When you meet Adah Tibbetts, a vivacious 18-year-old high school senior, you would never guess the story she literally carries in her heart. A story that began at birth but came to a full-blown crisis just weeks after her father, Bill Tibbetts, MBA, now a dean at North Central University, had recently started as a first-time professor.
Bill and Natalie Tibbetts had already experienced great loss in their parenting journey, going through four miscarriages before Adah was born. When Adah arrived nine weeks ahead of her due date, weighing in at just over three pounds, they had to readjust their thinking out of the starting gate about what parenting would be like for them. “We could hold her, essentially, in the cup of one of our hands,” Bill recalled.
As a “preemie,” Adah had physical challenges right away, but Bill said they noticed breathing challenges that seemed to get worse as she moved into the toddler stage. Living at that time in Indiana, Bill and Natalie began a regular rhythm of trips to doctors to help their daughter. “Her condition was identified as some level of asthma,” Bill explained, “and she was on a nebulizer for years, essentially pumping steroids into the lungs.”
But Adah’s breathing problems didn’t improve, and, in fact, became worse. Shortly after Bill and Natalie arrived in Minneapolis in 2008 for his job as a new instructor in NCU’s Business Department, Adah took a turn. “Within the preceding weeks of our move, we noticed Adah going from a very lively, energetic, happy child to quite a lethargic child,” Bill said. “I have very distinct memories of looking at her on our couch and thinking, “Something’s not right.”
Natalie and Bill attributed Adah’s change to the move and the challenges of leaving friends and known surroundings, but without any visible bounce-back, they needed answers. They reached out to specialists in their new city and the answers sounded familiar—asthma, nebulizer—until one day, things got really bad. Bill said, “We just noticed something was very wrong. We had to lean into the Holy Spirit prompting our hearts to say, ‘You need to push harder on this.’”
Divine timing
They took Adah to one of her doctors, and he ordered an x-ray of her chest and lungs. But this time, they did something different: The doctor directed the technician to turn Adah on her side for a different view. It was that x-ray that alerted the doctor to something more severe happening inside the little girl’s body. Bill recalled, “He more or less said, ‘You need to get into the car and go to Children’s Hospital right away.’”
During the short drive to Minneapolis Children’s Hospital, the couple saw their daughter’s condition deteriorating before their eyes. They arrived at the hospital and got a room, and Bill and Natalie found themselves watching a whole team of doctors trying to save their daughter’s life.
Thirteen years later, Bill can still recall that moment vividly—the sight, the sounds, the smells. “It feels like something we would have watched in a movie,” he recalled. “It still gets me every time. As you stand in the room and they’re trying to save your child, I don’t think there are many experiences of life that could connect to a moment like that.”
The atmosphere in the ER was getting tense. The providers were struggling to figure out what was going on when a young resident physician—Bill estimates he was in his twenties—walked in. The young doctor looked at her chart and said that on a previous rotation with a cardiovascular physician he had seen this condition before: Restrictive cardiomyopathy.
“As soon as they became aware of what it was,” Bill said, “they knew how to stabilize her.” As it turns out, stabilizing Adah for the moment only bought a little time.
Shattered
After Adah was stabilized in the ER and moved to another room in the hospital, a doctor sat down across from Bill and Natalie in the hallway where they had been waiting and said, in essence, there was nothing they could do for her; she had an incurable disease.
“For me at that moment,” Bill recalled, “it was like holding a sheet of glass that represented my life and it was dropped; it just simply shattered into a thousand pieces.”
Bill wishes he could say that was his shining moment of faith where he just knew God was going to come through, but it wasn’t. “I was at the very beginning of that journey that night,” he said. “And there was just a complete collapse in me almost immediately—emotionally, spiritually, physically.” Working through his emotions would not be an overnight process, nor would Adah’s path to health.
The following day, Natalie and Bill learned that Adah’s only hope would be a heart transplant. Adah remained in the hospital while they did all that was required to determine first if she was a good candidate to get on the heart transplant list, and then to get her on the list.
