Love at First Spike

{Prompt: What was your first impression of Dianne?}

Dianne and I have been married since 1991. Still, even now, from time to time, we will meet someone at a party (or a dinner party) who will ask, “So… how did you meet?”

Dianne will light up with excitement because the story of how we met is one of her favorites, and it involves her all-time favorite activity, volleyball. It even has a sort of tagline, which is the first line of the story — “It was Love at First Spike”.

Before I tell the story, let me tell you what is pretty self-evident when we’re both in the room. Simply this. There is a slight discrepancy between her height and mine. I am 6 feet tall, and Dianne is about 5 feet 4. I can almost touch the top of a volleyball net while standing flat footed, while she can barely reach the top of the net when jumping. (Sorry, but it’s true.)

After all, she’s a setter. Her job is to move laterally — scrambling all over the court to track down errant passes, and lob them up in a perfect arc (with zero spin) to the waiting hitters.

My job is to move vertically — jumping high above the net (I wish), and spiking the perfect set down into the other court—preferably leaving a dent in the parquet floor and blockers, weeping in anguish.

Now back to our story. It goes something like this, as Dianne tells it. (Once more. From the top.)

“So… how did you meet?”

“Well…” Dianne says, “…I know Steve has heard this a lot, but…” glancing at me, “…It was love at first spike!”

(Pause for effect, while laughing.)

“See, we were both at UNC…”

“UNC-Chapel Hill,” I clarify, helpfully. “At the School of Public Health…”

“We both went to a volleyball game at the gym…”

“A pick-up game. At Fetzer Gym. It’s the student gym on campus…” I interject.

“We had never seen each other before…”

“Well, that’s not completely true…” I feel that I really must object.

“Well, I had never seen him before.” Dianne says while giving me a cautionary look to hold my tongue. So I stop interrupting.

“So… anyway… we were playing volleyball. I’m on one side of the net, and Steve is on the other side. I hit the ball, and Steve tries to block it. It glances off of his fingers and goes out of bounds. Ha!”

“Next time, the ball came to him, and he tried to spike it on me. [Eye roll, meaning “Can you believe the nerve!”]

“Well, I jump up and put my hands up to block, even though my hands are barely over the net. And he hits the ball down — right into my hands! And the ball popped back over the net and landed at his feet. Aha!”

“Love at first spike.”

“We started going out, and we’ve been together ever since. Thirty-something years.”

This is where the story ends, and we start doing the math in our heads, trying to figure out how long we’ve been married.

Dianne and I with a Volleyball - circa 1989

It’s a pretty good “meet-cute” version of our introduction to one another, on and off the court. First as adversaries, and then as teammates. If a rom-com movie is ever made, please use it. And for the most part that’s what really happened, although, to be fair, we played for several hours and I had a few good plays of my own. Some of the retellings—of serves, spikes, digs, and dinks—had to be sacrificed for the sake of brevity and amusement.

In essence, although I played decently well in my own right — well enough to show promise — Dianne outwitted me and outplayed me at the net — not just once, but twice — and she did a little victory dance right in front of me each time, which kind of made me fall in love with her.

My First Impressions

But it wasn’t really the first time I had seen Dianne. I had noticed Dianne several times before, at the UNC School of Public Health, where her department (Biostatistics) and my department (Maternal & Child Health) shared space on the third floor of Rosenau Hall.

I noticed her because:

A) she was (and is) beautiful,

B) she was not from “round these-here parts”, and

C) she was a dynamic bundle of energy and activity.

Dianne Shihadi - circa 1990

I had even learned her name - “Dianne Shihadi” - from the posted page of class photos on the bulletin board for the department of Biostatistics. But I had never met her until we met on the court in that legendary game.

A mutual friend introduced us either before or after the game, and we got to know each other a bit for the very first time. Not much later, we went out to “pepper” the volleyball on a grassy field at West Point on the Eno, a park in Durham.

We hit it off and saw each other with our friends, or at “the Trailer” where Dianne was often working after classes. It wasn’t long before we had our first date at an Italian restaurant near the Weaver Street Market in downtown Carrboro. So we kept spending time together — playing volleyball at Fetzer Gym, or going out for dinner at Pepper’s Pizza, on Franklin Street, or meeting up at her apartment at Ramsgate, in Carrboro.

I already knew that Dianne was dynamic, athletic, and competitive. I came to find out that she was also outspoken, unfiltered, and honest. She left an impression on everyone she met, and it was usually a good impression. She was hard to forget. She always said what she meant, but said it in a spirit of good humor and goodwill. She just said things without thinking twice.

Over time, I also came to find that she was caring and loving. She cared about her friends at school; her family in Maryland (cousins and all); her roommate, Barbara; Barb’s dog, Otis; me and even my cat, Salinger (the little psycho).

Before you knew it, we were spending all of our time together, and I began to see how impetuous she could be. I half-jokingly asked if she had any interest in riding in a 150 mile charity bicycle ride in New Bern — the MS150 — and she agreed! That is another story, for another time.

Two impetuous cyclists— Dianne Shihadi & Steve Gallup

I once returned from a road trip to Miami (with my brother) to find her hair completely permed (nearly as tight as the Orphan Annie on Broadway). I barely got over the shock of her new perm before she gave me a long, dramatic hug, saying she was so happy to see me, and she was lucky to be alive. On her way to see her family, she had spun out on Interstate 95 in Richmond, passing out in the process, yet waking up unscathed. She had had a near-death experience. I didn’t know what to say. I was thinking, “What have you done to your hair?”

