Thump … thump … thump … thump … Paige Hammock walked to the batter’s box, her steps almost matching the slow cadence of her heartbeat. She dug her cleats into the dirt and focused her eyes on the opposing pitcher.
Thump, thump, thump, thump …With each pitch, her pulse accelerated. She wanted a hit. She needed a hit. Then, Pop! The dense sound of an aluminum bat hitting a softball interrupted the chatter of the crowd.
Thumpthumpthumpthump …To the first-base bag she raced, and so did her heart. As she sprinted down the line, a small device inside her chest fired an electrical pulse through a wire to her heart. It repeated the action a short time later when she took off for second.
In a blur, Hammock legged out a single and stole second base. Her pacemaker made it all possible.
In most regards, Hammock, the starting second baseman for Jefferson Forest’s softball team, is a normal, active 17-year old. There’s one twist. Because of a low underlying heart rate, she had a pacemaker implanted when she was seven.
Because of this amazing device, which was placed under the skin below her left shoulder, she is able to perform at a remarkable level on the softball field.
She’s a team captain — a rare occurrence at JF for a junior — and she leads the team in batting average (.398), on-base percentage (.523), RBIs (13) and runs scored (14). She also has committed only one error.
“You never want to say one player makes a team, but she would definitely be missed if we didn’t have her,” Jefferson Forest coach Gary Harris said.
Hammock’s pacemaker, which helps speed up her heart rate so she can participate in athletics, caused her coaches some concern when they first found out, but they’ve since learned that she is able to perform routine tasks — and many extraordinary ones — on the softball field with no problems.
In fact, the only thing she isn’t supposed to do is dive head first while running the bases because of the risk of direct impact to the device.
The pacemaker doesn’t cause Hammock any intense pain. Sometimes it’ll be sore if she sleeps on it the wrong way. It occasionally causes discomfort if she exerts herself in practice.
“It only goes up to 180 (beats per minute), so if my heart rate is pushing 180 or going over, it’ll start getting really tight in my chest because my pacemaker is trying to slow me down,” Hammock said.
If this happens, she is required to stop. Her coaches watch her closely — especially during team runs — and if they notice her struggling to keep up, they make her stop.
“She’s bullheaded in the fact that she won’t tell you she’s hurting,” Cavaliers assistant coach Will Myers said. “You’ve got to know what to look for.
“When she’s running, if she falls off pace, she’s not wussing out. Every once in a while, she’ll look around to see if you’re looking, and if you aren’t, she’ll tug at it to try to get the shirt off it, and that’s when you stop her.”
‘Just treat her normal’
Hammock doesn’t tell people about her pacemaker. To her, it’s not a big deal.
“I don’t really think about it,” she said. “I forget it’s there sometimes. People will ask me, ‘Oh, you have a pacemaker?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, I guess I do.’”
Some of her teammates found out when they inquired about the three-inch surgical scar below her left shoulder. Some of them learned when they saw her sitting out a team run.
“We were running last year and she had to stop, and I was like, ‘Huh, I wonder why,’” JF senior Brittany Roark said. “I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she was like, ‘I have a pacemaker.’ I didn’t know. She doesn’t really talk about it.”
Roark didn’t think anything of it. None of Hammock’s teammates do. They don’t treat her any differently.
“They just know I have something metal in my chest,” Hammock said.
Hammock’s reluctance to talk about her pacemaker caused a small stir during preseason conditioning three years ago.
Her coaches didn’t know of her condition, and when they noticed her struggling during one of the running drills, they thought she was slacking.
“She’s an eighth-grader. She just made the team. We’re on varsity, just kind of watching from a distance. I thought, ‘The kid’s got potential, but she ain’t even running hard,’” Myers said.
Jefferson Forest’s coaches learned of Hammock’s pacemaker through one of the junior varsity coaches’ wives — she was her elementary school principal — and expressed their concern immediately. They didn’t know what to do.
