THESE TWINS FACE DOUBLE TROUBLE.

Byline: Tom Archdeacon Dayton Daily News 

With the Greenhorn girls, the tenacity always helped them outrun the trouble.

And that's how it was that day last May . . . until the two-mile run came down to the last few yards.

Heidi Greenhorn wasn't just leading the race in a high school track meet at Kentucky's Cumberland College, she was setting a meet record and running the best time of her life. With the finish line a football field away, she picked up the pace, determined to sprint to victory.

But in the cheering crowd, Mary Ann Greenhorn knew something wasn't right with her daughter. She saw it first in her tightened face, then her melting posture, finally, her rubbery stride.

Sheri, Heidi's twin who was running different events that day, saw it, too: ``At the end, I saw Heidi's eyes start to roll back in her head.''

Someone began yelling: ``Get the Bellbrook girl! Quick, someone get that girl!''

Race officials didn't move, and neither Mary Ann, nor her husband Dave, could find a way through the fence that flanked the finish area. Finally, Randy Hawkins, another Bellbrook parent who has a son on the team, found a passage and caught Heidi as she was about to drop across the finish line.

``When we got to her she was twitching from head to toe,'' Mary Ann said. ``She was real glassy-eyed. She didn't verbalize anything. She wasn't cognizant.''

``She just looked like a little rag doll,'' Dave said quietly.

As they put her in the ambulance, she fought wildly at the restraints. Her family was in tears, and 12-year-old brother Joshua, sobbing loudly, had to be lifted and taken away.

Iris Black, a veteran distance runner in Dayton and a Bellbrook assistant coach, remembered seeing Heidi and only being able to say ``Oh my God!'' She said she'd never seen a woman suffer like that after a race: ``I was very frightened. I knew this was trouble. . . . Real trouble.''

For the Greenhorn girls, it was double trouble. Almost deadly trouble.

It eventually would lead to the stunning end of the competitive careers of two of the best high school runners in the state. But as Bellbrook cross country coach Dale Walker puts it, ``It's just a miracle these girls are alive.''

The race that day tells you a lot about the Greenhorn girls. It shows the will and wonderment that made the 16-year-old juniors the best female distance runners Bellbrook High has ever had. Both were All-District selections last year. Sheri had qualified for the state meet the past two years in a row and in the first big meet this fall - the Dayton Christian Invitational - the sisters finished first and second in a field of 117 girls.

Colleges already were lining up with scholarship offers. ``By the time they were seniors, they could have written their ticket to almost any college in the nation,'' said Walker, once the University of Dayton cross country coach.

Yet, just as their running resumes had some rivals calling them ``The Awesome Twins,'' their doctors' charts, Mary Ann said, left them known as ``The Medical Mystery Girls.''

``They've been fighters since the day they were born,'' Mary Ann said a few nights ago during an emotional session around the kitchen table of their farm home between Bellbrook and Waynesville. ``They were born seven weeks premature and were so small and badly jaundiced, doctors didn't think they'd survive.''

The early birth left the girls lungs smaller than normal and in their early years they had lots of respiratory problems. By the time they reached seventh grade, both were diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that was severe enough in Heidi, that for a year, she wore a brace from her waist to her shoulders.

In eighth grade both girls tested positive for Cystic Fibrosis. Yet, after 11 months of DNA testing, it was determined they didn't carry the common CF gene. Then in the winter of their freshman year, both had bunion surgery and finally last season, as Sheri struggled with breathing problems in cool weather, Heidi endured a torn quadriceps muscle.

Yet, all this was but minor prelude to the problem that now confronts them. After the Kentucky collapse last May, Heidi fainted twice during a late August cross country workout. Then in the Dayton Christian meet, Sheri - who finished a half-stride behind Heidi - had breathing problems.

That's when Mary Ann, a Greene county social worker, and Dave, a cattle consultant who works with Erv Nutter, called the Kentucky hospital where Heidi had been admitted and asked that her electrocardiogram results be sent to them. That's when they discovered it had been stamped ``Abnormal.''

A local doctor looked at it and said it was fine, but Mary Ann persisted and sent the paperwork to Childrens' Medical Center in Cincinnati where cardiologists and pulmonary specialists poured over it and then called Mary Ann saying, ``How soon can you get down here? It's urgent.''

They were told the twins - and 41-year-old Mary Ann - suffered from Long QT Syndrome (LQTS), a rare abnormality of the heart's electrical system which brings on rapid, chaotic heart rhythms (arrhythmia) and can lead to sudden loss of consciousness and, sometimes, may cause sudden cardiac death.

