No more cheeseburgers, no more cigars, no more drinking: a recipe to stay alive.
It was around 2 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 9, when Lisa Moyer’s phone rang. She heard it ring, but by the time she got to it, she had missed the call and there was a voicemail.
It was from her son, Josh.
“Toots, I’m in the hospital,” said Josh, who calls his mother ‘Toots’ and his father ‘Holmes.’ “I was having some pain so I thought I should get checked out. Give grandma a call and hope to see you soon.”
Lisa panicked for a while, frantically dialing her son’s phone until finally a doctor answered at Mount Nittany Medical Center in State College, Pennsylvania.
“Your son is in serious condition,” the doctor told Lisa. “He needs to be life-flighted to a hospital that can perform a procedure for his heart.” She later told Lisa that she had to hang up, as she was trying to sedate Josh and wasn’t sure if he’d make the ride to the next hospital.
Lisa and her husband, who reside in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, jumped in their car and headed to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, anticipating Josh’s arrival there. The drive, which is normally around an hour, took two hours because a snowstorm slowed travel.
About an hour and a half earlier at 12:30 a.m., Josh Moyer was relaxing on his black Ikea couch watching the final episode of a show on Netflix. Moyer leaned back and, just like that, knew his life had changed forever.
“Instantly, as soon as it happened, which let me tell you is a pretty sobering feeling when it feels like your heart ripped in half or a bolt of lightning struck it,” said Moyer. “As soon as that happened I started sweating. I could feel my blood pressure pick up. My heart was racing. I didn’t know what had happened but I knew it wasn’t good."
Moyer, who hadn’t been to a hospital or a doctor in what he estimated to be 10 years, didn’t want to go. All he wanted to do was go to sleep. He decided to give himself an hour, hoping he just pulled a muscle or his blood pressure was high, before he would go to the hospital. In that time, he took a cold shower, as cold as he possibly could, but was still sweating.
“That’s when I knew something was wrong,” said Moyer.
Despite the pain, Moyer drove himself to the hospital in the snow. After a short wait, he underwent an initial exam. The nurse attempted to take his blood pressure, but to no avail. After nearly 15 attempts, it finally registered at close to 300 over 220.
“The blood pressure only measures up to 300,” said Moyer. “That’s apparently a number that most of those nurses will never see any higher in their careers. I was told there was a good chance I probably should have stroked out.”
Moyer doesn’t remember much after that and woke up three or four days later a little more than an hour away from State College with a scar on his chest.
The 30-year-old Penn State football beat writer for ESPN and 2008 College of Communications journalism alumnus had suffered an aortic dissection, which is when the aorta, the main artery that distributes oxygenated blood through the body, tears. Moyer’s tore six centimeters, which usually means death for about 40 percent of people, and, according to MedicineNet.com, the death rate is up to 80 percent of patients. Still, when treated surgically, the 10-year survival rate is greater than 60 percent.
Doctors usually tell patients that a successful surgery will likely extend their lives five to 10 years. Moyer was lucky. When the doctors opened him up and saw his chest, it turned out his aortic valve didn’t need replaced as the doctors initially anticipated from the scans.
“It went from extending my life, to I should lead a long and healthy life,” said Moyer. “For the rest of my life, I’ll be on medication. For me, low sodium diet. No more cheeseburgers, no more cigars, no more drinking. There’s a lot I can’t do, but it certainly beats being 6 feet under.”
Despite the condition being more common to men in their 60s and 70s, Moyer was told the combination of being born with a large aorta and high blood pressure probably led to the incident.
Right now, while he still has pain, the biggest obstacle is fatigue. Sometimes, he just needs to nap, but he hopes that will get better with time.
“I might never be 100 percent again. They said as much. But I can get pretty darn close,” said Moyer. “I’m dieting, exercising, doing all the things I should have done before this. I like to think I set the bar so low before that I can be even better.
“Certainly, now it’s still difficult, but I feel like I was given a second chance and like anyone, I certainly hope to make the most of it.”
Already, he is back on the job and “light-years” ahead of where he was in mid-February.
“I thank the good Lord every day that he’s still with us and it’s not his time,” said Lisa. “It’s close to the heart. I almost lost my son.
