Still standing

If you know David’s story, get ready for a good feeling all over. If you don’t then here’s a brief breakdown of what the guy’s been through. At 16 he was diagnosed with something I can’t even pronounce, Wegener’s Granulomatosis. But I know what it does to him. Or at least I’ve heard. And seen. It puts him on his butt. Attacking his body. Making it hard for him to even breathe.

It’s a little known disease so he ends up the guinea pig at times. Sampling some pharmaceutical cocktail that his doctors hope might work. Hope. Might. That’s all he has to roll on with his life literally hanging in the balance. His prognosis. Who knows. Even the specialists that he flies thousands of miles to see can’t say for sure.

Try going to college fighting an adversary that you can’t see. Try just sitting in a desk and having someone walk in and punch you square in the stomach, knocking the breath out of you. Or better yet imagine being on the lake just trying to fish while the chemo pills you’ve been choking down have you hurling over the side of the boat. Not a pretty imagine is it.

Try being a smart kid who is told he has failed out of college because he missed too many classes. Try having your financial aid revoked. Try loving fishing more than your next breath and not being able to have either. Try aching from a disease and trying to survive the medication that can’t cure it but only, hopefully, might fend it off.

Now try being positive. Try finding a reason to even get up. If you can’t then I recommend you do whatever you can to meet David Cosner. Get to know the guy. Because he gets up everytime and he can be an inspiration to even the most pessimistic, woe is me, types.

I have never, never heard David say one cross word about his disease. He owns it. And when I bumped into him at the Forrest Wood Cup Expo I would have had a hard time knowing he had so much as a head cold. He is putting Wegener’s on its butt. He has gone from taking 30 pills a day to two. Ruled out the terrifying option of a double lung transplant for now acing every stress test and lung function test the doctors could throw at him.

We talked for 10 minutes and I never heard him take a breath. No more rasping and wheezing to fill the lung and a third that he has left. Only smiles and fish stories. Talk about how his financial aid has been reinstated and how he’s starting back at Texas State in a couple weeks. Talk about his new project, College Fishing Forum. An eager and ambitious young man with the whole world ahead of him and only one thing to say, “Can you just put in there how thankful I am to FLW for all they’ve done for me?”

Sure David. I can do that. And on our end I’d like to thank you for the inspiration and role model you have been these last few years. A College Fishing All-American and a class act. Thanks David and I hope to bump into you, still standing, at a hundred more Cups.