The Inspiring Journey of Lee Moreau

Life was great.  Actually, life was nothing short of awesome, and Lee Moreau was savoring every minute.
A 1985 Collegiate alumna and multi-sport athlete, Lee was well known for her prodigious talent, speed, sportsmanship, and love of her teammates, coaches, and the entire Collegiate experience. Her intentionality and competitive spirit, though, that set her apart. No challenge was too great, no opponent too formidable, no obstacle too daunting.
 
What she didn’t fully understand until July 14, 1984, was that the same spirit that had propelled her to athletic excellence would serve her ever so well when her world came crashing down and she embarked upon the greatest competition of her life.
 
On that fateful Saturday, she was playing shortstop in an all-star softball tournament at the L.C. Bird Athletic Complex in Chesterfield County.
 
“I fielded a ball, faked a throw to first, and pivoted to pick off a girl at second,” Lee recalled. “I planted my (right) foot. My body turned but not my leg. ­­I had the girl dead to rights, but I couldn’t even get the ball out of my hand. I dropped to the ground screaming. The people who were there that day said it was one of the most awful things they’d seen, knowing how much pain I was in.”
 
The preliminary diagnosis was torn cartilage in her right knee. Surgery was scheduled for the following Tuesday at St. Luke’s Hospital (now Parham Doctors’ Hospital). Routine outpatient procedure, she was told. Clean up the site. Crutches for a few days. Back in action for an eagerly-anticipated Junior Olympics field hockey tournament in Seattle in August.
 
“I woke up in a full leg cast,” Lee said. “I thought, This is not walking out and being fine in a few days. They came in and said it was a lot worse than they thought: three cartilage tears and a torn ACL (anterior cruciate ligament).”
 
If all went well, her entire right leg would be in an unforgiving plaster cast for eight weeks.
 
“I was devastated,” she said. “My whole sporting life was put on hold. I didn’t like that at all.”
 
The odyssey, one fraught with unfathomable peril for this 17-year-old, was just beginning.
 
By Friday, she was in pain. The next day, her parents Bonnie and John rushed her to the emergency room at St. Luke’s with a 101 temperature.  
 
“When we got there,” Lee said, “they removed the cast. An infected pocket the size of a pear popped out the front of my knee. They determined it was a staph infection. I had surgery that night.”
 
On Wednesday, the day she hoped to be discharged with the infection under control, she began to feel nauseous.
 
“The nurses were coming in, taking my temperature,” she said. “They finally stopped telling me what it was. I had a good relationship with them, so it was unusual for them not to tell me anymore.”
 
As her nausea intensified, the medical staff packed her with ice in an attempt to reduce her fever.
 
“Finally, at about 11 o’clock,” Lee said, “I got one of the nurses to tell me my temperature. It was 106.3.”
 
Her parents were summoned. Throughout the night, she hallucinated. The next day, she recalls, there were periods of time when she shivered for 45 minutes or so, then felt intensely hot, then repeated the sensations several times over.
 
Dr. Michael D. Mandel, an internal medicine specialist, was called in and prescribed medication to stabilize her condition. It would take time to work, however, and time was of the essence. Later that day, she experienced a seizure, the first of six over the next couple of hours. Then, she went into cardiac arrest.
 
“They revived me right there in my room,” Lee said. “Then, they rushed me to intensive care. I was there the next five days. I remember one night waking up at about 3 a.m. My mom was in the room with me. I looked at her and said, ‘Did I almost die?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, no.’ She was worried that I’d have a relapse if she told me that I had. I’d contracted a blood infection from an IV site in my wrist that caused all of my major organs to start shutting down. The medicine that the doctor had put me on that morning saved my life.”
 
Lee spent three weeks in the hospital including five days in the ICU.  She was able to return to Collegiate for her senior year, underwent hours upon hours of physical therapy, and finally shed the crutches in April.
 