They were able to bring Adah home, along with a regimen of medicine to help sustain her, and shortly after they had another moment that changed their trajectory, which they readily attribute to God’s work in their daughter’s story.
Bill and Natalie rarely watched TV or news programs, but on this particular day they “randomly” turned on the television, and the news program they landed on told the story of a family whose child had needed a heart transplant. What piqued their interest was that although it was a Minnesota family, they had gone to St. Louis Children’s Hospital in Missouri for the transplant. Curious for more information, Bill followed up with the reporter who told the story, and he and Natalie decided to take Adah to St. Louis to wait for a new heart.
“The primary reason for our decision,” Bill said, “was because St. Louis is in the middle of the United States, so her heart [which would only have a limited time for transportation] could come from almost anywhere in the United States.
Waiting for a heart in St. Louis
Just two months into the academic year, the Tibbetts family set up temporary residence in St. Louis, in a Ronald McDonald House. Bill flew back and forth. “Every Friday night I would fly down there and then I would fly back on a red-eye flight on Monday.” He would teach classes all week and do it again.
Meanwhile, Natalie, who is currently the Childhood Director at Eden Prairie Assembly of God, was a solo parent of a sick little girl. Adah was surviving with the help of a machine she wore like a backpack that kept fluid out of her lungs, but she wanted to play and do all the things that four-year-old children were supposed to do.
While Bill’s emotional state was still deep and dark, Natalie, after wrestling initially with Adah’s diagnosis, went quickly into “a high-functioning mode.” She remembered, “I really focused on absorbing as much as I could absorb [from a medical information standpoint] and give Adah as much fun and normalcy as possible. We tried to have a lot of fun in that waiting time.”
Adah still holds memories of the experiences her mom tried to create for her. “I remember being in Missouri and living in the Ronald McDonald House,” Adah said. “Mom would take me to the park and go to museums. We would have little sleepovers in the living room, maybe watch a movie. We’d sleep all night out there on inflatable beds.”
Adah received a new heart in February 2009, donated by the family of an 11-year-old girl in Texas.
The journey before and after Adah’s successful transplant surgery has been different for each member of the Tibbetts family.
Adah – memories, remaining risks
After her transplant, Adah remembers some details, but it’s fuzzy, in part because of her age and in part because she was on a lot of medication. “I remember after waking up, they had a dog there who could visit kids,” she said, also recalling a few of her interactions with the doctors who cared for her. The emotional burden of the surgery and illness has been less severe for Adah than for her parents, but as a transplant recipient, her life is forever different than her peers.
Adah has to take anti-rejection medication to suppress white blood cells for the rest of her life to keep her body from attacking the heart that saved her. And because of her lower white-blood-cell count, Adah is high-risk for both viral and bacterial illnesses. She has to avoid swimming in lakes and oceans, wash and sanitize her hands a lot, and of course, she needs to be very careful to avoid exposure to illness. The COVID-19 pandemic caused great concern for Adah and her family, and they have worked diligently to mitigate exposure, not just for Adah but for all of them.
Natalie – powering through
Natalie’s maternal response to step up stayed in high gear for at least two years. She simply didn’t have time to process much emotionally during the apex of Adah’s health crisis, transplant, and initial recovery. “I think my adrenaline stayed really high for quite a long time,” Natalie said. “I just went into go mode.” Bill struggled much more during the months his family was in St. Louis, and Natalie felt she had to be strong for both family members.
The emotions Natalie powered through during the crisis caught up with her years down the road, and although throughout the process her faith never wavered, she has worked through bouts of grief and depression she attributes to that season of her life. Yet she’s grateful that she and Bill did not hit the crisis point at the same time.
Bill – a moment of choice
With the same clarity that he remembers the night they learned that Adah’s condition was incurable, Bill remembers his own dark night of the soul that came during the time his family was in St. Louis.