She was cleared to play, but the coaches tried to move her to a different position to reduce the risk of a collision or getting hit by a ball.
Hammock came home one day and complained to her mom, Cary McFadden, about how the coaches were handling her.
“They don’t know what to do with me,” she told McFadden. “They’re thinking about putting me at first. I can’t play first. I don’t even want to play first. They’re even thinking about putting me in the outfield.”
McFadden immediately dialed Harris. “You guys, just treat her normal,” she said to him.
She explained that Hammock was no more at risk of being hurt than the other girls. When Harris heard this, he was relieved.
“It put me a lot at ease because now I understood the fact that the she didn’t need the pacemaker to live. She just needed it to be a normal teenager,” Harris said.
Jefferson Forest’s coaches have still been guilty of being overprotective at times.
Myers was hitting grounders during warm-ups last year at Rustburg, and one of the balls took a tricky hop and hit Hammock in the left shoulder.
“As soon as it happened, I just dropped the bat and walked off the field and said, ‘Come on off,’” Myers said. “All the kids came off and they’re looking at me like, ‘What?’ It scared me. I thought I hit her right in the pacemaker.”
Hammock was fine. In fact, she and her mother laugh now when they tell the story.
“She has an underlying heart rate, so I know that probably if something traumatic happens to the pacemaker, she’d survive,” McFadden said. “I think that makes a difference, because I know if something were to ever hit her so severely to damage the pacemaker, it would probably hurt any kid’s heart.”
Rock of Gibraltar
Hammock has always been active. She played soccer and T-ball as a child and has played softball yearlong since she was 10.
She comes from an active family. Her mother played organized tennis, softball and beach volleyball, and her extended family — her mother recently re-married — often plays spirited games of volleyball and Frisbee golf together.
Her love of physical activity has never been in question. She couldn’t sit still as a youngster, even when her doctor told her to.
After her first pacemaker surgery (she has since had another surgery to replace the device’s battery), her doctor ordered her to refrain from lifting her left arm over her head for six weeks.
About a month after the procedure, McFadden found her swinging high and unfettered on a swing set, both arms high above her head.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing? Get off that swing,’” McFadden said. “She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Paige, your arm. You can’t be doing that with your arm.’ She goes, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because you may end up in surgery again.’ And she says, ‘It wasn’t so bad.’ That’s when I realized she’s just the Rock of Gibraltar.”
McFadden was overprotective at first, but she now knows her daughter can withstand almost anything.
Now, she can watch Hammock dive to snag ground balls or slide feet-first into a base and not fret.
“I worry more about jammed fingers and strawberries than I do her pacemaker,” McFadden said.
After all the heartache McFadden went through early in Hammock’s life, things are relatively settled now. Her daughter is healthy, active, a good student, and she stays out of trouble.
Hammock’s teammates respect her so much they voted her one of three team captains this season along with seniors Roark and Cara Hannell.
“She’s pretty good about talking everybody up on the field. Off the field, she’s a good role model for all the younger girls,” Roark said. “In the classroom, she keeps her grades up. She gets her studies done, and she’s a good driver.”
Life experiences have grounded Hammock. They’ve given her perspective.
She and her family have overcome so much.
“There are a lot of things she’s had to endure that have kind of toughened her up,” McFadden said. “It has to have had some kind of impact on who she is.”
‘I literally fell to pieces’
Hammock had surgery to repair a valve and close a hole in her heart before her third birthday.
The same day McFadden learned 2-year old Paige needed open-heart surgery, it was discovered that her older daughter Melissa, 14 at the time, needed an orange-sized tumor — which was later found to be benign — removed from her right breast.
“I went to (Paige’s) cardiologist checkup in the afternoon after I had taken my daughter in over this breast lump, and I literally fell to pieces,” McFadden said.
McFadden had the support of her parents and friends and the church, all of which helped put her at peace during this troubling time.
