Brea Griffiths ’05 - An Incredible Story Of Survival

Photo by: Beverly Schaefer

Brea Griffiths ’05 - An Incredible Story Of Survival

August 17, 2020 | Women's Soccer

Brea Griffiths’ world these days seems to be divided into two categories – the things that make her cry (10 percent) and the things that make her laugh (the rest). There doesn’t really appear to be much in between.

And so it is that she says things like “it’s not fun” and then immediately laughs. Or “when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did” and then laughs again.

She even started the conversation this way, blurting out “I’m living in my mother’s basement,” and, as the words came out of her mouth, flashing a huge smile as she burst out laughing.

That she is 37 years old, with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a master’s degree from Yale, not to mention two sons and one daughter, and yet laughs as she says it says a lot about where she’s been. And hey, she’s lived in way worse places than her mother’s basement.

Still, there was something about the way she said “I’m living in my mother’s basement” that clicked. It wasn’t really clear at first what that was. It’s just that there was something more to that sentence, something much deeper.

For the rest of a nearly one-hour Zoom call, Brea tells all of the details of her incredible story, one that took her to points lower than most people would have been able to endure. And with each of those details, with every struggle that she went through, with every picture of her face distorted and puffed up and sad, that first part about her mother’s basement still resonated, with its hidden meaning still waiting to be solved.

Was it the laughing? That showed a great attitude, sort of a self-deprecating look back, an attitude of “sometimes all you can do is laugh.” Still, that wasn’t it.

It wasn’t until she was finished talking that it became clear. For everything she said – and she said a lot – she told her whole story in that first sentence, and she didn’t even need all six words to do so.

This is a woman who has been homeless. This is a woman who has been forced to leave her children. This is a woman who has seen her marriage end. This is a woman who literally had to live by herself in the deserts of five different states, sleeping outside, bundled up in whatever she could handle when it got too cold.

This is a woman about whom one her best friends said “I was waiting for the phone call that something really really bad had happened.” This is a woman about whom another of her best friends said “she felt so much physical and mental pain all the time.”

It wasn’t “I’m living in my mother’s basement” that screamed out. It was just the first two words.

“I’m living,” Brea Griffiths said.

Yes, she is.

* * *

Brea Griffiths was the last line of defense on one of the greatest teams from any sport that Princeton University has ever seen. In the 2004 season, her senior year, Princeton reached the NCAA women’s soccer Final Four, something no other Ivy League team has ever done in a 64-team draw. Along the way, the Tigers won four NCAA tournament games, this after rolling to a 7-0-0 Ivy League record.

Brea played defense. She started 71 of the 73 games Princeton played in her four years, helping the Tigers to three Ivy League championships and four NCAA tournament appearances. She was twice named All-Ivy League and twice selected as team captain.

She came to Princeton as part of an Ontario gold rush that included the Ariss twins, the Willis twins and Diana Matheson. Brea herself was a force of strength, her own Canadian border in front of the Princeton goal who contested every loose ball and who let almost nothing get past her. One of the iconic images of that run is a picture taken in the Raleigh-Durham airport of the team as it was about to get on the plane to come back after a 2-0 loss to UCLA in the national semifinals. There is Brea, the NCAA Final Four trophy in her hands, again, smiling.

She graduated in 2005 with a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology. Soon she was married. In 2007 she ran the Boston Marathon.

And then? It all came crashing down around her.

“I had some issues in college,” Griffiths says from her mother’s basement, outside of Toronto. “I’d had a lot of sinus infections. I had fatigue. I had digestive problems. Insomnia. But it was livable. I tried mind over matter. Athletes are like that. Whatever happens, just push through it.”

This was different, though. This time, after running the 26.2 miles of Boston in 3:35, she was unable to recover.

“It was like a month later and I couldn’t do anything,” she says. “I’d go to work, come home and go to bed. Then I decided to see if I could run. I went to a track and wanted to run one lap, and I couldn’t even do that. I just ran 26 miles, and now I couldn’t even run one lap. That’s the first time I thought there was something seriously wrong with me.”

She only started to feel better after she became pregnant with her first child, her son Braden, in 2008. Her health improved even more after that when they relocated to Venezuela, living on an organic sustainable farm.

“There was great air, great food, low stress,” she says. “Things were good for a bit.”

She had another son, Colton, two years later. By then she was back in the United States, working on her master’s degree in forestry and environmental science at Yale, which she finished in 2012. It was two years later when the wheels fell off.