Barbara (Baldwin) and Dianne (Shihadi) - college roomies

She had another experience driving back to Chapel Hill, in her Acura Integra, along Highway 52 near Pilot Mountain (returning from a volleyball tournament). She was given a speeding ticket for driving more than 15 miles over the speed limit. (That Acura was a bit of a magnet for attention and trouble, with its race-car design and its spoiler.)

She was complaining to me about having to make an in-person appearance at the Surry County courthouse. Little bells went off in my head that this could be more serious than she imagined, so I offered to ride up to Surry County with her.

I’m not doing the story justice, but to make a long story short, at the courthouse she had come to an unwritten agreement with the prosecutor to plead “nolo contendere,” (and put off punitive action), but the court was so busy that some of the cases were sent to another courtroom with a different prosecutor. He refused to accept the plea, saying that 15 mph over was just “too fast… way too fast.” And consequently, they yanked her license… on the spot.

I think that’s the first time I saw a bit of the righteous anger, lurking beneath the surface of her gentle exterior. She went on a bit of a rant — at the injustice — outside the courtroom, but ultimately complied with the laws against reckless driving, and turned over her license… for the next 6 months! Fortunately, I was on hand to “save the day,” and give her a ride home (probably my first time driving her Integra) so it was a lucky day for me.

Getting Engaged

Within a few months, we were so close, and so in love, that I asked her to marry me. But she didn’t say yes right away. At least in this regard, she was not too impulsive. She waited a few weeks before she agreed to my proposal, and then, still, with some trepidation.

I didn’t know why she was so hesitant at first. But it became apparent after an ill-fated call with her father, when she tried to make plans to go back up to Maryland for a visit (a chance for me to ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and his blessing). Mr. Shihadi asked why she was coming home. And she equivocated. And then he insisted on a reason. It seemed that she had to admit that we were not only dating, but also talking about marriage. I would judge that the rest of the call went rather badly, as she recounted the altercation to me in tears. The problem, essentially, was that I was not Middle Eastern.

Of course, our marriage was eventually approved. Dianne says that he changed his tune a little when he found that I was going to be a doctor. I had always intended to ask Dianne’s father for her hand in marriage, as traditional and misogynistic as that might be, but I never really got the chance to do it properly. In fact, the whole process of our engagement was a bit of a mess.

One of our engagement photos

Aside from some family drama, our time in Chapel Hill (and Carrboro) was really magical. We were going to graduate school, which was admittedly hard, but we had so much fun at Dianne’s apartment in Ramsgate that the hard times were mostly forgotten.

We enjoyed Pepper’s Pizza and Ben & Jerry’s on Franklin Street. We walked around the UNC campus to places like the Pit and the Old Well. We went to a basketball game and a few concerts. (Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly were winning multiple women’s soccer championships, at the time, but I think we only ever saw one women’s soccer game.)

We went to the SPCA on North Columbia Street to look at puppies and came home with an adorable blonde Collie mix that Dianne named “Scooby”. Little Scooby and gigantic Otis (a Malamute mix) became close friends and playmates. And Scooby was such a good dog that she inspired us later to go out and get a purebred rough-haired Collie that we named “Maggie”.

Steve & Dianne with Scooby (and Dianne’s Integra)

From Romance to Reality

But all good things must come to an end, and before we were married (June 1991), I had to return to my life as a medical student and complete my medical degree at Duke University.

One night I didn’t come home, and Dianne couldn’t figure out where I was. She must have called and I explained that when I said that I was going to be “on call”, that meant that I would actually be spending the night in the on-call room in the hospital, praying for a little bit of sleep between high-pitched beeping from my pager. (I had to carry a pager on my belt for about the next 10 years — before the advent of cell phones.)

Another time, before we were married and while I was still at Duke, I returned to Ramsgate to find Dianne lying on her couch, in the living room barely able to sit up. She was weak and sick. I knew that she had been dealing with a GI illness, but then she told me that there had also been some GI bleeding. She was dehydrated and anemic.

She had been to the UNC student clinic several times, for the usual diagnostic tests for an acute condition, but that night we went over to the N.C. Memorial Hospital Emergency Department where more extensive testing gave us new insights. X-rays of the colon showed the quintessential “lead pipe” sign of ulcerative colitis (UC). I saw it myself.

Subsequent treatment for ulcerative colitis resulted in a remission. But that was just the beginning of our odyssey in living with inflammatory bowel disease. (Although a biopsy confirmed ulcerative colitis, we later came to learn that she had Crohn’s disease, or a hybrid of the Crohn’s and Colitis.)

The story of Dianne’s life with Crohn’s disease has the makings of an epic, and it’s too long and gruesome to tell over cocktails, so I don’t think it will ever make it into a Hollywood rom-com. The real story is how she has survived the ordeal, persevering to have a full career in clinical research, raise twin daughters who still join us for family meals, and go on globe-trotting adventures with me, even after I played so badly as a beach volleyball doubles partner so early in our marriage.

We went on to play many games of volleyball together. We were teammates, fighting for that elusive championship T-shirt, in the Sanford (or Cary) city league, and fighting over who should receive or pass the ball in pick-up sand volleyball games.

I love you Dianne, but that last ball was yours, not mine. :)

 A candid moment - circa 1990 (T.C. Pate’s house?).