Rick Skoyec checks his watch, shifts his weight and scans a group of approaching runners with growing apprehension. Where is his son, Michael?
Panting athletes run past the cobblestone corner where Rick waits. The morning grows lighter; still no Michael.
Finally father and son spot each other. Michael approaches, running with an economy of movement; graceful, steady. His arms raise and pump the air as a smile breaks the concentration on his face.
“Go Michael!” yells Rick as his son gives him a double thumbs-up.
Michael soon merges with the pack of runners and disappears around a bend in the road. Rick can’t keep the happiness from his face.
Michael Skoyec, who turned 27 last month, had trained hard for this day.
Months earlier, Michael lay in an operating room as a team of surgeons worked to give him the breath of life. Michael was receiving a new set of lungs.
One breath at a time
Born with cystic fibrosis, Michael inherited the chronic, often-fatal genetic disease that is passed through two copies of a defective gene — one from each parent.
“They told me I wouldn’t live past my teens. So my mindset was to just live for now,” says Michael.
Born two months premature, Michael fought for his first breath and every breath after that. He was rushed to emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction when he was just days old.
Doctors soon took parents Rick and Sandra aside to tell them the news: Their son was very sick and would remain that way for the rest of his life.
“Every child has some kind of need to address. Because we were new parents, we adapted,” Rick says.
But the strain took a toll on their relationship.
“The doctor told us the stress of dealing with this sickness causes 90 percent of parents’ marriages to end in divorce,” Rick says. “He wasn’t wrong.”
Even though their marriage dissolved, Rick, an irrigation specialist in Sarasota, and Sandra kept to the task at hand: raising their son.
“When he was a baby, Michael would scoot everywhere instead of crawl,” his dad recalls. “We didn’t think anything of it, we didn’t know. When he was 2, we found out why: He had double hernias.”
Rick pauses. “The kid was dealt some rough cards, but it never stopped him.”
After two years of constant infections and hospitalizations, Michael reached a level of health through constant, daily therapy to keep his lungs clear.
“It was just part of my life — it never affected me,” Michael says. “I assumed that I was as normal as everyone else.”
Baseball, martial arts, swimming — Michael did everything with a passion.
When he reached his middle-school years, however, his disease progressed to a point where he was hospitalized every few months with chronic lung infections.
Michael didn’t quit; he realigned his expectations.
“I still played sports and everything,” he says. “I just began to realize I was a little sicker than everyone else.”
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