She became pregnant for the third time, this time with her daughter Lynleigh. Unlike the first two times, it didn’t help her.

“In fact,” she says. “It had the exact opposite effect. I went into labor quite sick.”

It was two months later when there was significant water damage in her house. It was the beginning of what turned out to be the lowest point.

“I didn’t make the connection from the water damage and the mold,” she said. “I lost the hearing in my right ear. I was vomiting. I had all these things wrong with me. I couldn’t get out of bed, and I stayed in the house. The more I did, the worse I got.”

She tried every kind of doctor she could find.

“Nobody could help me,” she says. “The doctors tried. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on every kind of treatment. I finally had to move out of my house in 2017.”

She had researched every possible disease to explain what was wrong with her. Addison’s Disease. Fibromyalgia. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

“I didn’t believe that’s what I had,” she says, “mostly because when I researched them, there was no hope. Doctors either throw everything at you but the kitchen sink, or they tell you they can’t help you and send you on your way.”

There weren’t many people out there who had similar symptoms. One of them, a classmate from Yale who did, actually passed away.

Eventually, it was thought she had Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The CDC website says of the disease: “Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a serious, long-term illness that affects many body systems.”

It’s a brutal disease.

“It’s like living with severe, severe flu 24/7,” she says. “You have vertigo, weakness, pain. You can’t eat. It’s like a five-alarm fire that’s going off in your body at all times. Then you push yourself because you want to do something, you want to live, and you pay the price. You crash. It’s debilitating. I got to points where I didn’t even have the strength to speak.”

The CDC website also says this: “There is no cure."

“It’s like living with severe, severe flu 24/7. You have vertigo, weakness, pain. You can’t eat. It’s like a five-alarm fire that’s going off in your body at all times. Then you push yourself because you want to do something, you want to live, and you pay the price. You crash. It’s debilitating. I got to points where I didn’t even have the strength to speak.”

Brea Griffiths

* * *

The first person to appear on a different Zoom call is a baby. She’s 10-month-old Elizabeth Byrd Jeydel. She is in Norfolk, the youngest of three children, with a six-year-old brother and a four-year-old brother.

Their mother is Catherine Jeydel, who was Catherine Byrd when she played soccer at Princeton with Brea. To anyone around the soccer program then, she was “Byrdie,” and that’s what little Elizabeth is sometimes called. Catherine Jeydel went from Princeton to law school at the University of Virginia.

About three minutes later, Sylvia Vitousek appears on the screen as well. She is on the other side of the country, in California. She was Sylvia Morelli when she, too, was part of the Princeton women’s soccer program.

In the picture where Brea is holding the NCAA Final Four trophy, Byrdie is next to her, holding the other half. Sylvia is standing next to her.

In the picture of the team’s seniors from that year, they stand together in the back row in the same order, Byrdie in between the other two. Their arms are around each other, and they are smiling.

Sylvia Morelli, Catherine Byrd, Brea Griffiths

Byrdie holds the baby, who squirms and strains to get away. Sylvia has a daughter of her own, and she is two months away from giving birth to her second child. She already knows it’s a boy.

Sylvia has a Ph.D. in psychology, and she now works for Instagram.

“What she’s been through has been crazy,” she says. “Crazy. Crazy. Throughout it all, at her lowest point, no matter what happened, she never gave up. That’s Brea. She’s always proactive. She was going to do whatever she could. It was like she was on the field. That’s how she played.”

And then she paused.

“I admire her strength.”

The two have stayed as close to Brea as is possible, considering that much of the last few years Brea has been off the grid. They have supported her. They have worried about her. They have helped her. Now they marvel at her.

“Not that she had a choice, but she was very, very committed to getting better,” Byrdie says. “She was going to cross every T and dot every I. The mentality you have to have, whether you’re training in the preseason or trying to retrain your body in the desert, is that you have to be committed. It’s hard. Every step along the way challenges you and gives you reasons to quit. Maybe it doesn’t seem worth it. You have to stay the course. I used to say ‘close your eyes and run’ during our fitness test. I would say that to Brea. When it gets hard, close your eyes and run and you’ll get there. Close your eyes and get out of your body’s way. Let your body take over.”

No matter what, they were determined to stay connected to her.

“We felt like it was important for her to know she had people in her corner,” Byrdie says. “She just felt abandoned. We wanted to help her so badly. We wanted to will her out of it.”

