Wesleyan's SID rebounds after surgery

Joe Wasiluk is the Sports Information Director at Virginia Wesleyan, but he wasn’t always interested in writing. At the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, he was a pharmacy major for three years.

“I answered an ad in the student newspaper paper that said free travel, free food, free money,” said Wasiluk.

The school paper needed some new sports and news writers and since Wasiluk had a background in athletics, they assigned him to sports. The more he got into it, the more it exposed him to different kinds of writing.

“I worked for the sports information director,” said Wasiluk. “He liked me and gave my name to the sports editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer.”

That led to a brief job at the paper until it began to interfere with his schoolwork. He worked late.

“After an internship at a hospital, I didn’t really like what I saw,” said Wasiluk. “Maybe I should go back to writing.”

He dropped his pharmacy major and entered the college of arts and sciences. He graduated with degrees in English and American literature.

Wasiluk got married in college, so he had a wife to think about when he graduated.

“I was offered a job at my hometown newspaper in Mt. Vernon, Ohio,” he said. “The salary they offered me was for more money than I had ever heard of, especially for a 19-year-old with a family.”

Wasiluk talked to his family and decided writing was something he should do. His first beat was covering the city and county government court cases. After a year they moved him into the sports department, where he stayed for the rest of his time there. Eventually, he became the sports editor.

“My wife was a waitress, and she met the sports editor of the Cincinnati Herald, which was an African-American newspaper,” said Wasiluk. “They were looking for a sports writer. That experience was probably one of the best I’d ever had, because it introduced me to the professional end of coverage.”

He covered the Bengals, the Reds and the Cincinnati Stingers, the ice hockey team at that time.

“I got thrown into all that and it was just an eye-opening experience,” said Wasiluk. It was kind of backwards. Instead of starting at the bottom and going to the top, I started at the top and got to see what it was like.

“My first experience in a football press box was just unreal. There were three tiers of men as far down as you could see and completely quiet. All you could hear were the typewriters. No talking, no fooling around, nothing, which was totally against everything I had heard, that it was just wild in the press box and a big party up there. That doesn’t happen at all. It was very, very professional.”

There were certain things he didn’t like about the whole coverage process, particularly with football. For example, during a press conference the speaker would call on the press people that he knew or with whom he was familiar.

“You really never actually got to ask the players questions,” said Wasiluk. “You’d have to get your story off what the other reporters were asking. It’s difficult to go up to players and get them to answer questions if they don’t know who you are.”

Wasiluk had a little bit of an inroad though, because he would say that he was from the Cincinnati Herald.

“They would look at me and say, you’re from the Herald?” Wasiluk said. “They thought it was kind of funny so they would eventually talk to me. It ended up being a pretty cool experience.”

He weighed the professional end of sports writing with the college aspect. Wasiluk decided he liked the excitement of college athletics more than the pros. The pros are business, whereas college is more fun.

He spent the next 10 years as the sports information director at Kenyon College in Ohio, before deciding that he wanted to try something different. Wasiluk moved to Florida and lived there for a year and half.

“I wanted to see what else was out there,” he said. “I bounced around jobs for a while.”

He said he couldn’t get used to an 8-5 job, with a lunch break at noon, after working in writing where hours are scattered throughout the day. He looked for something more flexible and found an ad for a bar/restaurant in Daytona.

“They were looking for a general manager, but when I interviewed, I told him I had a background in writing,” said Wasiluk. “I think that’s what really got me the job, because they also wanted a publicist for the place. So I did a few articles for him while I was there, but I was still in charge of hiring and firing employees. It was an experience. That’s all I have to say.”

The bar, 316 Main Street Station, was right beside Boot Hill, which is one of the most famous biker bars in the country.

The bar shut down soon afterward and Wasiluk decided he wanted to get back into sports information.

“It’s a little more stable,” said Wasiluk.

This is Joe Wasiluk’s fourth year at Wesleyan as SID. On August 5 of this year, he had quadruple bypass surgery. Before the surgery, Wasiluk felt fine. He never saw what was coming.

“I was at Sam’s Club buying groceries with my roommate, when all of a sudden I got some stomach pains,” said Wasiluk. “I had to sit down because I thought, well, these are weird, unlike anything I’d ever felt before. When I stood up they got sharper, so I said to my roommate, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but maybe we ought to go to the emergency room to see what’s wrong.’ We had just eaten dinner before that, so I thought maybe I’d had some food poisoning.”

Wasiluk was in the ER for three hours. He endured test after test. He said he was feeling fine by the end of everything, so he thought they were going to come in and tell him he could go home. When the nurse returned, she informed him that he was being admitted to the hospital and that he would be staying overnight. A heart specialist would take a look at him in the morning.

