Leah Casteel attributes the strength and determination she has learned in the last decade to a 2-week-old "heart baby."
She was a more naive and carefree 21-year-old when doctors first told Casteel her newborn daughter had serious heart problems.
Today, Casteel is a loan officer at Southern Bank. She has turned a skill at marketing into an ability to relate with each and every customer.
Casteel, 38, believes she is more at ease with who she is today.
"I really think what I am good at is just really talking to people, any kind of person," said Casteel, seated in her office at the bank's new headquarters, a blue-glass building on Oak Grove Road she believes is a testament to the kind of investment Southern Bank has made in Poplar Bluff. "It could be the CEO of a company or a 5-year-old that has millions of questions about everything."
Casteel believes her journey with Lexi, now 17, has defined who she is today.
"It would not be right for me to say I've gotten to where I am without seeing the strength she has, that sometimes as a teenager, she doesn't even realize she has," Casteel said, as a third heart valve replacement surgery for Lexi approaches in the fall.
Her daughter's heart was enlarged, had a large hole, narrow pulmonary arteries and a valve that was not functioning when she was born.
Lexi was just 2 months old when she had her first heart surgery. Doctors were trying to wait for the little girl to grow a little more before beginning a series of repairs to the hole in her heart. Lexi went into cardiac arrest in a doctor's office and had to be airlifted to a hospital hours away, while her mother followed by car.
"More than anything, it's taught me strength and determination and will power and just that I am capable," said Casteel, a Doniphan High School graduate. "The way I look at it ... if I have doubts about something, I think, if my daughter can go through what she's been through, I can do this.
"Whether it's work related or dealing with any kind of adversity."
A number of amazing doctors and a strong family support system helped Lexi and Casteel through four surgeries to repair the hole in her heart, two previous valve replacement surgeries, two pacemaker surgeries and other procedures.
Casteel says it has been important to find perspective.
"It could be so much worse," Casteel said. "We've been very blessed in that there are many other worse cases. She has had a complete repair, while many other children have to wait months and sometimes years for a new heart."
Lexi will be a senior next year at Doniphan High School, and wants to apply to Murray State University, the school her mother attended.
"She doesn't really know how amazing she is. She's starting to get an idea, and that makes me happy," said Casteel.
Banking was not the career Casteel saw for herself when she graduated with bachelor's degrees in public relations and political science.
Casteel was working in management and marketing for a Missouri-based car rental and sales company that she loved when her youngest daughter, Macy, was born in 2014. It was full of competitive, recent college graduates who were rewarded for their hard work and customer service.
She soon found she didn't want to go straight back to work. After discussing it with her husband, Mike, Casteel decided to stay home with her daughters for a while.
Shortly after Casteel made the decision in 2015 to return to work, she was hired fulltime by Southern Bank.
A former employee of Southern Bank had once told Casteel her skills in marketing at the car rental company would also make her a perfect loan officer.
"Now I understand where he was coming from, because you want to develop good relationships with your customers," Casteel said. "I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be. I love the bank that I work for. It was a perfect fit for me and I didn't even know it."
She tackles a variety of different types of lending, but enjoys mortgage lending the most.
"You're always helping someone, whether they're buying a house or they're consolidating their debt. I just like being able to help people in that sense," Casteel said. "You know your home is everything. It's not just the house itself, it's where your family comes together and where you spend a large part of your life."
She also finds construction lending rewarding, seeing a customer's dream turn into reality.
There are many amazing women at Southern Bank, Casteel added. Lenders could do nothing without loan coordinators and the vast amount of knowledge they have, she said.
"We have a very good team here," Casteel said.