Jesse Fabricant: Relentless
I’d like you to do something. For a 
moment, close your eyes and think back to junior high and high school. Try to remember how exciting life was during that time. During those years it seems like each day brings us a new experience. From the pep rallies and prom dates, to the late nights with foggy details and questionable decision making, those years and those moments become etched in our minds, and we often cherish them as some of our fondest memories. It’s that cornucopia of experiences that become the bricks and mortar of our adult personalities, forming the foundation of who we’ll become.
Now, erase those memories and imagine that those years never happened. Imagine that instead of spending your time at those same pep rallies and prom dates that it was spent being constantly shuffled in-and-out of the hospital being endlessly poked and prodded, being subjected to a seemingly endless battery of tests, and in a deep depression – wondering whether life was even worth living. For NPC Men’s Physique Competitor Jesse Fabricant this wasn’t the plot of one of those terrible Lifetime movies, this was his reality.
At age twelve Jesse was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis (UC). UC is an inflammatory bowel disease that causes severe inflammation in the digestive tract. By his own account, Jesse was a normal kid right up until one fateful morning when his world was flipped upside down. On that morning when Jesse woke up, he knew something was wrong, but he had no idea what was about to occur.
“I went into the bathroom thinking everything was okay, but after I went, I saw that there was blood everywhere.” Jesse was immediately rushed to the hospital for what would be the start of a horrific series of events that would consume the next five years of his life.
After doctors diagnosed Jesse with UC, he was sent home and attempted to resume life as normal. For the next few years Jesse attempted to live life as normally as possible despite frequent flare-ups that would leave him hospitalized for days and sometimes weeks at a time.
Finally, just before his freshman year of high school, Jesse’s health was in such a state of decline that he was forced to withdraw and begin home schooling. When I asked Jesse about what it was like to be forced to leave his friends during a time when your social life is everything, he said, “It was devastating. I spent the next three years of my life feeling totally isolated. I couldn’t see anyone, I couldn’t talk to anyone, and I spent a lot of time wondering why this had to happen to me. I would ask myself, what did I ever do to deserve this?”
The combination of feeling socially isolated, being regularly hospitalized for long periods of time, and the unrelenting illness that seemed to be wreaking havoc on his life sent Jesse spiraling into a deep depression. However, despite all of the darkness that seemed to be clouding his life, Jesse did have one thing that he always looked to for salvation – the gym.
“I always admired
bodybuilders, and whenever I was healthy enough, I would do my best to train. I didn’t make any gains because I wasn’t able to eat any solid food, but training always made me feel better.”
At age seventeen, Jesse underwent surgery to have part of his colon removed, a procedure that would hospitalize him for over three weeks. Despite doctors’ promise of relief, following the surgery Jesse still suffered from his chronic debilitating illness. After weighing their options, Jesse and his family opted for him to undergo a second surgery that would remove the rest of his colon, along with the insertion of an artificial stomach 1/8th the size of a normal stomach. Then, once Jesse recovered from surgery, he felt something that he hadn’t felt in quite some time – relief. Finally, after five years of a soul-crushing battle against his own body, Jesse Fabricant was healthy again.
A few short weeks after his surgery, Jesse was finally able to return to school again and begin rebuilding his life, a process that included rebuilding a body that had been ravaged by sickness for the last half-decade.
As Jesse’s health improved, so too did his physique. Despite being able to eat an extremely limited amount of food due to his artificial stomach, Jesse was determined to follow his dream and set foot onstage, and he did just that at the NPC All South Championship where he took 3rd in his class in Men’s Physique. Then, just a few short weeks later, Jesse would go on to win the overall at the NPC Gainesville Classic, a contest that would qualify him for Nationals, a dream that seemed like a quantum leap from reality just a few years earlier. Now, with Nationals right around the corner, Jesse is preparing to take the next step to fulfilling what he believes to be his destiny, earning his IFBB Pro Card.
Walt Disney once said, “When you believe in a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.” I’ve found that more often than not, especially in cases like Jesse’s, the hardest thing to believe in is ourselves. Even the strongest among us, in our private moments, has a tendency to be agent provocateurs of self-doubt, planting negative thoughts in our heads that makes us believe our critics are right. But, for people like Jesse who stare into the eye of the storm chin up and chest out, daring it to give us its best shot, nothing is impossible.
Subscribe to RxMuscle on Youtube