“It was quite a life-changing event,” she said, “when you go from being an athlete who can pick and choose where you go to college to I-just-hope-I-can-get-back-and-run-and-play-in-college. Fortunately, I was able to do that.”
 
Lee’s health journey included five surgeries before 1990 and replacement of both knees in 2021. It also included multiple blessings.
 
Though she was sidelined her entire senior year, she attended hockey, basketball, and lacrosse practices and games, helped out where she could, became her teammates’ biggest booster, and earned the respect of the Collegiate community (and beyond) for the courage and positivity with which she handled her challenges.
 
At year’s end, she was cited as the co-recipient (with Anne Mountcastle Rusbuldt) of the Charles Larus Reed Award “presented annually to the senior girl who has contributed most to the athletic program through leadership, cooperation, sportsmanship, and ability.”
 
“It meant everything,” Lee said of the honor. “It highlighted the importance of teamwork. It’s not always whether you score the most goals or have the best percentage of this or that. It’s what you’re doing behind the scenes, in the shadows, to support a team.  It speaks to the camaraderie, and my friendships from the Collegiate experience are as strong as ever.”
 
Despite her injury, Lee’s competitive career was hardly over. Janet Grubbs, who had coached her at Collegiate, recruited her to play hockey and lacrosse at University of Richmond.  After her sophomore year but with three years of eligibility remaining, she transferred to Trenton State (now The College of New Jersey) and helped both squads (lacrosse in the spring of ’88, hockey the following fall) win Division III national championships. She was a DIII lacrosse All-American and national offensive player of the year in 1990, her final season.
 
The following year, she served as an assistant women’s lacrosse coach at Princeton, then went to work as a customer experience sales and marketing professional in South Florida, first in the cruise industry and later with Federal Express. She recently relocated to Richmond where she’s contracting with the Virginia Department of Health to assist with the organization’s Covid call center.
 
How did you develop such a strong competitive spirit? I asked.
 
“It was a natural part of who I was,” she replied. “I grew up in and around sports my whole life, particularly with my dad (a long-time, highly respected high school and college basketball official). I love sports. I was pretty good at it.”
 
The “pretty good” applied to her Collegiate endeavors. She played JV as a middle schooler and varsity throughout high school, earned numerous All-League of Independent Schools citations, and was a charter inductee in the Athletic Hall of Fame in 2002.  It also applied to softball, swimming, and diving outside school.
 
As she amassed accolades, she remained humble and unpretentious. Her analysis of her talent as “pretty good” attests to her mindset and demeanor.
 
 “I’m a firm believer,” she said, “in letting your actions speak louder than your words.”
 
What had you learned through sports, I asked, that enabled you to manage the crisis of ’84 and the aftermath?
 
“You get out of something what you put into it, whether it’s physical therapy or just getting across the room with a walker or with crutches,” she responded. “If you put the effort in, you’ll get there. If you don’t, you’ll reap what you sow. If I wanted to get back and play again, which I did more than anything in the world, I needed to fight through the pain of physical therapy and, sometimes, the monotony of the exercises, because I knew that that was the only way I could reach my goals.”
 
How did you remain positive and focused, I asked, rather than descend into the abyss of self-pity?
 
“There were days,” she said with a laugh. “In the big picture, I hope those were few and far between. That instance made me realize that I appreciate every person in my life, every opportunity, and every moment I get to share with my father or my brothers or their kids or my friends.
 
“It made me realize that tomorrow may not happen. You have to make the most of everything that comes your way today. If something doesn’t come in the form that you want it, it’s okay. You can be disappointed, but figure out a way to change it or look at it differently or find a better way. That, combined with the Collegiate experience, has made me the adult I am today.”
    
Do you consider your injury bad luck or good luck? I asked.
 
“It was bad luck…however, I wouldn’t change the direction of my life,” she replied. “I think we sometimes wonder,What if? But I wouldn’t change anything. I’m very grateful for my journey and the experiences I’ve had and all the people I’ve met along the way.”
        
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