Immelman's family has healthy outlook
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Carminita Immelman had very strict travel restrictions for the men in her life.
"No medical institutions for the two of them," she said of her husband and 2-year-old son when they made their annual visit to South Africa in December. "I had my fair share of them the year before. If anyone's going to the doctor it's me, and that never happens."
The Immelmans endured more than their share of hospitals in 2007. Trevor Immelman had already survived a mysterious intestinal ailment that had him subsisting on toast during the Masters and cost him a month of competition and 25 pounds. But that was only a prelude to the trauma of the trip to Cape Town.
Jacob, not yet 18 months old, was sick and going in and out of the hospital having his lungs checked for a terrible reaction to allergies. Trevor, just a week removed from a satisfying victory in the Nedbank Challenge, was suddenly immobilized by searing pains that forced his brother and caddie, Mark, to pick his ball up on the third hole of the South African Open. Doubled over, Immelman didn't even put up the faintest fight.
"He just said 'I'm in pain,' and he walked off," said David Frost, who was playing with Immelman and Darren Clarke that day. "The next thing I heard he was in the hospital. We thought he had a pulled muscle, and we now know what the deal was."
The deal turned out to be a mass that doctors initially thought was attached to the 11th rib on Immelman's right side. They had no idea what it was and wouldn't until they cut a 7-inch gash across his back and went inside. But they suspected they would need to remove a portion of his rib.
Carminita, whose mother had recently died from cancer, refused to consider the worst.
"I was obviously very worried, because he's my best friend and everything, and I didn't want anything to happen to him," she said. "But I don't think thinking the worst is going to help anybody. Until I heard them use the word cancer, I wasn't even going to entertain the thought. I wasn't going to get ahead of myself. I kind of take it as it comes."
That has been the way Trevor and Carminita have operated since they started dating at Hottentots Holland High School in the Western Cape in South Africa. They were both 14, though Carminita was a year ahead of Trevor.
"It was a cradle-snatching scandal," Carminita quipped. "We shared classes and started writing notes, and here we are. He's my first boyfriend, and I'm his first girlfriend."
Immelman's wife understands what it took to get here. Like few others, she's been there from the beginning.
"This golf thing really stumped me," she admits of their early dating experience. "I didn't know what that was."
Having spent half their lives together, she's figured it all out along with Immelman. But the whole "in sickness and in health" vow has been a little too literal. Immelman's pro career started with a major health scare.
Immelman was only 19 and set to embark on his path through the pro ranks when he suffered an attack of viral meningitis. A brutal headache stopped him from driving to an exhibition tournament. His mother sent the doctor to their house, and Trevor couldn't lift his chin to his chest. Carminita rushed him to the hospital, and he was placed in intensive care to await brain surgery.
Tests eventually alleviated fears that he had burst a blood vessel in his brain, but he still spent weeks receiving IV treatments. Three months later, in his first Challenge Tour event, he beat Henrik Stenson by four shots in the Kenya Open to earn full-time status.
"It's so weird because he never gets sick, and the three times he gets sick it's really invasive stuff," Carminita said.
"People do not know what he's gone through to get where he is," said his father, Johan. "He's a tough young man."
That toughness was tested to the limit in 2007. A year after his breakout rookie season on the PGA Tour, Immelman struggled to get any traction starting the Tuesday before the Masters. Despite mapping out yardages to every course bathroom, Immelman somehow made the cut. But a week later he had to withdraw from the Heritage and sit out five weeks with an intestinal parasite that doctors never fully diagnosed.
"When I came back, my whole body was so different," Immelman said. "It took me three or four months to get back to normal. All in all, it was a fairly disappointing season. I went from finishing seventh on the money list to finishing 40th."
Things finally seemed to turn around in December.
"I got down to South Africa and started feeling myself again, and I won the Nedbank and things were perfect. I'm back," Immelman said. "The next week I started getting this pain in my ribs. I thought I must have overdone it in the gym and took a couple of Advil and nothing happened, and it just got worse and worse as the day went on. Next morning I woke up and really had a tough time breathing. The only relief was when I was hunched over into a ball."
CT scans revealed a mass that appeared to be on his rib. But when the surgeon opened him up, he couldn't find anything. So he cut deeper through the pleura lining his chest cavity, and a fibristic tumor attached to his diaphragm stood out like a golf ball on a tee.
"Even in surgery, you can't get away from the golf," Carminita said. "Even at a time like that, we have a golf ball teed up. It's not even funny."
The tumor was shaved off, and two agonizing days later the biopsy returned negative.
"Everybody has these stories," said his mother, June. "You just don't know about them."
Immelman's experience is well known because, less than four months later, he was beating the world's most famous golfer and slipping on a green jacket.
"You've got to look at the positives," Immelman said. "For me to go through that and for everything to be fine, at the end of the day winning golf tournaments and winning majors is like a weird dream, but life is far more important. I consider myself lucky."
Reach Scott Michaux at (706) 823-3219 or scott.michaux@augustachronicle.com.
