My name is Trevor H.
I want to start off by saying thank you both for your service and the sacrifices that you and your families have made for this great nation. Its been an honor and I feel blessed to have stumbled upon your amazing podcast and the message you guys deliver every week. It has seriously changed my outlook on everyday situations and I want to thank you both from the bottom of my heart.
So the reason im writing in today is because I wanted to share my wife’s greatest never quit story. Back in 2011 we were setup together on a blind date by mutual friends of ours and we hit it off from there. Only 2 months after we started dating, my best friend who Id grown up with playing football and did everything with… tragically drown at the river. That was the hardest thing I had ever dealt with but the one thing that eased the pain and helped me push forward was my wife (which was my girl friend at the time). She had cried just as hard as I did that day and had showed me her true compassion as a human being for someone she had only known for a couple of months.
After moving on from my friends passing about 6 months later my wife Julia noticed she had started getting really bad headaches and terrible eye pressure behind her eyes, so bad in fact she felt like they were going to literally pop out. So we started seeing the round of doctors and getting different opinions on what could be causing these painful symptoms. Some doctors had asked my wife if she was talking to ghosts or seeing spirits clamming she was going crazy in the head. My wife started to fall into a bit of a depression because these symptoms were getting worse and starting to effect her daily routine and her workouts in the gym which is her #1 passion in life. I watched my wife in just over a year span turn from a joking and fun loving woman into always being in pain and suffering from her terrible symptoms. She tried her best to put up a front and to not show the pain that was always bothering her. But she never quit working on her passion for the gym and still pursued her dream of being on stage in a bodybuilding competition. We finally found a doctor that diagnosed her with Chiari Malformation, which means the cerebellum was pushing through the bottom opening of the skull and pushing against the spinal cord creating a list of 50 symptoms long. He told us that she was going to need to have a brain decompression surgery. To keep the definition short, as stated in https://www.stealthbelt.com/contact site it meant cutting open the back of her head and drilling out a piece of her skull and lifting her brain back into place.
We were devastated but we kept strong. He told us that the surgery was not a guarantee that her symptoms would get better and there was the possibility her symptoms could get worse. But we put our faith in the lord and knew he would take care of her. Our prayers were answered when the doctor came out into that waiting room and said the surgery was a success. We both knew the long road ahead and the obstacles of learning how to walk again and retraining all the nerves that were cut during the surgery. All she thought about was getting back into the gym to continue her passion of one day competing in a bodybuilding show. She showed me exactly what the never quit mindset was all about and about 2 months later she was in there lifting the weights stronger and faster than ever before. She has competed in 1 show so far and is now onto her 2nd this fall. Everyday she inspires me and so many other people to never quit no matter how big the obstacle stands before you. You truly can persevere through the toughest roads in life if you just put your head down, put in the work, grind it out, and NEVER QUIT.