``When I heard `Sudden Death Syndrome' and then heard that all strenuous physical activity - including the girls' running - had to stop immediately, it was like they just dropped a brick on me,'' Mary Ann said.

On the tearful drive back home, Sheri kept thinking, ``This isn't really happening. I'm just dreaming a terrible dream.'' Mary Ann was wondering how she was going to tell Dave - who in his own words was ``addicted'' to the girls' running and was at every meet with a stopwatch and chart - that the three women in his life all had LQTS.

``I was at my folks house when Heidi walked in crying,'' Dave said. ``She said mom wanted to see me in the car. In an instant our lives were turned inside out.''

Current studies say LQTS may occur in 1 of every 10,000 to 15,000 births. Triggered by physical exertion or emotional upset - anything that increases adrenaline levels - it may cause 3,000 to 4,000 sudden deaths in children and young adults every year. The most publicized cases always seem to be in otherwise healthy, thriving athletes, such as Chris Daniels, the University of Dayton basketball star, who died so suddenly last February.

While the Greenhorns got second, third and fourth opinions - from specialists in Cleveland, New York and Oklahoma - the diagnosis was the same. The girls and Mary Ann - who has had the disorder since birth and had fainting spells when she was younger - now take beta blockers, the mainstay therapy that is effective in about 90 percent of LQTS subjects.

Patients that don't respond to such treatment can have everything from the insertion of a pacemaker or automatic defibrillator to the surgical cutting of certain nerves in the neck so the sympathetic impulse doesn't reach the heart.

Yet while the beta blockers can stabilize an irregular heart beat, they do nothing to mend broken hearts. ``Right now, we feel pretty lost,'' Sheri admitted. ``We've been running our whole lives.''

Donnie Moore, the star of the Bellbrook boys team, knows them well: ``They're just as sweet as can be, but when it comes to running, you don't find anybody - not a boy or girl - who is tougher physically and mentally. They push themselves harder than about any athlete I know.''

Over the summer they trained seven days a week, three times a day. They ran at least seven miles daily and bicycled three. They lifted weights, ran sprints and went to summer camps. Named the co-captains of the Bellbrook team, they had set their sights on college scholarships and berths on the U.S. Olympic team.

``Those were our dreams,'' Heidi said quietly. ``Now, what do we put in their place?''

The girls - who call themselves each others ``best friend'' and are identical except for the lone freckle on Sheri's nose - are top students, both with grade point averages over 3.5. They raise steers and show them at the county fair and area livestock shows. And they still are coming to Bellbrook meets to cheer on their teammates.

Yet, the longer you watched the twins at a meet in Brookville last week - and saw the pained silences and the way they sometimes stood off by themselves, top competitors lost on the sidelines - you knew their smiles masked their real moods.

``They've cried themselves to sleep quite a few nights here lately,'' Dave admitted.

Mary Ann tried to go to two meets since the girls quit running, but got so depressed she left in tears, came home and went to bed: ``It's like a grieving process for us. And for me, I feel like I'm reliving when they were babies.

``When we first brought them home, I'd always be getting up in the middle of the night and checking to make sure they were breathing. I was so afraid of those sudden crib deaths. Now at night, I find myself getting up and going in and checking them again. I just want to make sure we haven't lost them.''

Mary Ann told of checking with the local rescue unit to see how long it takes to get to the high school and making sure they had electric defibrillator paddles.

As she was talking, Dave's bottom lip quivered and soon the tears were spilling from his eyes onto his weathered cheeks. Sheri, her eyes glistening too, touched her dad's arm:

``We had all kinds of emotions. Frustration, anger . . . love, too. We realize the love between all of us.'' She expressed that in a moving, six-page letter she wrote to her parents last week. Heidi did the same in a poem entitled ``Can It Be True?''

As they talked about the uncertainties of the future, Joshua, unable to sleep, appeared in his pajamas carrying the past. He gently placed an arms-load of his sisters' trophies, plaques and ribbons on the kitchen table and went back for more.

Dave studied the table, then shook his head and asked him to stop. ``The best trophies are the girls themselves. Hearing their laughter and seeing their smile, that's the prize here. We could have lost that. And the thing that made them so special is still inside them. Now, we'll just wait until it takes us in some new direction.''

With the Greenhorn girls, it likely will.

The tenacity always has helped them outrun the trouble.