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tourbi
Age: 57 Zodiac: 
| Joined: 09 Jan 2008 |
| Posts: 2640 |
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Location: tourbiland, at the foot of Pikes Peak, USA
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 Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2008 4:23 pm |
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Rags to Riches
Woody Woodburn
Ragnar Arnesen’s nickname is “Rags.” His father, Erik, calls him this; he also calls his son a hero.
Ragnar, named after his Norwegian grandfather, was born in San Francisco and grew up near the waves in Manhattan Beach. At age eleven he learned to surf. But the crashing waves, capable of breaking his surfboard in two, posed less of a threat to Rags than his own blood-sugar level. He was diagnosed with diabetes while still an infant, and his blood sugar could crash worse than any wave, leaving him helpless in the ocean.
Nearly two decades ago, Erik Arnesen—himself an avid surfer in the sixties—took his son to San Onofre state beach for the first time. After giving Rags a lesson on dry land, Erik went into the deep water to ride some curls—alone.
“I just couldn’t get out there,” Rags, now thirty, describes. “I kept paddling and paddling, but that first day I could never get past the white water where the surf breaks.”
While another, less insightful father might have considered his son’s failure a lack of talent, Erik focused on something else. “I saw what a fighter he was,” Erik recalls. “I offered to help him, but he was determined. He wasn’t going to let the frustration defeat him. And that became our credo: ‘Whatever it is you want in life, you have to paddle out to get it.’”
Rags has since paddled through storm surf and tsunamis (tidal waves).
His big trouble began when he was thirteen and diagnosed with kidney problems. The doctors said he would need a transplant within six months. Rags would hold out for an extra six and a half years.
“I refused to let my condition stop me from doing things,” he says. So he surfed, he cycled and he ran varsity cross country at Mira Costa High—all with failing kidneys and a malfunctioning pancreas because of severe diabetes.
That first day Rags tried to surf is nothing compared to the time he was training to run the Manhattan Beach 10K with his father a few years later. On the eve of the race, Ragnar’s blood-sugar level had a wipeout. He was rushed to the ER by ambulance. “It was touch-and-go,” Erik remembers.
The scare abated at 5:30 the next morning when Rags insisted on leaving the hospital to run the 10K. The doctors strongly advised against it, but Erik knew his son.
“I knew if he allowed his diabetes to keep him from running the race, it would have damaged him for the rest of his life,” explains Erik, himself a four-hour marathoner, cyclist and backpacker. “We took sugar cubes for Rags to suck on while he ran, for a quick energy lift, until he could get an insulin shot after he completed the race.”
Whatever it is you want in life, you have to paddle out to get it.
The disease worsened. Rags paddled. “Even in the most difficult times,” he says, “if I could go surfing with my dad I knew things were okay. And even with my obstacles, sports make me appreciate life more . . . much more. When I’m cycling, running or surfing—especially surfing—I feel totally alive.”
Finally, the doctors told Rags that he had to have a transplant immediately. He and Erik went to their favorite surf spot. There, out on the ocean swells, waiting for the next set of waves, they picked a date to do the operation. On December 19, 1990, twenty-one-year-old Ragnar checked into UCLA Medical Center to get a new kidney. A fifty-one year-old kidney from his dad.
Sometimes you can’t paddle alone. Sometimes we all need some help getting past the white water.
“It was a no-brainer,” Erik says of his decision.
Five days later, on Christmas Eve, father and son left the hospital together. Rags felt more energetic than he had in years, and Erik was in considerable discomfort. “But I never felt better,” he says.
Rags returned to Chico State, where he was a majoring in biology. In six weeks he rejoined the university cycling team. He continued taking six to ten insulin shots a day to keep his diabetes under control.
Then the clouds returned—another tsunami hit Rags head-on.
While Rags competed at the 1995 World Transplant Games in Manchester, England, his body began to reject his father’s donated kidney. For five years, the son and father had shared their flesh. Now they shared their anguish.
“I felt terrible for him,” Erik says, “but I also felt bad for myself. I wanted my kidney to work for him—now whatever I had done for him was over.”
Gone too, was Rags’ fighting spirit. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like paddling.
“My life felt upside-down. I had been a fit athlete; now I was on kidney dialysis.”
The first three months were especially difficult.
“I finally decided I could do two things,” Rags recollects. “I could feel sorry for myself, or I could accept it.”
Whatever it is you want in life, you have to paddle out to get it.
Rags paddled. With the help of his mother, Xenia, he studied about dialysis and nutrition to better manage his condition. And paddled: He earned his Emergency Medical Technician degree and started working twelve-hour shifts between his Monday, Wednesday and Friday “part-time job,” as he called his four-hour dialysis treatments. And paddled: He surfed, cycled and started training for a triathlon, which, while on dialysis, is like climbing Mount Everest carrying a 200-pound backpack.
Rags never completed that triathlon, but not for the reason you might think. He skipped it because the day before the race a kidney match was found. Christmas in 1997 came on July 11 for Ragnar Arnesen.
A year earlier, the rejection of his father’s kidney had seemed the cruelest of fates. Now it turned out to be the greatest of blessings. This time, Rags was the recipient of a kidney/pancreas transplant that not only restored his kidney function, but ended his diabetes as well.
“When I woke up, I wasn’t diabetic anymore!” said Ragnar, the excitement still in his voice three years later. “It has been a miracle.”
In September 1999, Ragnar the Miraculous joined a contingent of international athletes who have donated organs in their bodies at the 1999 XII World Transplant Games in Budapest, Hungary.
For Rags—who competed in cycling, track and field, and volleyball—it was his eighth national/international game. He has won more than a dozen medals, all silver and bronze.
“I’m still looking for my first gold,” the five-feet, seven-inch, 130-pound athlete says. “I’d like to give it to my dad.”
But Erik says he already has something better: a collage of pictures of Rags at various Transplant Games, inscribed by his son with the words from Bette Midler’s popular song, “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”
Erik Arnesen has known great striving and adventure in his own right. But his greatest hero and treasure is his son.
A “Rags” to riches story, indeed.
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