I used to say ‘close your eyes and run’ during our fitness test. I would say that to Brea. When it gets hard, close your eyes and run and you’ll get there. Close your eyes and get out of your body’s way. Let your body take over.

Catherine Byrd Jeydel

* * *

Brea Griffiths is trying her best to smile, but she can’t quite get there. It’s not easy. Her face is swollen. Her eyes are sad. Her skin has patches of red.

This was Brea in the desert. This is when it almost got to be too much.

She had tried everything she possibly could to turn it around. One point that seemed to at least be something of a common theme was that she needed to rid her body of the toxins that had invaded it.

“I had to do a mold sabbatical,” she says. “That meant extreme avoidance. The doctors told me that I had a gene that had been turned on, and once it had been turned on, it couldn’t be turned off. They said I couldn’t detox this class of biological toxins, that it’s really limiting. I didn’t want to start operating in that belief system.”

And so it was off to the desert. She made a few trips, actually, the longest lasting nearly half a year. That’s nearly six months of being on her own, homeless, unable to sleep in a tent because she couldn’t find one that wouldn’t make her sick.

When she went for supplies, she immediately needed to decontaminate herself, including washing her hair and changing her clothes, because she would have reactions to whatever she would get on herself.

“I was in five states,” she says. “I spent a lot of time in Death Valley in California. I was in New Mexico, Utah, Nevada and Arizona. It was pretty heinous. I couldn’t be in a campground, because I couldn’t be around people. I had no cell phone service because I was far away from any towers. I was stuck alone, living outside. The chemicals in a tent or a rental car were too much. I had to sleep outside on a cot under the stars in the middle of nowhere, through the winter. I froze my butt off. I had multiple sleeping bags and winter coats. If it rained or snowed, I had to find someplace else to go. I couldn’t tolerate anything by that point. I’m talking about having significant reactions. You start to feel like you’re being attacked from all sides. You’re in complete survival mode from moment to moment.”

There was only one goal.

“I was doing whatever I had to do to survive,” she says. “I’m not sure what the lowest point was, because there were so many of them. There were definitely moments in the desert where I thought about driving my car off a road and killing myself, but no, I wasn’t going to do that. I was mostly just chasing good air. I felt like a fugitive almost, on the run. I was constantly in reaction mode.

“I had no plan other than to stay alive.”

I had no plan other than to stay alive.

Brea Griffiths

Meanwhile, from thousands of miles away, she did her best to stay in touch with her children.

“It was hard to talk to my family,” she says, going into the 10 percent of the time when she teared up. “It was hard. They couldn’t understand. I had a phone, but I couldn’t tolerate being in cell range. It was really hard for me to see them, to watch them on FaceTime. It was reminding me how horrible my life was. I couldn’t handle it. Plus, they were young kids. They didn’t want to be on FaceTime.”

The turnaround began in her mind, and she attributes this to two things. First, there was the homeless man she met in the desert. He’d been homeless for five years, battling the same disease that she was. Brea had met someone along the way who referred her to him.

He ended up handing her a bible, and she began to read it. A self-described “blasphemous atheist” prior to this, she began to reevaluate the benefits of faith.

“I didn’t think I’d ever become a spiritual person,” she says. “I’m not even sure I am. I just have a strong faith in God that I never had before. That’s what first gave me the hope that I could actually heal. If I truly believed I could move my mountain, I could. A sea was growing between me and my children. I thought I was never going to be able to live near them again. I decided that nothing was going to stop me from being a mom again. That’s when hope started to be restored in me. I had an empowerment.”

Before she reached that state of empowerment, she had something else to draw from: her experience as a soccer player.

“There were moments where I said ‘this isn’t how it’s supposed to be,’” she says. “I kept telling myself that I was a Princeton soccer player. I’m resilient. I’m tough. I never wanted to believe I was a weak person who couldn’t make it. I had that identity, of being a Princeton athlete. I held onto that. The real me is strong and tenacious and powerful. And hard-working. I had to hold onto that. I had determination and motivation.”

She chronicled her time in the desert with a series of pictures. Clearly visible in them, on the middle finger of her right hand, is her 2004 NCAA Final Four ring.

There were moments where I said ‘this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.' I kept telling myself that I was a Princeton soccer player. I’m resilient. I’m tough. I never wanted to believe I was a weak person who couldn’t make it. I had that identity, of being a Princeton athlete. I held onto that. The real me is strong and tenacious and powerful. And hard-working. I had to hold onto that. I had determination and motivation.

