BREWER, Maine — High school life is about accepting numerous challenges for the average teenager.
By all accounts, triplets Meg, Danny and Reed Davis of Dedham will graduate from Brewer High School this spring having thrived within that bustling environment.
All three 17-year-olds are high-honors students bound for college in the fall. All three are active in numerous extracurricular activities, including athletics, where Meg and Danny are three-sport standouts and Reed has competed in distance running and served as chair of the school’s Student Athletic Advisory Committee.
“They’re just top-notch people,” Brewer athletic administrator Dave Utterback said. “Those three kids are right at the forefront of the things we’re trying to do at Brewer High School. When there’s an initiative or task to be done, you’ll always see one or two or all three of them right in the middle of it.”
Perhaps most importantly, all three children of Burt and Jane Davis are able to live such active lives with smiles on their faces — an easy task on the surface but one surely well-earned by these triplets born within a span of two minutes, given several circumstances out of their control during the past three years.
First was a fire that ravaged their Chestnut Road home in May 2013, which required them to live at several locations during the next 2½ years.
Eighteen months later, Danny suffered a stroke and Meg incurred a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee within weeks of each other, medical episodes that short-circuited their athletic careers and lives for months.
But both returned to the competitive arena this year, with Danny earning all-conference honors in football and helping the basketball team to a tournament berth and Meg leading the Witches’ girls soccer and basketball teams.
Perseverance was found to a great degree within their unique bond as triplets.
“I think it’s just that we have a different relationship, just like I think we have a different relationship between us than we have with our older brother (Joe),” said Meg Davis, who recently received the Maine McDonald’s Spirit of the Game Award as a high school senior who embodies the spirit of basketball, exemplifies sportsmanship and supports and inspires her teammates and coaches.
“It’s like we’ve never done anything separately and not been together because we’re the same age and we’ve just always done the same things.”
Flames and relocation
The Davis triplets were within a few weeks of completing their first year of high school when fire broke out at the family’s home on a Friday afternoon in late May 2013.
The home was not destroyed, but it wasn’t in liveable condition.
“It was a lot of temporary for a while,” Reed Davis said.
The family was divided among several locations in the immediate aftermath of the blaze, then for the next two years lived in family owned camps on Lucerne Lake during the summers and in the triplets’ grandfather’s home in Brewer during the next two school years while he spent winters in Florida.
The Davis family finally moved back into their own renovated home this past winter.
“The hardest part was not being able to find stuff,” Meg said. “The people who own Lucerne Storage, we’ve known them for quite a while and they let us use one of their storage units, and we’d put our winter stuff there and then we’d put our summer stuff there because we just didn’t have room to have everything with us all the time.”
Illness and injury
Coming off his sophomore season of football at Brewer, then-15-year-old Danny Davis left school briefly one Monday afternoon to retrieve his basketball gear for the opening day of tryouts in late November 2014.
“I was feeling completely normal,” he recalled. “Then my leg started giving out on me — the whole left side of my body. I couldn’t walk. And my arm started to feel weird, and my mouth started to feel weird. And I started seeing double, and my whole body was aching.
“I had no idea what was going on, but the symptoms made sense when I found out it was a stroke.”
Davis was hospitalized for the next two days, eventually learning his stroke stemmed from a blood clot in his left cerebellum caused by a blood protein deficiency.
“It turns out it was genetic because we all got tested afterward to see if we all have the same deficiency,” Reed said. “I do. Joey and Meg don’t. But I just don’t have it as severe as Danny does so I’m not as much at risk.”
Danny was prescribed blood thinners for several months and missed the entire basketball season before returning to the school’s outdoor track team the following spring.
“I didn’t think I was going to be able to play football or basketball again,” he said. “My doctor didn’t think so, either, because she thought I would be on blood thinners for years — for quite a while. But we got the protein back in the healthy range, so now I just take a baby aspirin every morning.”
Danny was barely into his recovery phase that winter when Meg, his older sister by one minute, suffered her own significant setback during an early season basketball game in Skowhegan.
“We had thrown the ball away, and I was running next to the girl who had the ball. And she slowed down, and I stepped just right when I slowed down,” she said. “I really didn’t know what happened. I just fell because it hurt.”
Meg went home on crutches that night. By the end of the week, the pain hadn’t subsided so she saw an orthopaedist. A magnetic resonance imaging test conducted Christmas Eve revealed the ACL tear and surgery followed in January, leaving both basketball-playing Davis siblings to watch the rest of the season from their respective benches.
The medical concerns didn’t stop there. During the same time, older brother Joey — now a student at the University of Maine — suffered what Meg described as a “bad concussion” that left him at less than 100 percent.
“We began to joke that Reed was the only safe one left, so he better be careful with what he was doing,” Meg said.
Return to normalcy
The 2015-2016 school year has been injury-free and quite productive for the Davis triplets.
Meg received medical clearance for athletic competition last July and played a full soccer schedule for the Witches before captaining coach Chris Horr’s girls basketball team to a Class A North post-season berth.
“I was definitely excited,” Meg said of her return to basketball. “We went 1-17 last year. It was a tough season to have to sit and watch. This year we were much more successful. It was definitely an improvement and said we were going in the right direction. It was nice to be able to play.”
Danny Davis was one of the top defensive players in the Pine Tree Conference last fall and helped the Brewer football team reach the Class B North championship game. He then returned to basketball after a year off, coming off the bench to help the Witches finish 15-5 and advance to the regional semifinals.
“The little things really meant a lot more to me, for sure,” he said. “I didn’t play much my sophomore year, and then I didn’t play last year, so this year was really my only chance. My first varsity points came this year. I had eight points against Skowhegan and I never score, so to have eight points in a game was huge for me.”
Danny and Meg also helped coach the school’s unified basketball team from January to March. Unified basketball matches athletes with developmental disabilities with nonvarsity teammates.
“They’re kids you’d see in the hallway, but we didn’t really know them and they never had the chance to play before,” Meg, who began softball pitcher-and-catcher tryouts this week, said. “But they love to play, and now you see them in open gym playing with us when they can. I know with a couple of kids it was the first time they were able to be on a team, so it was a really great experience to be part of that.”
And Reed Davis, often the glue among the triplets as they coped with their individual adversities, ran his first sub-five-minute mile during indoor track season and is playing the lead role in the Brewer High School Drama and Brewer Youth Theatre production of “The Greek Mythology Olympiaganza.”
“It was definitely hard to get through all of it,” he said. “Nothing was constant in our life at that point, and being triplets we had been always going through the same things our whole lives. I don’t think any of us would have been able to get through it like we did if we didn’t have each other to lean on whenever things got hard — which they did a lot.
“But we had each other,” he continued. “I think it would have been different if we weren’t triplets but just siblings, because I do think we have a different connection.”
