After what Shara Deal has endured over the past eight years, the 6.2 miles she'll walk Friday in The Atlanta Journal- Constitution Peachtree Road Race will be a snap.
With glass-half-full enthusiasm, the Woodstock mother of two has beaten cancer. She withstood the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that severely damaged her 44-year-old heart.
She rallied after a heart transplant saved her life.
"There's not enough words in the dictionary when you wake up and realize you have a second chance," she said recently as her eyes sparkled with a contagious optimism.
Just days after receiving a new heart at the UAB Hospital in Birmingham on Christmas Eve 2007 --- yes, just six months ago --- Deal was thinking Peachtree. She doesn't know why.
She had never participated in the popular race before. Perhaps the race represented home, which she dearly missed after in-and-out trips to the hospital. To make it home, she had to walk, hospital staff members had told her.
Perhaps she remembered not being able to climb the steps to her home near Lake Allatoona, a major sign that something was wrong with her heart, and that she saw the Peachtree as inspiration to climb them easily again. Perhaps she was used to physical challenges, and the race was simply another she aimed to conquer.
But there she was at the UAB Hospital taking her first steps after the operation, and Peachtree popped into her head.
"My very first steps and I'm like, 'I'm training for the Peachtree. I'm training for the Peachtree. Nothing's going to stop me.' "
In and out of hospitals
Deal, a para-pro working with special-needs students at Etowah High School, the alma mater of her and her husband, Rick, was 37 when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma after months of unsuccessful treatments to ease pain in her right hip. The cancer had started in the thymus gland and spread to the hip. She had radiation treatments and six months of chemotherapy, and the regimen worked. Deal was able to go to work and to classes at Kennesaw State to get a teaching degree.
But in the past year, she started experiencing shortness of breath. It was most noticeable on a student trip to Boston that she chaperoned. She couldn't walk up the hills without getting out of breath. The Deals considered selling their house by the end of the summer because of her difficulty climbing the stairs.
In September, she was treated for arrhythmia with a defibrillator inserted in her chest, but her health still deteriorated. The fall of 2007 was a blur of frequent emergency room visits to Northside and St. Joseph's hospitals.
By the end of November, she was airlifted to UAB. She was placed on a transplant waiting list in December. Her heart, perhaps as a rare side effect of her chemotherapy treatment, was enlarged and valves were damaged.
"She's a positive person, believe me. She had her down moments, but she never gave up," said Rick Deal, Shara's high school sweetheart before they married. "The first thing that came to mind [when the Deals applied for a transplant] was no way they'd give her a new heart with her medical history."
Focused on the future
On Christmas Eve, a donor was found from out of state. The Deals don't know anything about the donor but hope to meet the family.
"The doctor [UAB heart surgeon David McGiffin] said, 'This is the most beautiful heart.' I said, 'I'll take it,' " Shara Deal said. "When I woke up on Christmas Day, I had my new heart. Trust me, I'm going to take good care of my new heart."
Fittingly, she was released from UAB's care on Valentine's Day.
Since her first steps in the hospital, Deal is up to daily walks of two to four miles around the neighborhood or at nearby Hobgood Park. "Every day that's my prize to myself. If nothing else gets done in the house, that's fine by me."
Deal is focused on what's ahead. She aims to return to school and get that teacher's certificate. She plans to start a walking club for students and teachers at Etowah High.
She's been visiting area churches to give testimony and thanks for all the prayers she's received.
Incidentally, during her first church visit --- at a Baptist church in Austell ---the congregation took up a collection for a member who was waiting for a heart transplant and needed $5,000 for the insurance deductible. Deal didn't know that until after the service, when she was told $7,000 had been raised.
Her strength through her ordeal also inspired her brother Steve Morris to quit smoking after nearly two decades. He said he had a conversation with Shara in February, and she made it clear that she didn't want to see her brother in a similar predicament, lying in a hospital bed. "That really struck a nerve with me," said Morris, who also will run in the Peachtree.
Shara Deal, who will walk the Peachtree with her two children --- Michael, 22, and Amanda, 19 --- also wants to promote organ donation.
"There are so many other people at UAB Hospital waiting on hearts, kidneys, lungs. I keep saying I'm going to spread the word," she said with another sparkle in her eye. "Just sign that card. What better gift is there to leave? The chance for life is the best gift you can give."
FRIDAY'S PEACHTREE ROAD RACE
> For results: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will publish the top 1,000 finishers of the Peachtree Road Race in our print editions July 5. The complete results can be found at ajc.com.
Copyright 2008 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution