As a filmmaker, entrepreneur, and journalist, I feel I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of fascinating experiences since I’ve graduated from college.
I’ve been invited to speak coast-to-coast from the National Press Club to Stanford Medical School. My film, Forgotten Plague, which tells the story of a disease called myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has been hailed a “Must-See Documentary” by The Huffington Post. Each week I might be meeting a U.S. Senator, talking to world-renowned scientists, meeting with CDC officials, or speaking on the radio. But most of what I’m sharing on social media only represents half the story.
Beneath that thin façade of success, there is a much more sinister and grim reality that my team and I live with every day, plagued by the universal notion that there is no magical formula for success other than hustle, 12-14-hour days, and knowing the greatest success in any early business is to fight hard enough so that the organization survives at all. The bad days, of which there are many, are best left forgotten, and the failures are never Instagrammed.
The only way to get more funding for our film production was to cultivate an image of success and not report to our donors how often we come within a hair’s breadth of failure. Some days it’s the specter of IRS late fees, other days it’s a disastrous contract negotiation, still other days it’s the threat of a global boycott of our film for some perceived slight we committed. I know each week to expect some new challenge that could torpedo our company.
This is the story of perhaps our most dire day: February 21, 2014, when we were filming our documentary in Boston, a thousand miles from home. That day it wasn’t just our film or our company on the line.
I’d been experiencing significant chest pain for weeks, and the strain of running a two-person film crew on a hectic national schedule was leaving me gasping for air, barely able to stand, and in so much chest pain that the emergency room was the only solution.
We were leaving to go wait for a taxi in our hotel lobby. “Wait,” Nicole said, heading back into the hotel room. “I need to get something.” She emerged with her camera around her neck. I hadn’t the strength to care that the cold, unblinking lens, which had recorded countless interviews with others, would now be turning its gaze on me.
Nicole filmed nearly every second of our trip to the emergency room. She filmed as I cowered in a chair in the hotel lobby. She was shooting as I leaned against the taxicab window in the fetal position. She was right next to me rolling as I stared into space, shirtless, laying in a hospital bed with electrodes on my chest, while nurses rushed to discover whether or not I was having a heart attack.
My ultimate diagnosis was pericarditis, an inflammation of a sac around the heart caused by herpes viruses and cocksackie viruses. Ostensibly it is caused by a pathogen, but I knew entrepreneurial burnout was the real diagnosis.
My beating heart had swollen to capture and carry the stories of hardship of thousands around the world. Now those horrors threatened to tear me apart not just emotionally, but also physically. The whispering voices of sufferers were a chamber orchestra just off one of my ventricles, beating an off-kilter rhythm you could now hear with a stethoscope.
That episode made the final cut of our documentary, and became one of its most gripping sequences. But what didn’t make it into the film was a scene equally heart-stopping. And yes, I do mean that literally.
Around 2 am, the ER staff concluded I wasn’t dying, and was therefore clear for discharge with some over-the-counter painkillers. I got up from the hospital bed to go find Nicole. A nurse was wheeling Nicole on a bed coming straight toward me. “Odd, yet fun,” I thought, that the nurses must be putting people on wheeled beds and staging races in the halls.
But Nicole’s face was pale, blank. She didn’t return my smile. The nurse docked her in an alcove, half a dozen more staff poured in, and they snatched the curtains shut around them.
A few more ran in. I figured someone just hadn’t hooked up the electrodes up correctly. I peaked up over the top of the curtains to try and comfort her with a goofy Bullwinkle grin amid the pandemonium.
She stared blankly, didn’t even recognize me. She was a ghost of her normal self.
I thought to myself, I should be filming this. But Nicole’s camera was still around her neck, blocked by a fierce squadron of ER nurses. This probably wasn’t a great time to grab it.
For several long moments, I watched figures scrambling behind the curtain, until finally, there were faint beeps as her heart rate reached into the zone of 40 beats per minute.
A few minutes later Nicole was cognition, and color. “I’m fine, we need to go home,” she tried to convince them.
“Finding people passed out in the floor of the bathroom isn’t fine,” the nurse retorted. “You were standing and you just hit the deck. We have to keep you for examination.”
Recently, in recounting the story, Nicole told me, “There have only been a few times in my life where I felt, with absolute certainty, that I was dying. That was one of them. As I was lying there, in the bed, I had two thoughts. The first was that I was dying. The second was, ‘Wow, the nurses don’t very good poker faces.’ I was very, very frightened. But I could tell in their faces there were just as frightened.”
Her condition, I learned, was called vasovagal; it is characterized by a sudden drop in heart rate, which leads to fainting. Medical textbooks say it is often caused by a stressful trigger, an example of which might include seeing your best friend admitted to the ER for chest pain in the middle of night, thousands of miles from home, while at the same time you have little to no extra money and no one to turn to.
After, being released from the ER, I fell asleep on a bed outside her room. She wasn’t released until 6 am. We went back to the hotel room, canceled all the shoots for the next day, and slept.
Rattled, and in need of advice, I called my mother, a nurse, and she called her father, a doctor. Remarkably, both advised us to take a day off and continue our trip, the next leg of which included lugging our equipment to a bus station to travel to New York City for a few more days of shooting.
I suppose that simple decision, to board that bus to New York, perfectly encapsulates the other half of entrepreneurship that you don’t always hear about. Even after a harrowing, near-death experience, you take a bit to collect yourself, punch your ticket, and carry on with the next leg of your journey.
