Baseball player back on the field after a grueling illness

By Dave Girrard

Geoff Loomis will always remember the day he first met Nolan Soete.

Loomis had just started as head baseball coach when Soete ’06 dropped by his office in Olson Auditorium during the first day of classes in the fall of 2002. “I had heard there was an MVP-type hitter here,” said Loomis.

The next day Soete’s father pulled him out of class. “I had been feeling terrible for a while, but I just started getting real bad,” recalled Soete, who is from Port Orchard, Wash. “I would have to stop about every 10 feet on campus to catch my breath and my nose was bleeding a lot. I figured I’d better go to the doctor. “I was sitting in class the second day and they pulled me out and took me to the hospital because my blood levels were so low.”

After five days of testing, Soete was diagnosed with idiopathic aplastic anemia, a failure of the bone marrow to properly form all types of blood cells. There is no known cause for the illness. Symptoms include fatigue, weakness, an increased risk of infection and bleeding. The only cure for Soete was a bone marrow transplant.

Finding a match for the transplant was relatively easy. The donor was his sister, Jacinda, who is a student at Central Washington University. “My sister was an exact match, which was lucky because there’s only a 25 percent chance of that happening. But I really needed it fast, because I was getting blood transfusions every three days or so. My body wasn’t making any blood, my immune system was shot, so I needed the bone marrow transplant as fast as I could get it.”

He took a break from school, and in October 2002 moved to an apartment in Seattle next to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He started chemotherapy on Oct. 31, and the bone marrow transplant was done six days later. After the 10-hour procedure, the waiting game began. Soete recalled it took 17 days before he starting seeing positive signs and knew the transplant had worked. He was released from the hospital about a week later.

His goal from the moment he got sick was to return to PLU and again play baseball for the Lutes. In his first two seasons he had started every game except one and was one of the top hitters on the team, hitting .300 both seasons. He made it back to the diamond last fall.

“I had an idea by the end of the summer that he was going to come back out for baseball again,” said Loomis. “My biggest hope for him was that, one, he would get through it alive, and two, he would get back to doing some of the things that he was able to do prior to getting this disease.”
Soete, a physical education major who wants to teach and coach at the high school level and has a long-term goal of becoming a college baseball coach, returned to PLU and began taking classes again in September. In October, he joined the team when it began a month-long schedule of practices and intrasquad scrimmages.

“He had a great fall,” said Loomis. “He didn’t miss a step.”

Loomis said Soete’s return has been a huge boost for the baseball program. “Not because of what he’s gone through, but because Nolan’s a great teammate. He’s a great guy to have around, and the others on the team really respect Nolan.”

His immune system will take a few years to totally recover – Soete said he had to get all his childhood immunizations all over again and he has been fighting off “little colds” since the end of December. In the first part of the season he had played in half a dozen games and had yet to get a hit. Then he broke out with a grand slam April 17.

“This season’s been tough for me at the plate, but I’m not going to make any excuses. I just can’t wait to get better,” he said.

But Loomis says, “above all, whether he performs or not, I feel we’re blessed to have him back. It’s a huge motivator for me to see somebody go through that, and love the game so much that the first thing he thinks about is getting back involved with it.”

“I’m excited to be back in school and playing baseball especially,” Soete said.