Holding His Breath
By Matthew Schwartz
December 26, 2024
Cody Heyer during a recent “Pickleball Medicine” podcast.
-
If you’re so inclined, you could say a prayer for Cody Heyer this holiday season. If you’re not the praying type, a good thought for him couldn’t hurt.
Cody loves pickleball. He’s a very good player with a DUPR (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating) of 4.3. He’s a paddle junkie and reviewer. He recently became a co-host on Dustin Fowkes’ YouTube channel podcast called “Pickleball Medicine.”
Cody is only 29, a Navy veteran and a father of four young children, including a seven-month old baby girl. They live in Richmond, Virginia. This is an important time for Cody and his family.
In May 2017, Cody was in a Navy briefing in Georgia when he first felt the pain. He remembers it like it happened yesterday.
“It felt like I was stabbed in the chest suddenly and I couldn’t breathe,” Cody told me. Another sailor who was going off-duty took him to the hospital. A CT scan showed a cancerous tumor on Cody’s right lung that caused the lung to completely collapse.
“It was 10 centimeters in diameter, roughly the size of a grapefruit or softball,” Cody said. “It was a very aggressive germ cell tumor that stuck to the outside of my lung. I was never given a prognosis while going through treatment but later I found out that an oncologist told my parents that I had a three to five percent chance of making it through. They withheld the prognosis from me for years. Honestly, I would agree with the choice of not telling me until years later. When I saw the tumor on X-ray for the first time, I immediately went into denial. I was also on some strong pain meds because I couldn’t breathe without them so I was a little out of it.”
The doctors told Cody if the cancer doesn’t return for seven years he will be considered “cured.” January 13th, 2025, will mark seven years in remission.
“I’ve been holding my breath the last couple weeks,” Cody said. “Sometimes it feels like it was just a nightmare that we woke up from until I spot the scar in the mirror while getting ready for work.”
Cody and his wife Melissa
-
Cody works as a quality control engineer for a company that makes automated packaging machines. He and his wife Melissa (they met at a college football game in 2015) have a four-year-old son named Henry, twin two-year olds, George and Scarlett, and the seven-month-old, Dorothy. “The thought of my children inheriting this from me is a constant fear for sure. The doctors suggested the best course of action [for the children] is to have yearly screenings once they turn 13 or so,” he said.
Despite the big family and fulltime job, Cody finds time to play pickleball at least twice week (one session is spent drilling, one is testing paddles) and recently added the podcast co-hosting gig to his schedule. He liked Dustin’s “Pickleball Medicine” reviews and they had previously discussed paddles, so Cody reached out to him. “It seemed like the next step for [me] and he was a very established reviewer with a good following who I have talked to and really seem to mesh well with,” Cody said. “We would like to be in the top five pickleball podcasts by the end of next year.”
(Fowkes’ YouTube channel has quickly grown. I wrote about him last May when “Pickleball Medicine” had just 1800 subscribers. It now has over 5300. The title comes from Dustin’s medical career. He’s a fourth-year med student at the University of North Carolina.)
Dustin gushes about Cody, telling me, “Cody is one of the most genuine, authentic, and truly kind people I have ever met. I actually don't think I ‘chose’ Cody as a cohost, I think it just sort of happened, and I think it was his idea, initially. I'm so task-saturated most of the time that I've constantly pushed away the idea of adding a podcast to my plate, but knowing Cody and what he has been like as both a friend and fellow reviewer, I knew he would be a pleasure to work with. He's very flexible, hard working, and humbly looking to improve with every project he does. He's very relatable, since we both have other full-time duties, family and children, etc, and as such, we usually film our podcasts around 9:30 or 10:00 pm. For as humble and endearing as he is, you wouldn't ever imagine the depth of experience his life has been full of, or the truly astonishing trials he's conquered.”
Cody grew up in Tryon, North Carolina and graduated from Fletcher Academy. There were no traveling teams but he played intramural soccer, basketball, volleyball and flag football. He first picked up a pickleball paddle in November 2022 and was hooked on the sport. “What drew me in is the fact that the game is always evolving and changing. There is no ceiling.”
He was also drawn to paddle construction. “I like trying out new tech, seeing how two paddles made ‘exactly the same’ can play very differently. I like occasionally helping companies alter designs and features to improve paddles when they send me prototypes.”
This was a special Christmas for Cody and Melissa with the milestone seven-year remission mark being so close. Hopefully, next Christmas will be his first being considered “cured” and Cody and his family will all breathe a lot easier.
Thoughts of the week, not all pickleball
- If you like reading biographies and have an interest in great writers, Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth, by Richard Esposito, is a must-read.
- Major market TV news reporters are getting hired a lot younger these days. I remember when a reporter had to pay their dues in small markets for at least 10 years before making the big time. Now I regularly see 20-somethings on the air in big markets like New York and LA. When I was a reporter not that long ago I had my own photographer and editor. Now almost every reporter is a “one-man band” who researches, shoots, writes and edits his or her stories. The bean counters know they can save money this way and don’t care much about the quality suffering.
- Pickleball players who only bang and never learn the drop shot or proper dinking may win a bunch of rec games against low level players but will only go so far.
- The first four college football playoff games were not exactly scintillating. All were decided by double digits. The next round has to be better.
- On ESPN’s Collge GameDayshow last Saturday, loudmouth sports-talker Pat McAfee and the guest picker, a comedian named Shane Gillis, used profanity. Former Alabama coach Nick Saban sat between them and looked obviously uncomfortable. I don’t blame him. I’m no prude but using four-letter words on a national college football show is low class and lazy. Find a better adjective.
- I can’t be the only pickleball player who thinks beginners should take some lessons and watch some videos before just running on the court and playing games.