The world isn’t there to see your shaky arms thrust the trunk of cinematic lighting equipment into the cargo bay and to mount the steps up into the bus, but those are the moments when you begin to feel you might just be actually earning whatever little success may come your way.
There is, and always will be, only one magical formula. And that is grit.
Since my childhood in Caracas, Venezuela, I have always been an athlete. Team sports like soccer, roller hockey, speed skating, and especially baseball were all a big part of my early life. I always assumed that I would be involved in sports my entire life and, so far, that hasn’t changed. What has changed, is the type of sport I’m involved in.
I moved to the US when I was 19 to attend college at the University of Tampa. I stayed active during college and while building my career in the medical imaging equipment field, but it wasn’t until I was 28 that something changed in me. Team sports fell by the wayside as I shifted my focus to running, cycling and, eventually, triathlon.
Six years later, in 2015, after dozens of triathlon races, 14 of which were at the 70.3 mile, half-Ironman distance ( 1.2 mile swim; 56 mile bike; 13.1 mile run), I felt I was ready for a new challenge. I submitted an application to vie for the Guinness World Record for most half-Ironman triathlons completed in a single year. The current record is 23. I would need to complete, in one year, nearly twice as many half-Ironman’s as I had in the past six years combined. The goal was lofty, but after three months of waiting, Guinness accepted my application, and I made plans to begin my pursuit of the record in 2016.
Just one week later, I was at an Ironman event in Louisville, KY. During the race, I began to experience unbearable pain in my left calf. The pain became so intense that I was forced to stop before I could cross the finish line. Back home, my doctors confirmed that the pain was coming from severe damage to my meniscus and that I would need to undergo a full repair surgery to relieve the pain and to be able to race again. The surgery, which required nearly 12 weeks of recovery and physical therapy, was scheduled for the middle of January. Even if I recovered ahead of schedule, the year would be 25% over before I could get even one half-Ironman under my belt.
This news was discouraging, to say the least. I had just gotten everything in place to pursue my goal, only to have a huge obstacle, one that I had no choice in, set in front of me. Through introspection leading up to my surgery though, I considered the circumstances that many others fight through.
A lot of the races I had been a part of over the years had ties to non-profit organizations. Some of the people I had seen and the stories I had heard came back into my mind. Most notably, stories from the Challenged Athlete Foundation (CAF), a group that helps provide athletic-grade prosthetics and appliances for athletes who have been physically challenged by severe injuries or congenital conditions, and also stories of the patients at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital; kids, some not even out of pre-school, already facing circumstances that could take literally everything away from them.
Knowing that there are people fighting much harder and with much more at stake, I doubled-down on my commitment to breaking the record, regardless of the time I would lose to my recovery. Now, after a full recovery, with lots of help from my doctors and physical therapists, I’m nine races into my goal with more scheduled every weekend for the next 16 weekends. In between working my regular job Monday through Friday, I’m travelling all over the US, racing in a dozen states, and even racing in the US Virgin Islands and Canada.
In addition to setting a new record, I’ve decided to widen the scope of my goal and use any attention this pursuit might draw to raise awareness for the organizations that helped inspire me. I encourage anyone reading this story to look into the courageous battles being fought by children and athletes with the help of CAF and St. Jude’s.
Ultimately, this experience has taught me that there is no excuse for making excuses. Very few things in life can actually stop us from achieving our goals if we only have the commitment and the discipline to overcome them. The Guinness Book is filled with regular, working-class people who set excuses aside, embraced commitment and discipline, and became their very best. I hope to be one of them very soon.
To follow my journey and help me support both organizations please go to http://aracing.net/
I’m going to be perhaps a little too honest with you guys from the get-go. I never meant to start a business and I absolutely never considered myself to be an entrepreneur – that word alone scares the hell out of me. But here I am, writing this, trying to explain what it is exactly I hope to accomplish.
I’ve officially been out of the world of media – or should I say journalism since technically I still work in media – for about a year now. It took me being approximately two weeks removed from the industry to realize that I missed it. Holy hell did I miss it.
Looking back, the 3 and half years I spent working in sports journalism were 3 of the most chaotic, challenging, frustrating, enthralling, and wonderful years of my life. Good or bad – I wouldn’t change a single experience I had. Okay I maybe would have gotten in a few less Twitter fights and reacted quicker that time I got tackled on the sidelines (shout out to Ryan Switzer for my first concussion) but you get the point. I would however, have appreciated it more.
The one issue I had with working in sports journalism however, was that I often times found it very limiting. I could only talk about certain things. I was only allowed to have an opinion on this, not that. I needed to “stay in my lane,” and after awhile it got too frustrating for me. I wanted to have a real voice, on real things and most importantly on my own terms.
So I started dijananotdiana.com (catchy title, I know) in hopes of getting my voice out there and showing fellow journalists they don’t have to be limited to one topic or field of journalism. Launching the website was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. In a world where everyone has an opinion on the Internet, I was terrified at the response I would get. And then … something weird happened. People were supportive, encouraging even, and they actually liked what I had to say. People read my articles and listened to my podcasts and suddenly I was a millionaire!
Yeah JK, that last part didn’t happen at all. I record my podcasts out of my closet. I write my articles after my 9-5 actual job and on weekends. I am one-woman team. Starting my own site was very liberating and exciting but it’s also a lot of work and pressure; mostly pressure that I put on myself. It’s a lot of pushing myself to the limit, giving up free time, and realizing it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
This is going to take time, patience and a lot of hard work – all of which you have to be willing to put in when it comes to being an entrepreneur.