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Xzavierro rebounds from lung surgeries
2/14/2023 11:30:00 AM | Men's Basketball, Paul Coro
Indonesia's 1st DI scholarship player endures 7-week hospital stay with GCU support
Clutching a chest that felt constricted, Derrick Michael Xzavierro's strain to study in his second language increasingly turned to a difficulty to breathe.
Indonesia's first Division I basketball scholarship player was four months and more than 9,000 miles removed from his Jakarta home when he spent a Dec. 12 afternoon and evening trying to clear what the freshman believed was lodged food while in his Grand Canyon campus apartment.
There was a reason that his GCU basketball teammates' attempts to aid with the Heimlich maneuver and web-search remedies were fruitless. An ensuing late-night emergency room visit revealed a collapsed lung, leading to a seven-week, two-surgery hospital ordeal that stumped doctors.
"It's hard to see yourself getting down this much because it was so quick," said Xzavierro, who lost 40 pounds on his 6-foot-10 frame before being released from the hospital on Feb. 1. "I'm alive. That's the important thing. When I first come back to the court and play a game, I'll feel blessed to come back. I can prove myself again. God gave me a second life."
Xzavierro (pronounced ex-ZAH-vee-eh-ro) felt like he was carrying the basketball banner for the world's fourth most populous nation when he arrived Aug. 15 in Phoenix, the other side of the world from Jakarta. A new culture, language, school and basketball life came at Xzavierro quickly, but using a redshirt year proved ideal for his athletic and educational acclimation.
With a 7-foot wingspan, he embraced every facet of the program and university to the point that the ever-jubilant freshman, known to teammates as "DMX," was living a typical student-athlete day on that fateful Monday in December.
After a morning weightlifting session for the body that he had bulked up to 226 pounds, Xzavierro put in a skills session at the GCU Basketball Practice Facility, attended the team's study hall and headed to his go-to Panda Express campus stop. The steamed rice came closest to satisfying his home palate.
"I felt like I couldn't breathe," Xzavierro said. "I thought, 'What's wrong with me?' I thought it was because I didn't have a drink yet. I drank water, but it was getting harder to breathe like I just choked on food."
He ran scared to roommates Isaiah Shaw, his teammate, and Jonah Pozniak, a team student manager, and desperately said, "Can you help me?" Pozniak slapped his back to jar any lodged food. Teammate Gabe McGlothan heard the commotion and tried the Heimlich maneuver.
"It progressively got worse," Shaw said. "You could tell he was in a lot of pain. He was saying, 'My chest, I can't breathe.' It was freaking us out, too."
After calls to GCU athletic trainer Chris Elliott and a visit to the campus health center, Xzavierro was feeling better and drinking water. But at about 9 p.m., Elliott remained concerned and called Xzavierro.
The 19-year-old had been reluctant to bother Elliott, but his chest pain and halted breathing were worsening.
"When I was walking and talking, I couldn't breathe," Xzavierro said. "I was in pain."
Elliott rushed to campus to take him to the emergency room at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. Within 10 minutes of his X-ray, Xzavierro and Elliott were walking into an examination room to receive results when five doctors ominously entered behind them.
At least 50% of Xzavierro's right lung had collapsed and the medical team immediately numbed the side of his midsection to insert tubes, which vacuumed the air that was escaping his lungs and building pressure. At the instant the tubes took hold, Xzavierro felt his lung inflate like a balloon and thought he was going to faint.
"It was tough to see because it was super painful," Elliott said. "But he started breathing better and they moved him to a room. We thought it was going to be a two- or three-day hospital stay. They thought it was going to heal on its own, but for whatever reason, it never did."
Because Xzavierro is a basketball player, the doctors assumed that he had been struck to cause the collapsed lung, but it was a spontaneous pneumothorax from a slow leak that revealed itself during his homework session.
Dr. Ross Bremner, executive director of the hospital's Norton Thoracic Institute, told Xzavierro the next day that he needed surgery because he was at risk of another collapsed lung. For the situation, it is a typical operation with nearly every patient recovering in less than a week.
Xzavierro underwent a pleurodesis, a procedure that sticks the lung to the chest wall to remove space where air can build up and allow the lung to collapse again. Despite conducting a surgery that almost always heals the lung, it would not take for Xzavierro.
Meanwhile, GCU teammates, coaches, support staff and his girlfriend, a nursing major, were in Xzavierro's hospital room daily for around-the-clock shifts and overlapped stays during a trying time that pushed him to tears often.
Shaw became close friends with Xzavierro since the August day when he picked him up at the airport and moved him into their campus apartment. He visited Xzavierro three times a week, including staying overnight with him after his first surgery. Hospital personnel told Elliott that they had never seen a patient have so much support, which included Indonesian community members who his mother found in Phoenix.
"I wasn't planning on staying, but he was just in so much pain and could barely speak," Shaw said of his hospital sleepover. "All he could say was, 'Zay, it hurts.' I couldn't imagine what he was going through. He's got no family here. We're his only friends."
With Xzavierro's mother, Eva, arriving from Indonesia, doctors released him on Dec. 23 with a tube still inside his body and a 24-hour portable machine maintaining the air suction so that he could try to enjoy Christmas.
He attended a Dec. 29 GCU home basketball game behind the bench and went to a follow-up appointment with Lopes director of operations Peyton Prudhomme, who took him to breakfast in anticipation of good news before his Jan. 4 doctor visit.
"I thought I was almost healed," Xzavierro said.
Instead, the doctors said he needed a second surgery after already having the tube inside him for three weeks.
Bremner, joined by three other surgeons, repeated the pleurodesis and told Elliott later that it looked like the first one had never been performed. The lung was not scarring like skin does, and air began leaking again following the second surgery.
The entire team and staff visited him following the surgery, which came in the same week that teammate Jovan Blacksher Jr. suffered a season-ending knee injury. The players watched in awe as he struggled in pain and tears to move to the restroom and back with a walker.
Late that night, at the end of another day of multiple, long visits by Elliott, Xzavierro said, "You know, Chris, this was a really good day," explaining that it was because he had the chance to be with his teammates again.
"He had that heart and mentality throughout the process," Elliott said. "None of that wavered at all. His spirit was super inspiring."
Bremner arranged a national call of thoracic surgeons and learned of a similar-sounding case in which a collapsed-lung patient had contracted Valley fever and quickly recovered with medicine for the fungal infection.
Xzavierro started taking the pills in the final week of January.
"Things started turning the corner," Elliott said of addressing a fungus that prevented the lung from healing. "Over the course of a week, they saw less and less air coming out of the tube."
Xzavierro said he thought, "Yo, this is happening. I'm happy, but I'm going to chill a little bit."
He screamed upon the removal of the tube, an immediate contradiction to the feeling of clear breathing once it was out.
"It has been a very difficult time for Derrick being in the hospital for so long," GCU head coach Bryce Drew said. "The care that the GCU medical staff and the support that our team gave Derrick was phenomenal. Prayers were answered, and we are so thankful that he is out of the hospital and back at school."
His mother was able to return to Jakarta last week after seeing her son through a time that was made more difficult by trying to understand complex issues through the translation of her son, who learned English at the NBA Global Academy in Australia but advanced rapidly since coming to GCU.
"My mom is amazing because she was praying for me," Xzavierro said. "She made me closer with God during that time. I feel like I got healthy because of my mom. I ate Indonesian food. That made me happy.
"After everyone came to my room to visit me, I felt better. It was like a spirit, when you're happy and you see people you love. The spirit of people made me healthy. I was blessed that it happened here."
Xzavierro already has progressed to jogging on a treadmill and light weightlifting with strength and conditioning coach Jordan Jackson, who he credits for alleviating the stress and doubt that built when he watched his YouTube highlight videos in the hospital.
Although his body feels like water and bone to him now, Xzavierro has been able to restore some of the weight that he worked so diligently to add in muscle with his body fat at 2% after his first four months at GCU.
"He's got that spark of life in him," Shaw said. "No matter what he's been through, he's going to be happy for his teammates and brothers. It's been barely six months that I've known him, but the brotherhood he and I established makes me think of how amazing it would be to be on the court with him after what he's gone through. The story that he's going to be able to tell once he comes back from this and to say that God brought him out of this."
Indonesia's first Division I basketball scholarship player was four months and more than 9,000 miles removed from his Jakarta home when he spent a Dec. 12 afternoon and evening trying to clear what the freshman believed was lodged food while in his Grand Canyon campus apartment.
There was a reason that his GCU basketball teammates' attempts to aid with the Heimlich maneuver and web-search remedies were fruitless. An ensuing late-night emergency room visit revealed a collapsed lung, leading to a seven-week, two-surgery hospital ordeal that stumped doctors.
"It's hard to see yourself getting down this much because it was so quick," said Xzavierro, who lost 40 pounds on his 6-foot-10 frame before being released from the hospital on Feb. 1. "I'm alive. That's the important thing. When I first come back to the court and play a game, I'll feel blessed to come back. I can prove myself again. God gave me a second life."Xzavierro (pronounced ex-ZAH-vee-eh-ro) felt like he was carrying the basketball banner for the world's fourth most populous nation when he arrived Aug. 15 in Phoenix, the other side of the world from Jakarta. A new culture, language, school and basketball life came at Xzavierro quickly, but using a redshirt year proved ideal for his athletic and educational acclimation.
With a 7-foot wingspan, he embraced every facet of the program and university to the point that the ever-jubilant freshman, known to teammates as "DMX," was living a typical student-athlete day on that fateful Monday in December.
After a morning weightlifting session for the body that he had bulked up to 226 pounds, Xzavierro put in a skills session at the GCU Basketball Practice Facility, attended the team's study hall and headed to his go-to Panda Express campus stop. The steamed rice came closest to satisfying his home palate.
"I felt like I couldn't breathe," Xzavierro said. "I thought, 'What's wrong with me?' I thought it was because I didn't have a drink yet. I drank water, but it was getting harder to breathe like I just choked on food."
He ran scared to roommates Isaiah Shaw, his teammate, and Jonah Pozniak, a team student manager, and desperately said, "Can you help me?" Pozniak slapped his back to jar any lodged food. Teammate Gabe McGlothan heard the commotion and tried the Heimlich maneuver.
"It progressively got worse," Shaw said. "You could tell he was in a lot of pain. He was saying, 'My chest, I can't breathe.' It was freaking us out, too."
After calls to GCU athletic trainer Chris Elliott and a visit to the campus health center, Xzavierro was feeling better and drinking water. But at about 9 p.m., Elliott remained concerned and called Xzavierro.The 19-year-old had been reluctant to bother Elliott, but his chest pain and halted breathing were worsening.
"When I was walking and talking, I couldn't breathe," Xzavierro said. "I was in pain."
Elliott rushed to campus to take him to the emergency room at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. Within 10 minutes of his X-ray, Xzavierro and Elliott were walking into an examination room to receive results when five doctors ominously entered behind them.
At least 50% of Xzavierro's right lung had collapsed and the medical team immediately numbed the side of his midsection to insert tubes, which vacuumed the air that was escaping his lungs and building pressure. At the instant the tubes took hold, Xzavierro felt his lung inflate like a balloon and thought he was going to faint.
"It was tough to see because it was super painful," Elliott said. "But he started breathing better and they moved him to a room. We thought it was going to be a two- or three-day hospital stay. They thought it was going to heal on its own, but for whatever reason, it never did."
Because Xzavierro is a basketball player, the doctors assumed that he had been struck to cause the collapsed lung, but it was a spontaneous pneumothorax from a slow leak that revealed itself during his homework session.
Dr. Ross Bremner, executive director of the hospital's Norton Thoracic Institute, told Xzavierro the next day that he needed surgery because he was at risk of another collapsed lung. For the situation, it is a typical operation with nearly every patient recovering in less than a week.Xzavierro underwent a pleurodesis, a procedure that sticks the lung to the chest wall to remove space where air can build up and allow the lung to collapse again. Despite conducting a surgery that almost always heals the lung, it would not take for Xzavierro.
Meanwhile, GCU teammates, coaches, support staff and his girlfriend, a nursing major, were in Xzavierro's hospital room daily for around-the-clock shifts and overlapped stays during a trying time that pushed him to tears often.
Shaw became close friends with Xzavierro since the August day when he picked him up at the airport and moved him into their campus apartment. He visited Xzavierro three times a week, including staying overnight with him after his first surgery. Hospital personnel told Elliott that they had never seen a patient have so much support, which included Indonesian community members who his mother found in Phoenix.
"I wasn't planning on staying, but he was just in so much pain and could barely speak," Shaw said of his hospital sleepover. "All he could say was, 'Zay, it hurts.' I couldn't imagine what he was going through. He's got no family here. We're his only friends."
With Xzavierro's mother, Eva, arriving from Indonesia, doctors released him on Dec. 23 with a tube still inside his body and a 24-hour portable machine maintaining the air suction so that he could try to enjoy Christmas.He attended a Dec. 29 GCU home basketball game behind the bench and went to a follow-up appointment with Lopes director of operations Peyton Prudhomme, who took him to breakfast in anticipation of good news before his Jan. 4 doctor visit.
"I thought I was almost healed," Xzavierro said.
Instead, the doctors said he needed a second surgery after already having the tube inside him for three weeks.
Bremner, joined by three other surgeons, repeated the pleurodesis and told Elliott later that it looked like the first one had never been performed. The lung was not scarring like skin does, and air began leaking again following the second surgery.
The entire team and staff visited him following the surgery, which came in the same week that teammate Jovan Blacksher Jr. suffered a season-ending knee injury. The players watched in awe as he struggled in pain and tears to move to the restroom and back with a walker.
Late that night, at the end of another day of multiple, long visits by Elliott, Xzavierro said, "You know, Chris, this was a really good day," explaining that it was because he had the chance to be with his teammates again.
"He had that heart and mentality throughout the process," Elliott said. "None of that wavered at all. His spirit was super inspiring."
Bremner arranged a national call of thoracic surgeons and learned of a similar-sounding case in which a collapsed-lung patient had contracted Valley fever and quickly recovered with medicine for the fungal infection.
Xzavierro started taking the pills in the final week of January."Things started turning the corner," Elliott said of addressing a fungus that prevented the lung from healing. "Over the course of a week, they saw less and less air coming out of the tube."
Xzavierro said he thought, "Yo, this is happening. I'm happy, but I'm going to chill a little bit."
He screamed upon the removal of the tube, an immediate contradiction to the feeling of clear breathing once it was out.
"It has been a very difficult time for Derrick being in the hospital for so long," GCU head coach Bryce Drew said. "The care that the GCU medical staff and the support that our team gave Derrick was phenomenal. Prayers were answered, and we are so thankful that he is out of the hospital and back at school."
His mother was able to return to Jakarta last week after seeing her son through a time that was made more difficult by trying to understand complex issues through the translation of her son, who learned English at the NBA Global Academy in Australia but advanced rapidly since coming to GCU.
"My mom is amazing because she was praying for me," Xzavierro said. "She made me closer with God during that time. I feel like I got healthy because of my mom. I ate Indonesian food. That made me happy.
"After everyone came to my room to visit me, I felt better. It was like a spirit, when you're happy and you see people you love. The spirit of people made me healthy. I was blessed that it happened here."
Xzavierro already has progressed to jogging on a treadmill and light weightlifting with strength and conditioning coach Jordan Jackson, who he credits for alleviating the stress and doubt that built when he watched his YouTube highlight videos in the hospital.Although his body feels like water and bone to him now, Xzavierro has been able to restore some of the weight that he worked so diligently to add in muscle with his body fat at 2% after his first four months at GCU.
"He's got that spark of life in him," Shaw said. "No matter what he's been through, he's going to be happy for his teammates and brothers. It's been barely six months that I've known him, but the brotherhood he and I established makes me think of how amazing it would be to be on the court with him after what he's gone through. The story that he's going to be able to tell once he comes back from this and to say that God brought him out of this."
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