Every Moment is a Gift

As Casey Bateman ’22 descended to the floor of the Coral Sea, he grew increasingly frightened by the pressure building in his head. He waited for the ear-popping sensation that would return him to equilibrium, but when release didn’t seem to be coming, he panicked. He was a few seconds away from requesting to return to the surface, but he paused and reminded himself of the rarity of his opportunity. He took slow, deep breaths from his oxygen tank. A kaleidoscope of coral and fish of all shapes, sizes, and colors came alive around him. A giant sea turtle glided by, close enough to touch. “It felt like a different universe,” he marvels now.

Scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef is just one of the incredible experiences Casey was able to cross off his bucket list during his gap year abroad—the trip of a lifetime that he wasn’t sure would be possible as he lay in his hospital bed in the ICU just months prior.

The spring before he was slated to start at Mount Saint Joseph as a freshman, Casey suffered a ruptured arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a tangle of veins in the brain that is present at birth but often goes undetected. Only an estimated 1 in 100,000 people have AVMs, and of those, fewer than 4% of AVMs burst.

On March 4, 2019, Casey was admitted to the hospital with an excruciating headache. The doctors were able to diagnose the AVM and schedule surgery to remove it, but the bleeding had affected Casey’s optic nerve, causing temporary blindness. There wasn’t much to do but wait in the pediatric ICU for his vision to return. He had surgery on April 18^th, and one week later he was cleared to go home and begin rehab. By the time he started at MSJ in the fall, he was fully recovered.

Four years at The Mount went by in a flash, and Casey looked to the future with uncertainty. Did he want to attend a big or small college? Stay close to home or venture out of state? What would he study? He’d heard of a gap year and thought it might be right for him. After some research, he came across a program called Education First (EF) Gap Year. The 23-week international program offers cultural immersion, language study, service-learning opportunities, and an internship experience.

“I had never traveled before, but I liked the idea of it, of trying something new, rather than going to college straight away when I didn’t feel ready for it just because that’s the norm,” Casey explains.

After a little convincing, Casey got his parents on board, but financing the program would prove to be another challenge. He searched for scholarships, reaching out the Flaherty Family Foundation, which had supported him as a student at The Mount, and scraped together his savings from his part-time job at Jennings Cafe. The restaurant also hosted a fundraiser night in his honor.

The day Casey finally made his last installment of tuition payments, he worked the breakfast shift at Jennings and went out to meet his family for lunch. While he was eating, another diner stopped by his table and asked how he was doing. “This happens to me a lot,” Casey explains. “There are plenty of people I don’t know who recognize me and know my story.” Casey shared with the man that he had just received the all-clear from his four-year follow-up angiogram. There was no evidence of regrowth.

As their meal continued, Casey started feeling sick. He excused himself from the table, and after some time, his family came to find him weak and disoriented. On the way to the hospital, Casey had a seizure in the car. “My mom said when that happened, a racecar driver took over her body. She was swerving in and out of traffic, and she was saying the Guardian Angel Prayer the whole time,” he says.

Casey had four seizures that day, one lasting nearly 45 minutes. Any seizure over five minutes has a high likelihood of causing permanent brain damage. However, when Casey’s doctors performed the scan, they were shocked to discover no evidence of injury. “I ended up getting out of the hospital in two days,” he says. “I’d been on life support, tube down my throat and everything.”

Casey was prescribed daily medication and an “emergency seizure spray” to always keep on hand. It was determined that the seizures were likely caused by scar tissue from his previous surgery. His prognosis was positive, but with his departure date less than a month away, the fate of his once-in-a-lifetime trip felt increasingly ill. “In my mind, that was more of a motivating factor to just push through and get better,” he says.

With enthusiastic support from his neurologist, medial team, family, and friends, Casey was cleared for the trip a couple weeks before orientation. “When it was time to go, I was super ready and excited. It was divine timing that it happened before I left and I had enough time to recover,” he says.

When Casey boarded his flight to Boston for orientation, it was his first-ever plane ride, which he would share as a surprising fun fact during the icebreaker activities. There were about 120 students in the program, and they came from all over the world. After a two-week European immersion tour through London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, the group split into three cohorts to begin their first six-week module. Casey stayed in Barcelona for his language study. He lived with a host family and attended Spanish classes five days a week.

Next, Casey traveled to Thailand for service learning. They spent the first two weeks building vegetable gardens for a school, working side by side with the young students who lived there. In Koh Lanta, Casey and his peers volunteered at an elephant sanctuary called Following Giants. They planted sugar cane trees for the elephants to eat and made medicine balls of fruits and herbs. Their final stop was an education center called NatureMind-ED, where they learned about sustainability and went snorkeling to detect and remove dead coral from the reefs using a color scale.

“The best part about Thailand, if not the nature, was the people,” Casey shares. “They’re super friendly and welcoming. They want to impart their culture onto you and teach you things.” He even tried a number of traditional Thai foods like fried scorpion, bamboo worms, and live mini prawns swimming in broth.

After winter break, the group set out for a three-week tour of Oceania. It was one adventure after another, from surfing on Australia’s famous Bondi Beach to skydiving in Sydney, with a slight hiccup involving a flooded airport, soaked luggage, and a delayed departure for New Zealand.

Casey’s third and final module of the program was his internship experience in Dublin, Ireland. He worked with Alternative Dublin, which hosts a wide variety of immersive events, creative experiences, and walking tours. Casey created posters and social media content and researched upcoming city happenings to include in weekly newsletters. The internship not only provided Casey with excellent experience for his resume but also an exciting and unique introduction to Ireland’s capital.

Casey returned home to Maryland with countless stories of adventures had and challenges conquered, with new friendships, and with a desire to continue to explore, learn, and grow in the space beyond his comfort zone. It is not lost on him how close he came to missing out on the experience of a lifetime.

“My journey has shown me that life is unpredictable, and every moment is a precious gift,” he says. “It’s made me more inclined to take opportunities when I have them. It’s given me more courage to branch out and try new things. I like doing things that scare me because I always think in the back of my mind, well, it can’t get any worse than what I already went through.”

Since his return, Casey has been skydiving six times and counting. He plans to move to Charleston, South Carolina, to begin college this spring, but he’s already dreaming about his next travel destination. Somehow, despite all he checked off last year, his bucket list just keeps getting longer.