Brea Griffiths

* * *

Little Byrdie is still cooing, though off camera now. Byrdie disappears for a second and comes back holding the baby.

Then she goes back to talking about her friend’s recovery.

“It just kept getting worse and worse until it was debilitating,” she says. “A huge part of the struggle was that it was unknown. She didn’t know how to fix it. When you have personalities like ours, we want to know what the answer is. There’s a problem? We want to try to fix it. She didn’t even know what the problem was. There was a time when she was in the desert when Sylvia and I wondered if she was going to come back. There were weeks and months where I wouldn’t have been surprised to get a phone call with some really bad news.”

Sylvia picks up on that immediately.

“There were times where she was in the desert when we couldn’t track her,” she says. “We spent a lot of time asking ‘is Brea okay?’”

As her health improved, doctors struggled to explain it. Sylvia looks at what happened to Brea as both a friend and a psychologist.

“To me, it’s been a combination of things,” she says. “She had a physical illness that she couldn’t resolve. She went to all the different doctors, from traditional Western doctors, to Eastern medicine, and to experimental treatments. That’s how desperate she was to get better. It worried me a lot. Throughout the process, she felt more and more alienated. There were doctors who were telling her it was all in her head. She had a ton of stress in her life, and on top of all that, she had an illness she couldn’t resolve. She had really serious physical issues that nobody could explain, and it weighed on her mentally. It was a vicious and brutal cycle of ever-worsening symptoms. More recently, she also went through what they call a brain retraining. It’s something that helps you process the trauma you’ve gone through and understand how it may have triggered a maladaptive stress response.”

There were weeks and months where I wouldn’t have been surprised to get a phone call with some really bad news.

Catherine Byrd Jeydel

* * *

Brea’s turnaround has been remarkable. She is healthy now, for the first time in forever. She runs six miles a day. She is symptom free. She is a mom to her kids again.

“I know I have been given a gift,” she says.

She freely admits that there is no definitive explanation for her startlingly good health. She has worked with the Dynamic Neural Retraining System – “it’s a self-directed neural plasticity, where you build a new brain structure to operate from. As you literally prune away old neurons and build new ones, you build a healthy brain and a healthy body.”

Beyond that, she is working with others who are going through what she has already gone through, even without the same illness she had. She’s looking to turn her coaching and mentoring into a career.

“Now that’s she's better, she has a strong need to connect with others,” Sylvia says. “That’s the teammate, the athlete-oriented thinking in her. She wants to give back to others who are going through what she went through. Now she has the energy to do so. And the time. It’s not something a lot of people would do. But that’s who she is. And of course, the coolest part for her is that is that she’s been able to reconnect. With us. And especially with her children.”

She is spending more and more time with her children. She’s even eaten pizza with them and taken them to amusement parks, things that she might never have dreamed would have been possible before.

To her, the future is as limitless as the past wasn’t.

Now that’s she's better, she has a strong need to connect with others. That’s the teammate, the athlete-oriented thinking in her. She wants to give back to others who are going through what she went through. Now she has the energy to do so. And the time. It’s not something a lot of people would do. But that’s who she is. And of course, the coolest part for her is that is that she’s been able to reconnect. With us. And especially with her children.

Sylvia Morelli Vitousek

“It’s almost like a rebirth, her transformation,” Byrdie says. “To say we’re happy for her trivializes the seriousness of all of this. It’s more relief. That was a close one.”

It was. And she’s determined never to go back there.

“This is behind me, 100 percent,” Brea says. “There’s no doubt in my mind, zero doubt in my mind. I am fully healthy. I will never have these problems again. Every day I catch myself. I rode my bike the other day with my daughter around the block and I thought to myself ‘how can I not be grateful for this?’ When you’ve lost everything, how can you not be grateful?”

Back when players would still mail videotapes of themselves to college coaches, a Canadian player named Krista Ariss sent one to Princeton’s women’s soccer staff. Ariss, and her twin sister Lynn, would both become part of the program before graduating in 2003. Their high school teammate, Brea Griffiths, could be seen on the same tape that Krista had sent in, and that was the start of her own recruitment.

Recently, the Ariss twins turned 40. Brea Griffiths was at their party. There’s a picture of the three of them, the twins in red and black checkerboard shirts with 40th birthday hats and glasses. In between them stands Brea, with a wide smile on a face that is no longer swollen and discolored.