Anderson County football assistant Derek Shouse is back on the sideline two years after heart transplant
By John Herndon, 110forChrist.com
LAWRENCEBURG — Two words. Just 15 letters.
Two words that literally changed Derek Shouse’s life.
Heart transplant. They sound serious. THEY ARE SERIOUS.
Lying in a bed at Frankfort Regional Medical Center, Derek Shouse heard those words apply to him for the first time. “Dr. (Roy) Kiriakos came in,” Shouse remembers. “He said, ‘Have we ever talked to you about a heart transplant.'”
It was in the spring of 2024. Shouse had been recovering from an episode in November of 2023 when he collapsed while coaching the boys’ eighth-grade basketball team at Anderson County Middle School. He and his wife Suzannah had recently taken a vacation to Arizona, but Shouse says, “I felt like garbage.”
Never did they expect what they were to soon confront when they returned. “The next Sunday morning at church, I was due to provide the communion meditation,” Shouse said of his assignment at Anderson Christian Church, where he serves as an elder. ” I got through the first service, but in the second service, I got up and I knew something was wrong.
“I went home and laid down. But then my wife said ‘Let’s go to Richmond (where the Shouses’ son Grayson was attending Eastern Kentucky University). I stood up and I passed out like I had done at the basketball game.
“You know, God works in funny ways. My brother (Bryan) is a surgeon in Frankfort. That morning at church, he had asked to borrow my truck. He pulled up to my house to borrow my truck at the same time the ambulance was there to take me to Frankfort. So he took care of my wife and got her there. They ran some tests on me. That was the first time I have seen my brother look like ‘Oh my gosh! This is really not good here.'”
The doctors tried to shock Shouse’s heart back into rhythm and the next morning, an echocardiogram indicated that his heart was functioning at just 15 percent. Normal is considered to be about four times that amount.
That’s when Kiriakos mentioned those words that can be terrifying: heart transplant.
“Nobody said anything,” Shouse recalls. “That night, God and I had a long talk. It was really an unbelievable peace that came over me lying there.”
Shouse was transferred to Baptist Health in Lexington where the doctors contacted the Cleveland Clinic, a world-renowned cardiac hospital and a leader in heart transplantation. “On Friday, Cleveland called and said they had a bed for me. So Friday night at 9 o’clock, they loaded me into an ambulance and drove to Cleveland.”
The trip took five-an-a-half hours. Shouse’s wife joined him the next day. Immediately, a team of doctors began evaluating Shouse, who was 57 at the time.”They have to present you to a council to say, ‘This is a worthy applicant of a heart transplant,'” Shouse explained.
Shouse was put on a waiting list on May 23, 2024.
A week-and-a-half after Shouse arrived in Cleveland, his son graduated from EKU. Shouse’s only option was to watch online.
Suzannah Shouse had to return to Lawrenceburg to work, leaving her husband alone in Cleveland. However, so many friends tried to stay connected with cards that two walls in his room were covered.
“While I was there, I was getting frustrated,” Shouse admits, “but God’s timing is perfect.”
About two weeks after being put on the waiting list, a matching heart became available. “We got the call that we have a heart,” Shouse says. “I was in Cleveland by myself and was told, ‘You are going to get a heart transplant tonight.”
The two-week wait for a heart was an unusually quick turnaround. And Shouse says that during that time, he never worried that a suitable heart would not be found. “I just had peace about it,” he says.”While they were prepping me, I was praying for the doctors and for my family.”
It was the next step in a journey that had begun in 2018, about the same time Shouse retired from an administrative position after 29 years of service in Anderson County Schools. He’d dealt with bradycardia – a very low heart rate – and had a pacemaker that worked well for a couple of years but his condition was getting progressively worse.
He’d coached middle school football and basketball over the years and had returned to the basketball court in 2021. Two years later, the incident that started the wheels turning for the new heart started turning. “I just dropped,” Shouse recalls. “I just dropped. Fell to the floor. It was halftime and I was determined to walk out.”
Seventh-grade coach Rick Staley took over Shouse’s coaching duties that night. Over the next few months, doctors were monitoring his condition up until that fateful Sunday that saw Shouse collapse again.
During his wait at Cleveland, Shouse went from being the coach to the coached in dealing with the guilt that inevitably accompanies a heart transplant. After all, the donor gives his life for another person. “They have former transplant patients come to talk to you while you are in the process of waiting….They say for whatever reason, (the donor) was done with that heart and they want you to have that heart.”
Shouse has no doubt that God delivered him to accomplish his purpose in life. His spiritual foundation his deep and solid. His maternal grandfather was a preacher. His father, Bill Shouse and an uncle, Charles Shouse, served as elders at Anderson Christian Church for many years. Another uncle, Kenneth Shouse, served several churches in Kentucky and was the first minister of Shelby Christian Church in Shelbyville.
“My foundation has been there from the beginning,” Derek says. “There is a difference in being at church and being in church. My dad prioritized being in church.
“One of the best football games of my high school career, my senior year (at Anderson County High School), we beat Harrodsburg 6-0. I was at the game, but we had a revival at church and dad was there.”
During Shouse’s journey to a new heart, that foundation was evident. While in Cleveland and for several months at home before he was given clearance to go out, Shouse participated in his Sunday School class online. “They put me on a screen where I could participate,” he says.
“The year going into my major heart issues, the leadership team at church chooses a word to focus on that year. That year my word was ‘trust.’ I trusted God to provide. My next year, because I knew that God had blessed me so much, the word was ‘purpose.'”
And that has led Shouse to return to coaching, this time serving as Anderson County’s freshman football coach. He says he ran into Bearcat coach David Buchanan and shared that his word was ‘purpose.”
“Coach Buchanan said, ‘I think I am supposed to be asking you right now if your purpose is to get back into coaching.’ So we talked about coaching and I went home to pray about it.”
Before Anderson’s season-opening win over Washington County, Shouse could be seen encouraging the Bearcats. During the game he appeared to be analytical on the sidelines. He says his roles in the program are to be the freshman head coach and to do whatever Buchanan needs on Friday nights.
Most importantly, Shouse believes he’s been given another opportunity to be a mentor to young men. And that mentoring includes being a Christian witness. “You have to show you care about them,” he says. “You share that love of Christ with them. No matter how bad things get, you still share that you love them.
“I want to be a role model. I realize that I am a lot older than these kids, 45 years older. I want to have a relationship with them. I want them to understand that I can talk to them about the problem they are having.”
It’s about priorities. Shouse says. “We are going to teach skills. We are going to practice hard. We are going to try to learn the system the varsity is running. I hate losing. I hate it. But if we can learn from our mistakes that will help down the line.”
Today, Shouse is grateful. He carries several medications with him but he has relatively few restrictions. He lifts weights two days a week during the football season and may add a day in the offseason. He does a mixture of walking and jogging three days a week and only walks the other days. “I try to eat healthy but I don’t really have restrictions. Higher protein and limited sugar.”
And Shouse is widely cognizant of his purpose. It’s the word that drives him today.
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