Wasiluk said, “I was surprised. The doctor had only been there five minutes when he said; You’ve got problems. There were some areas in my heart that were too dark. It turned out I had significant blockage all through my heart and that they were going to have to do a bypass.”

“They replaced all four arteries,” said Wasiluk. “They took a vein out of my left leg and also my chest, and that’s how they reconstructed everything.”

The surgery lasted five hours. It went smoothly.

After the surgery, he was in the intensive care unit for two days and spent another two days on the cardiac floor. The doctors had to be sure that the incisions weren’t bleeding and that he could get around by himself.

“They make you get up and use the restroom or walk down the hallway,” said Wasiluk. “They give you a pillow in the shape of a heart. You hold that against your chest when you cough because the pressure in your chest is very painful. I used the pillow for two weeks. They actually encourage you to cough because it clears out your lungs of fluid and stuff.”

About two weeks after he was released from the hospital, he had trouble breathing. When you go through surgery your body fills up with fluid, and the fluid was hindering his breathing. The doctors were able to take care of it with medication though.

“It was awkward when I got home,” said Wasiluk. “You’re stiff and can’t do much because you were flat on your back for a while. You have to sit in the back seat of the car, because you can’t sit anywhere near an airbag. If you are in a fender bender and the airbag deploys, it would open up everything completely. So that kind of scared me.”

Wasiluk’s mother and daughter came down from Ohio. They made sure he ate well and took his medication.

“The first week I came back [to Wesleyan],” said Wasiluk. “I thought I was going to be Superman and be able to sit in [my office] for six hours and do the job. But about three hours into it, I was really tired. I still wasn’t able to drive at that time, so I called my roommate to come get me.”

“Your body will tell you when its had enough,” he said. and each day I’ve been here I try to add on a little bit more time and each day I don’t get that feeling anymore where I’m exhausted and I need to leave.”

Wasiluk is not yet working full-time. Not until Oct. 1 he says. At the time of this interview, Wasiluk’s longest day was about six hours.

“When I left [that day] I wasn’t tired, but I’m also being very careful not to push this because I’ve only been out of the hospital a month,” Wasiluk said. “And the doctors told me it would take anywhere from three to five months to get completely healed. Even when I do come back full-time, I’m still going to be very careful.”

As the SID, Wasiluk is in charge of keeping statistics of all athletic teams. He also shares that information with other schools and the press.

“I asked my doctors if I could come back a little earlier than they wanted me to because I worried about the work getting done,” he said.

In his absence, the Sports Information Assistants, seniors Colleen O’Connell and Top Drabczyk and the Sports information Intern, senior Bryan Nichols, have been holding down the fort for Wasiluk.

“What I admire most about them is that they’ve had no training in any of this whatsoever,” he said. “I’ve been gone since Aug. 1, so I spoke to them over the phone to let them know what needed to get done. Colleen actually taught herself how to use the stat-keeping program for all the sports, and it’s not easy to input all the information.”

O’Connell and Nichols have also written for Wasiluk. Drabczyk covers volleyball games and records the stats. Nichols has covered field hockey and soccer with whatever Wasiluk needs.

SIDs at other schools know the situation at Wesleyan. Wasiluk said they’ve been very patient with getting game files, stories and results.

“I really haven’t had to worry about all that because all the scores are there,” said Wasiluk. “My concern was about the website. There was just no way I could explain to them how to do that over the phone. That was the reason I wanted to come back. To make sure that the website was taken care of because that’s where most of the people go to get their information.”

“Athletic pages get more hits than any other website at the school. Everything right now is up to date because the effort of those three kids pushed it to the point of where it is. If they had not volunteered, the office would be a mess right now. They’ve done a fantastic job.”

When he’s back full-time, he will resume his work creating individual bio pages for athletes. It takes time, just like healing.

“I’ll be able to do game coverage again, too,” said Wasiluk. “I wasn’t allowed to go to the stadium through this whole situation. I was leery about climbing steps, but I’m fine now. What I want to get across to people about this whole surgery is this. I was going along, thinking nothing was wrong. You can be someone who is in perfect health and this could hit you the same way it hit me.”

“The doctors explained to me that problems with the heart manifest itself anywhere in your body. They way people think they’re having a heart attack is down the left arm, that it’s the only place you get it, but that’s just one. It can come anywhere.”

“My advice is that if you feel strange at any particular time, pains or aches, anything abnormal that you’ve never experienced before, there’s no messing around with it. It could be your heart telling you something. Your body is amazing, the messages it will send out to you. Basically, its up to you to pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you. I would not want anyone to go through what I went through.”

“And get a normal physical every year.”

Finally, Wasiluk said Wesleyan has been good to him. The athletic department and the administration have been understanding. He said that it has pulled him a lot closer to the school.

“It makes me feel like this is a great place to work, where people really care,” he said.