FEATURE SPOTLIGHT DAVIDSON JUMP

Photo courtesy of HR Imaging JUMPING THROUGH ADVERSITY

After a medical issue stopped him from playing the football, Davidson Jump found an alternative path back to the sport he loves TIMELINE

8TH GRADE

After having a seizure, Jump is diagnosed with an AVM in his brain. Later that year, he has surgery at Boston Children's Hospital.

SOPHOMORE YEAR

Jump learns how to kick

JUNIOR YEAR

Jump becomes the starting kicker for the varsity football team

SENIOR YEAR

Jump commits to the Denison University football team as a kicker

BY KAISON DURHAM

Davidson Jump was sitting in his eighth grade English class, little did he know his entire life would change at that moment. Davidson was sitting in his class and felt normal until things he read on the board started to stress him out. He was having a seizure.

“The whole room was spinning, there were floaters in my vision and my eyes were twitching,” Jump said.

He was taken to the nurse and then the hospital. Jump had a lot of tests done and got no answers. He was told that it is common for teens to have random seizures, but that did not sit right with him and his parents.

Jump had an EEG test and doctors saw nothing different in his brain. But his neurologist, who was a resident and did not have a lot of experience, took another look at his results and found something that saved his life. Jump had an AVM in his occipital and temporal lobes. An AVM is a tangle of blood vessels in his brain. Doctors explained it as "pumping a fire hose into a water hose, or even a ticking time bomb,” according to Jump.

Jump needed surgery to have the AVM removed. He and his family decided on Boston Children’s Hospital to have his surgery. It was a 30-hour, two-day surgery that was going to change his life. There was a risk that Jump could not read, talk or walk right again after the surgery, which alarmed him and his family.

Jump's reading level dropped significantly after the surgery. “They said I had the reading level of a 3rd grader,” Jump said. He said it was scary as he was about to start high school and had a long way to go.

Doctors told Jump that he could never play football again. This was tough on him as that was his favorite thing in the whole world. But there was one way he could still play: kicking. At the start of the sophomore year football season he started to try kicking. He wasn’t the best at it but he kept pushing through. By his junior year, he became the starting kicker.

Because of his hard work and dedication, Jump earned a chance to kick at the next level. He has committed to Denison University to kick for the next four years.

Jump has been through a lot of adversity in these past five years, but he has really shown how much heart and dedication he has to fight through the tough times.