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Provo
Monica Yeates once thought the toughest moment of her life would be having to pray for the ability to pee.
The mysterious illness that struck her in the middle of her Utah Valley University golf career would become part of a stunning sequence of trials that might have overwhelmed anyone else. Everything that happened — more accurately, her response to it — conspired to earn her a national award for perseverance among Division I women's golfers, after she came back and played as a senior in 2016-17.
She's deserving. Yeates could have earned the Kim Moore Spirit Award by enduring any portion of this litany, within a year: She struggled to walk, temporarily lost vision, dealt with the death of a childhood friend, learned of her father's stage IV cancer diagnosis and accompanied her uncle to a hospital where the two of them were told that her aunt had died after a zip line accident.
Summarizing those events, longtime friend Ariel Christensen said, "Just one of them would have taken down anybody."
Faith and golf are among the factors that kept her going, although her coach once wondered if encouraging her to keep pursuing the game really was proper advice. Yeates plowed through all of it with an attitude that UVU coach Sue Nyhus labeled "intensely optimistic."
Nyhus treasures the moment at Hobble Creek Golf Course in Springville last September when Yeates qualified for UVU's season-opening tournament. "We didn't think she was going to be able to walk," Nyhus said. "We didn't think she could see. We didn't think she could swing. And then she makes the team? It was like, wow."
After missing nearly all of her junior year of golf and having to compete with her teammates for a spot in the lineup, the graduate of Timpanogos High School in Orem played in six of UVU's 12 tournaments as a senior. She graduated in May with a business degree after being diagnosed with neuro-myelitis optica (NMO), a rare autoimmune disease that mainly affects a person's legs and eyes.
Yeates' sister, Michelle, remembers the night in the hospital when they cried together and Monica asked, "What if I could never walk again?" After her aunt's death, almost exactly a year later, she acknowledged thinking, "Is this ever going to end?"
That's a lot to process for a 22-year-old woman, who's known for worrying more about others than herself.
Yeates wishes she could have done more for the childhood friend who took his life, and she felt helpless when her father's sister died during a family outing while visiting Utah. "It's one thing to have things happen to you," she said, "but to see the people you care about most just hurt so much, that was really hard to experience."
If you're wondering, none of this material is too personal for Yeates. She wants her story to give others hope. In a 7,300-word essay, she detailed everything that happened to herself, her family and friends in those staggering 12 months beginning in May 2015 — starting with struggling to finish a round of golf and the next night having trouble using the bathroom. She told her roommate, "Jamie, I seriously cannot pee right now."
That episode ended happily, hours later in an emergency room. As she wrote, "I seriously was exclaiming with excitement through the door, 'I am going!' … God answered my prayer."
Many more trials would follow, in nearly every imaginable form. After five months of uncertainty, the diagnosis of NMO at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona in October 2015 was both assuring and sobering. "I now knew it was something I'll be dealing with the rest of my life," she said in a recent interview at Riverside Country Club in Provo.
Yeates is interested in becoming a spokesperson for NMO, supporting others with the disease. Every case is different, and she feels blessed that treatment is helping in her case. She knows paralysis and blindness are potential effects, and she's aware of a woman who recently died at a similar age to hers.
Yeates recently underwent surgery, unrelated to her illness. Now pursuing a master's degree in business, she invited four classmates to her hospital room so they could prepare a case-study presentation for their information systems and project management course.
Her treatment requires an infusion every six months; another session is scheduled this week. Yeates hopes for an easy recovery from the latest procedure, because she's planning to add two classes. Apparently, no one told her she didn't have to keep validating her award, even after her college golf career ended.
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About the award
The Kim Moore Spirit Award is presented annually to a women's golfer in each of NCAA Divisions I, II and II. Moore, now the coach at Saint Mary's College in Indiana, played with a prosthetic leg during her career at the University of Indianapolis from 1999-2003.
Another Wolverine
Monica Yeates' brother Aaron intends to enroll at Utah Valley University and play for the men's golf team once he returns home this month from an LDS mission in Columbus, Ohio. He hopes to give the Yeates family an eight-year run of Wolverine golfers.