Against the Odds

Kyle Pease laughs when he sees the picture of him and his older brother, Brent, at the 2011 Charles Harris Run for Leukemia. In the photo, Kyle, who has cerebral palsy, is wearing a golf club cover on his left hand, and there’s a blue bed pillow behind his head in what looks like a toddler’s jogging stroller. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Kyle says.

Michael Moore was the first person to save seventeen-year-old Scott Dolezal’s life last year. The Westminster Schools maintenance staffer just happened to come into work that Saturday, August 1. He just happened to drive his utility tractor the long way around campus to avoid disturbing parents who were watching preseason cross-country trials. And he just happened to glance back over his shoulder after he passed a runner along the wooded trail—at the very moment the runner toppled silently into a deep ravine, where he hung hidden and motionless, feet tangled in brush, suspended headfirst over a creek.

Jeremy had gone hunting, so two days after Christmas, Brandy Green rose late to make breakfast alone. She and Jeremy lived in a small, white-brick ranch house near Brandy’s parents in Ellijay. Together six years, married three, they were having trouble getting pregnant and Brandy had started fertility treatments. She thought about this as the coffee brewed.

I have always believed that I died when I was seven years old.

Riding my bike around our Sandy Springs neighborhood one May afternoon, I made a sharp right turn without looking and rode straight into the back of a parked pickup truck. At first, everyone thought I was fine, including a doctor who lived down the street.

Breast cancer was just Yolanda Mitchell’s first bad news. A decade ago at age thirty, the part-time model and boutique owner endured a mastectomy and monstrous doses of chemotherapy and radiation.“It’s been all downhill from there,” says the surprisingly cheerful Mitchell, as she ticks off a laundry list of the procedures and diagnoses she began to face.

Maybe James Kinsey swerved to avoid an animal. Maybe his cell phone rang. Maybe, as the investigating officer suspected, he dozed off at the wheel on Old Fountain Road, just a half mile from his home in Dacula, after a long night shift. Whatever the cause, his Chevy Aveo crossed into an oncoming lane and was struck by another car. Too tall for the Chevy’s tiny cabin, the six-foot-one Gulf War veteran smashed his head against the door frame. The seat belt saved his life.