BYU star safety beats rare disease

Steve Guiremand

Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000 | 10:25 a.m.

BYU head coach LaVell Edwards doesn't mince words when talking about Cougar safety Jared Lee.

"Jared is in a league of his own," Edwards said of the hard-hitting 6-0, 210-pound senior from Rexburg, Idaho. "He is an outstanding football player and should have been All-Conference last year -- there's no doubt. What else can you say about him?"

How about that it's a minor miracle that Lee is even alive, much less perhaps the premier safety in the Mountain West Conference.

That Lee even was able to star in high school football is a story in itself.

First, at the age of 11, he lost a large chunk of his left leg in an accident with a snow blower.

"It cut my calf really bad," Lee recalled. "I was out shoveling snow when my boot strings got caught in the snow blower. Luckily, it didn't cut through the bone, just the muscles. But it was a pretty nasty cut."

Pretty nasty? Try 40 staples to close the lengthy gash which had him hobbled for four months.

But that was just a warmup for the trauma that Lee would endure at the age of 14.

Lee contracted a disease called "Guillain-Barre Syndrome," an acute type of nerve inflammation that can cause paralysis and is life threatening. Only eight out of 100,000 people in the United States catch the disease, which most commonly strikes people between the ages of 30 and 50.

"It's kind of like your immune system attacks your muscles," Lee explained. "They don't know really what causes it. It's not genetic."

Lee said he first became aware that something was wrong when he woke up one morning and his calves felt really tight and he could barely walk.

He eventually was sent to Salt Lake City to see specialists who tried to figure out what was causing the problem, which would eventually take over his entire body.

"By then I couldn't even sit up in bed," Lee said. "After another two days, I was on a respirator. I was completely paralized. I couldn't move anything. The only part of my body I could move was my eyes when I blinked."

Lee laid in bed for eight days as doctors who pinpointed the disease tried to come up with the best cure for the ailment.

Enter Lee's older brother, Rob, a medical student at the time at Creighton University.

"He heard I had it," Jared said. "He started researching it and eventually came up with a treatment they used to fight it."

Lee would rebound from the illness to star in football, basketball and track in high school. After taking a two-year LDS Church Mission to Italy, he enrolled at Ricks College where he earned JC All-American honors as a cornerback in 1998.

Last year he moved into the BYU starting lineup and registered a team-leading 96 tackles, intercepted four passes and deflected eight more. He had 22 tackles in one game against Air Force.

"In one year Jared established himself as a tough, hard-nosed, smart leader in the secondary," Edwards said.

"If linebacker Rob Morris was the Freight Train, then safety Jared Lee is the Bullet Train," wrote Deseret News columnist Jeff Call.

Considering all that he's been through, Lee said he's just happy to be playing football, period.

"When I was laying in bed, all I wanted to do was to be able to walk, to run, to play a little basketball," he said. "When you've been through something like that, you learn to appreciate the little things."