“The night before her surgery, I was very calm. I was not freaked out,” McFadden said. “So through a lot of prayer, I knew it was going to be OK. And she has been OK. She’s a tough little nut.”
Hammock’s surgery lasted 10 hours, “probably the longest 10 hours of my life,” McFadden said.
After the procedure, Hammock was required to stay in the hospital for four weeks, during which she worried the nursing staff to no end with her rambunctious behavior.
The hospital provided toys for the recovering children, and six days after surgery, Paige was pedaling down the hall on a plastic big-wheel tricycle with her mother, holding the battery pack of her external pacemaker, in tow.
“She was two-and-a-half years old. She’s in the hospital. She just had her chest ripped wide open. … It didn’t stop her. She just goes,” McFadden said.
The family turmoil didn’t end with the girls’ surgeries. Only days after Hammock left the hospital, her father left the family. Just packed up and took off. Paige hasn’t seen him in years.
“They say it’ll make or break a marriage and it will make or break a person, and unfortunately it broke him,” McFadden said.
He wasn’t strong like the women in his family.
That strength was tested again a few years later when Hammock’s low underlying heart rate was discovered.
Her electrical conduction system was damaged during her open-heart surgery, but McFadden didn’t sense anything was wrong until Hammock was seven.
She was smaller than other children her age. She had dark circles under her eyes. She complained of fatigue when she went to bed at night.
Her cardiologist, Dr. William M. Gay, performed a stress test and discovered the abnormality.
“I think her heartbeat started at 45 or 50, but when she exercised, it wouldn’t go up because the upper part of her heart would beat faster, but the impulses would just get blocked more and more and her heart rate just wouldn’t respond to exercise,” said Gay, the chief of pediatric cardiology at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke.
The options were to cut back on her active life or implant a pacemaker.
“The reason we put it in was so that she could continue to be active,” McFadden said.
The good life
How could someone who has been through so much before her 18th birthday be so happy and well grounded? Perhaps the more appropriate question is: How could she not be?
Hammock has endured more in her short life than some people ever do, but you’ll never hear her question why it has happened to her.
“I think her experiences have probably grounded her more than most 17-year olds, but who’s to say that’s how she wouldn’t have been even without them,” McFadden said. “That’s kind of a hard call. It’s part of her life and has been part of her life, and we have dealt with it.”
Life is good for Hammock now, a few minor inconveniences notwithstanding.
She’s not supposed to go through the metal detectors at airports, though she’s been guilty of breaking that rule to avoid being patted down by security. She can’t have an MRI or be close to any heavy-duty magnet.
Regular pacemaker maintenance requires two check-ups a year with her doctor and a monthly pace check, a procedure in which her heart rate is read by a machine that sends the information to her doctor over the phone.
The pacemaker’s battery must also be changed around every seven years. She had the battery replaced once when she was 12 and plans to have it changed again sometime next year.
She wants to have that procedure early so it doesn’t interfere with her softball career.
“I want to be able to get back into running and preparing myself, not just for the next season, but if I’m going to play in college, I need to be conditioned for that too,” Hammock said. “I want it to be early enough so that it’s not in the middle of college that I need to get it changed.”
Hammock is passionate about softball — she has played an estimated 200 games between high school and her club team the last three years — and she’d love to play at the next level.
But she said her college choice would be more influenced by academics than softball.
She loves school. If pressed to choose a major right now, she said she’d probably go with neuroscience or international affairs.
“The school is my main thing, because I make pretty good grades. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I know I want to go to a pretty good school,” Hammock said. “If I can play softball for them, that’s great, but I just want to make sure I like where I’m going and I’m not just going for softball.”
Hammock has overcome a trying past to carve out a very bright future. Nothing, not open-heart surgery or a pacemaker or any kind of past turmoil, has stood in the way of her or her family’s happiness.
“There is not a point in time where I can say I’m glad we went through it,” McFadden said. “Who in the world would be glad you went through it? It was really tough, but we’ve been very blessed.”
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