“I will worry every day for the rest of my life because you just don’t know. As a mother, you don’t ever stop worrying. You just pray every day.”
A costly insurance gap
As if the medical hardships and being on pills for the rest of his life are not enough, the hospital bills he accumulated during his sickness are astronomical. As a contract employee, Moyer didn’t have health insurance through ESPN.
He signed up for coverage in December, but his plan didn’t kick in until Feb. 1.
On top of that, he was told he would have received financial assistance from the hospital if the incident had happened in December, but a new policy that started on Jan. 1 prevented that.
The Jan. 9 date of his attack fell in the four-week window that was the worst possible time for a health problem for him.
“It doesn’t matter if your bill is $50 million, you’re still on the hook,” said Moyer. “That’s probably, honestly, the worst part of all of this. On paper, I owe close to 300 grand. I’m a journalist. We don’t make that. I can put the surgery behind me, I can look ahead to the future, but with something like this, it’s hard to look ahead when you’re just dragged down by the past.”
According the U.S. Census Bureau, a 2013 health insurance report showed that 23.5 percent of adults between the ages of 26 and 34 are uninsured, and 38.3 percent of the nation’s uninsured population under the age of 65 is between the ages of 19 and 34.
Some friendly support
As word of his situation spread, Moyer’s friends collaborated and collectively decided they wanted to do something for him. An online donation page was created to help raise funds.
“Honestly, I look at the contributors and everything and I recognize almost every name and almost all of them are people I’ve worked with in this profession,” said Moyer. “Obviously, no one is particularly wealthy when you take on a life of journalism, but we’re tight-knit. I thought my mom summed it up succinctly, ‘I didn’t know you had so many friends.’
“People do care. Your friends don’t forget you. You mean something to them, they mean just as much to you. It’s incredibly humbling. It’s a shame you need something like this to kind of see that a little better, but that’s what happened in this case.”
One of those friends, Josh Langenbacher, made sure some of Moyer’s close friends and acquaintances were kept up-to-date and in the loop when he was in the hospital. He had an email chain of 30 or 40 people, and he would text Moyer’s mom on a daily basis for updates.
Langenbacher, a 2009 Penn State journalism graduate, works as a copy editor for the Altoona Mirror. He met Moyer when he was on staff at The Daily Collegian when he was a junior, and the two clicked almost instantly, with Langenbacher citing Moyer’s no-nonsense attitude as a factor.
“He’s one heck of a character,” said Langenbacher. “He has this incredible knack for being able to ream you out, but also making you want to run through a wall for him. Anyone who has spent any amount of time around him knows he has a personality that nobody could forget. He’s something else.”
An ‘all-or-nothing move’
Moyer had his first day back at work at ESPN on March 9, two months after the incident. The 30-year-old, who started working for “the worldwide leader” in July 2012, is approaching three years with the company. It wasn’t an easy path there, though.
Following his graduation from Penn State in 2008, the job market wasn’t great, and Moyer spent time without a job. He ended up with a job as a copy editor for the York (Pa.) Daily Record, but after it had a sportswriter opening and didn’t extend him an interview, he moved on to a startup website that covered Penn State football.
Knowing the startup wasn’t going to last (it went out of business about six months after he got there), he applied to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Moyer left the startup website and attended Columbia, knowing it would be expensive.
“Ultimately, it came down to, ‘If this is what you want to do the rest of your life, you need to find out if you’re good enough,’” said Moyer. “At the time, I wasn’t writing. I felt this was kind of my last chance. It was kind of an all-or-nothing move. If I could go to Columbia and I failed, I’d be OK with that. I couldn’t take not trying.”
He made the most of his adventure at the New York City school, finishing in the top 10 percent of his class. The native of a small coal mining town, Moyer had a newfound love of the city because he always had something to do. He was one of the only ones in his graduating class from a small town.
“We literally had a princess, a literal princess, in my graduating class, and I’m the son of a scrapyard worker from a small town no one has heard of in Pennsylvania,” said Moyer. “I thought the dynamic was pretty interesting there.”
Moyer graduated from Columbia with a reassurance that he had chosen the right career path and a rejuvenated confidence in his writing abilities.