It’s hard for Bill, as a man of deep faith, to share the despair he felt in that season. It’s a story that shapes him to this day, and he recalled when things came to a pivotal moment.
“I truly did collapse in every way a human could collapse,” Bill said. “I would go in classes and teach and just break down and, and not know how to function. I actually got to the point where I deeply questioned the existence of God, or at least a good God. I had more questions than answers or relief. I got to the point where I became jaded. I’ll never forget one Monday that I had flown back I five o’clock in the morning, taught all day, and came home to an empty apartment. It was dark and just starting to snow.
“I had gone to bed … looking outside at a street light with the snow was coming down, and I said, ‘God, one of two things is going to happen tonight: I’m either going to recklessly give you everything and just believe, or I’m going to take my life, because I cannot take another breath with this elephant sitting on my chest.’
“I rolled off the bed and landed on the floor face first. And I said, ‘The only reason I’m doing this is because if she makes it through this, I don’t want her to be without a daddy.’
“I said to God, ‘I give it all to you; whatever my emotions, my experience, my thoughts are, I am going to believe that you are God, you exist, and you are in control. And if things … don’t go as I want them to be, I’m still going to believe that you’re God.’’’
Bill said that in that moment, nothing happened—no amazing Holy Spirit, bright-light relief whatsoever. “And,” he said, “that is the exact moment in my life that I learned that faith was a choice. I had to choose to believe. And that’s when things started to turn for me, I did not get the relief, the emotional relief I was anticipating or hoping or whatever it may be, but I started to choose to believe. And that has set the course of my faith journey ever since.”
Community support
Bill and Natalie Tibbetts remain grateful to this day for the way the North Central University community walked with them through Adah’s health crisis. The night they received the news about the severity of Adah’s condition, Bill admits they felt isolated—they had only recently moved to Minneapolis and weren’t even firmly connected to a church yet.
“We feel like we were in the middle of the desert by ourselves,” Bill said, “but I can testify that moment lasted for only about eight hours.” Because the conversation with the doctor happened at midnight, and from the moment at 8 a.m. when they informed people at NCU about the situation, “North Central infiltrated our lives.” Bill recounted that even though they were new to campus, they were treated like family. “People quickly engaged in our lives on a deep and meaningful level.”
In that season, students collected funds to help the family, others paid for parking passes to the hospital garage, colleagues covered classes, students showed grace when feedback on assignments was delayed, and people would frequently stop him in the hallways and offer to pray.
Beyond the students and employees in Minneapolis, the NCU community around the world caught wind of the story and became prayer warriors. Bill said his family learned firsthand about the beautiful power of connecting with one another. “Our worst times bring a soul-like healing to our bodies, to our minds,” he said. “And that’s what happened for me. Despite the challenges I was facing emotionally, spiritually, and so forth during that period of two or three months, North Central was there for us.”
Next year, NCU
Adah is now a senior at Southwest Christian High School. She is also a big sister to Graham, who was born in 2011. The family has weathered COVID and concerns for all of them to stay healthy to protect Adah, and they have bright hopes for Adah’s future.
Adah displays a spirit of great positivity about the things she needs to do to stay healthy, and overall accepts that being a transplant recipient is just part of her life. “It’s something that I can’t deny. I remember as a kid thinking, ‘Was this just a story that people have told me?’ she said. “But it is a big part of my life and always will be … but it also doesn’t define who I am. I don’t define myself as somebody who is sick. I define myself as a regular human being who just went through something that was really hard when I was younger.”
Next year, Adah plans to attend North Central University to major in Business and Marketing. She is a talented artist and wants to put her skills to work in the business world.
The stories we don’t see are often the stories that hold the deepest meaning and have had the greatest impact on the people who hold them. The Tibbetts family remains grateful that Adah’s story turned out as it did, and the lessons they learned will remain forever in their hearts.
Featured below is some of Adah’s Art:
