You can imagine being 13 and having all the craziness of being a teenager, and then you’re told this,” Addison’s mother, Jessi Wise, said. “It’s different for Addie than a lot of normal 13-year-olds because softball was literally her whole life. It was every single day, and she was ranked nationally as a third baseman. Everything was just really going well for her, and her dreams were to play ball, so mentally she was really having a hard time accepting that it was gone.”
Following a tournament in October, an episode in which Herald’s heart was racing much faster than normal prompted her parents to take her in to get testing done. Doctor’s discovered that she had an irregular heartbeat caused by too many pathways in and out of the heart. A Cardiac Ablation procedure was supposed to fix things, but two days later the problems popped back up, and forced another trip to the doctor.
It was then that the disease was discovered, and when a little 13-year-old girl was told that she would have to stop doing all the things normal kids do, run around and play, ride bikes, and most importantly for her, stop playing the sport that she had loved her whole life.
“That was all pretty hard for us to stomach as parents,” Wise said.
It was then that her travel organization, the Indiana Gators, retired her number and set up a scholarship fund in her name because to everybody’s knowledge at the time, the doctors at Riley’s Children Hospital in Indianapolis had made it clear that Herald, who was ranked 27th nationally at third base in her age group, would never be able to take the field in a softball game again.
“It was a dark time for her when she found out,” Wise said. “There were a few weeks where we had to just give her space. She was hiding herself from everything, and didn’t want to do anything.”
But Addie and her parents wouldn’t take no for an answer, and a trip to the Cleveland Clinic gave them hope.
The doctors there were more progressive in treating the disease, and after months of tests and wearing heart monitors, she was told that ‘maybe’ she had a chance to play again.
That one word was all she needed to hear.
“We walked out and Addie just said, ‘Riley said never, but he just said maybe.’ She had tears in her eyes,” Wise said. “She was just so happy to hear a maybe.”
A trip back to the clinic in March was when everything changed. On the visit, Herald passed an activity stress test, but doctors discovered that her condition had worsened. Her heart rate and blood pressure were up due to the fact that her lifestyle had become sedentary.
A return to low activity sports was what the doctors deemed best, and it just so happened that softball fell into that category.
“She texted me directly and said “I can play, I can play, I can play,” and that was awesome,” her head coach at both NPJH and Indiana Gators, Josh Frank said. “Since she got that news she’s been back to her normal self on the field, always smiling, but she’s always focused the second she steps on the field, and she’s a really good player.”
“I was told by the doctor that she has just as much of a risk when she gets in the car and has a long-winded conversation with me as she does playing softball,” Wise said. “That kind of hit home in a lot of ways because I was excited for her to be able to play again, but at the same time it made me realize just how intense it is.”
While the news was great and what everyone had been hoping to hear, the return to softball wasn’t always smooth. A fear in Addie that the thing she loved would get taken from her again made things difficult. She went to one practice and then took three weeks off, and then broke down in tears on the way to junior high tryouts and ended up not going.
Now a few weeks later, according to her coaches and parents, she’s back on the field and back to being her old self.
“Now she’s out on the field and dancing, and you can just tell that she’s back,” Wise said. “The difference in what she was with everything taken from her, to now, is a complete 180.”
Another hiccup in her return to the diamond, was the need for an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) to be on hand at all games. With a majority of youth facilities not having one at all, or not having one close enough to every field, the Gators took matters into their own hands and started a GoFundMe in the hopes of raising enough money to buy one for the team.
Last Thursday the page was created, and by Friday morning the goal of over $5,000 had been reached.
“That was very humbling to me. I didn’t realize just how mad I was inside about everything because we were just living day by day and doing what we had to do,” Wise said. “Eighty percent of those people that are on that list, I’ve never heard of. It was very humbling to see how kind humans can actually be. That sounds so trite, but it’s exactly how I felt.”
With the money, the team purchased two AED machines, and made sure everyone that needed to was trained in how to use it. Last weekend, coaches, parents and her teammates on the Gators all got AED and CPR certified.
“That was amazing. I feel so much more comfortable now,” Wise said. “There’s just so many people around her now that know what could happen and how to take care of it.”
With all of that taken care of, Addie has been back on the field doing what she loves. And while there’s always a worry, her mom knows it’s for the best.
“I had to turn around and walk away for a minute when she first took the field because I was very overwhelmed,” Wise said. “As a parent, it’s just the single most important thing to see your kid happy.”
The whole situation has made Herald somewhat of a celebrity at the tournaments she goes to now. Coaches of older teams come up to her to give her a fist bump and see how she’s doing.
But for Addie, getting back to playing the sport that she began playing when she was six years old was much more than just a return to something she loved and something that had given her so many one-of-a-kind experiences.
“It just felt like I was back out there with my family,” she said.