Following Columbia, he spent five months with The Citizen’s Voice in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Then, his Penn State connections came through and all of his hard work finally landed him his dream job.
ESPN already had two college football writers, Jared Shanker and Matt Fortuna, who were 2011 Penn State graduates. When ESPN decided to start the Penn State site, it asked Shanker and Fortuna who might be good for the job. They both recommended Moyer. ESPN contacted him, he aced the interview, and the job was his.
“I’m definitely eternally grateful to (Jared and Matt),” said Moyer. “I think if you’re a sportswriter, I think if you’re in this industry, ESPN is a dream job for everyone. Where else can you get this kind of exposure? If you write something good, it’s something that’s going to be well-read. That’s not something you have at a lot of publications. This is where I really wanted to work.”
While Moyer’s focus is on Penn State, he covers all of the Big Ten Conference. This past season, he also covered games at Syracuse, Florida State, Baylor, West Virginia, Ohio State and Navy because ESPN likes its writers to be knowledgeable across college football, not just a specific conference. Every day is different, and his schedule and what he writes depends on what is going on in the news.
He attends Penn State football practices and press conferences as often as he can, and TV, podcast and radio appearances are done on an as-needed basis. But the fact that no day is ever the same is the reason Moyer loves the gig.
“I’ve been on ‘Outside The Lines’ and everything,” said Moyer. “It’s not about being on TV, it’s about being on something where your work gets noticed, where you can talk about people or maybe it sounds silly, but at the heart of writing it’s about people.
“You can share people’s stories; you can put all of this work into it and then share it to a national audience. I think that’s special. That’s why I like working for ESPN. It’s not the prestige or the social honor. It’s the fact that you’re able to bring the story to so many people.”
A journalist from the beginning
Moyer was born and raised in Pottsville, with a family that included his father, mother and younger brother Kevin, who currently resides in North Carolina as a member of the Air Force.
Moyer’s mother remembers him writing stories from the time he was in elementary school, and he loved to draw by the age of 2. He also had a personality of his own.
“It’s hard to sum it up in words,” said Lisa. “He has a big heart, but you’d never know it. He’s very sarcastic. He’s comical. He will always have the last word. He’s like a chameleon; he changes his colors when he needs to."
He always had a passion for sports and found his way to ESPN more than a decade prior to actually working for it. When he was 15 years old, he appeared on ESPN because he had started a website about the Pottsville Maroons, a former NFL team in his hometown.
“I remember my one friend telling me, ‘You know you’ve already hit your high. You’re never going to have this again happen in your life,’” said Moyer. “I remember him telling me that 15 years ago because I was like, ‘No, this is going to be the first of many. I’m going to get back there.’”
On top of his early fame, he started working for the Pottsville Republican-Herald, a local paper, when he was 16 and continued writing for it through high school and even into college.
But, while journalism was always there, it wasn’t his first choice, according to Lisa. Originally, Moyer applied to Wheaton College in Illinois, a Christian liberal arts college, and was hoping to become a pastor. After being denied admittance, he met with his pastor.
Moyer spoke with him and came to the conclusion it would be beneficial to get his bachelor’s degree in journalism, and then get his master’s in theology after getting his four-year degree.
“That’s when he applied to Penn State,” said Lisa. “Even at that point, he was going into journalism with hopes of being a pastor. Once he got into Penn State, the whole pastor thing was over.”
Moyer visited a friend at Penn State prior to attending and picked up a copy of The Daily Collegian, finding it better than his local paper. That helped lead him to Penn State, where he believes he was the most prepared person to go to a Collegian interview, showing up with around 50 news articles he had printed out.
“I was pretty bent on making that newspaper,” said Moyer.
He ended up covering football as a junior and senior and became one of three sports editors on a sports staff of about 50 people. He was also Penn State’s first Murray Scholar in 2007, receiving a $5,000 scholarship in a national essay competition that included representatives from 29 universities.
“I worked for my local paper before that, but the Collegian is where I certainly cut my teeth,” said Moyer. “It’s where I learned most of the foundation that I took with me the rest of my life. I owe a lot to that network, and I certainly owe a lot to my time at the Collegian.”