2014 VSGA One-Day Season
positive attitude when it comes to a far
more difficult opponent. It’s called chronic
lymphocytic leukemia, a diagnosis he received
in 2003. He will turn 60 in June, lives in
Springfield, Va., and has now gone through a
number of different experimental protocols at
the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Md. One procedure entailed a stem cell
transplant that failed after 14 months. Yet, with
one notable scare two years ago, his cancer
has been in remission since the fall of 2011.
Schmitz also knows this insidious illness,
when his white blood cells don’t mature
properly and leave his immune system
susceptible to all manner of complications, is
virtually certain to return at some point.
“It’s an incurable disease,” he says, almost
matter-of-factly. “I just keep getting kicked
down the road. Typically you burn your
bridges. You’ll do ‘Drug A,’ and it will work
for a while, but then the cancer cells get smart
and figure out a way to make a comeback.
Basically, you’re buying time.”
The big scare came in 2012, when he spent
I’m someone who sticks to it. Once I decide to do
something, I’m going to get it done. — DAVID SCHMITZ
30 days in the hospital at NIH.
“I just had so many things going wrong,”
he says. “I was really weak, had to use a
walker, and at one point I felt so badly that I
honestly was hoping someone would just pull
the plug. It wasn’t pretty.”
EARLY OPPORTUNITIES,
OBSTACLES TO OVERCOME
Nevertheless, Schmitz rallied from that
ordeal, much to the relief of his wife, Holly, a
Fairfax County school teacher, and his three
adult children. Clearly not the woe-is-me
type, he says his family and so many friends
have always kept him going and wanting to
fight back. And a return