[ Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News . ]
By Anne Marie Williams, RN, BSN
Live Action News
The star 22-year-old …
[ Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.] By Anne Marie Williams, RN, BSN Live Action News The star 22-year-old running back at the University of Georgia — the #1 ranked college football team in the nation — has an incredible life story. To look at Zamir White now, at six feet tall and weighing 225 pounds, you’d never know that while six months pregnant with him, his 14-year-old mother Shanee White was urged to consider abortion because her son was measuring small for his gestational age. Fortunately, the boy’s great-grandmother intervened and saved him. In an interview with ESPN, Shanee remembered that her grandmother Nancy White told her at the time, “We’re not going to terminate the pregnancy. No matter what’s wrong with him, he’s going to be born.” A frightened and overwhelmed Shanee told her grandmother that they should listen to the doctor since he was an authority figure. But Nancy responded, “The doctor is not God, so he doesn’t have the last say. If he takes one breath, he’s going to take it.” But Zamir’s problems were far from over after his mother bravely chose life for him. When he was born on September 18,1999, weighing a very respectable seven pounds, his mother and medical team saw that he was among the one in 1,600 children born each year with a cleft lip and palate. Zamir was transferred the following day to a larger medical facility because his lip and palate issues kept him from eating enough to maintain his own body temperature. Again, Shanee received dire warnings from health care professionals, as she was told that her son might not live another two weeks. Zamir spent three months in the hospital before being discharged home with his mom and great-grandmother, who fed him with a medicine dropper to accommodate his lip and palate. When he was just six months old, he had the first of two surgeries to address the cleft lip and palate, and then another surgery at 15 months for kidney problems.
