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4 Joanne Boyle: Hoop Dreams
- University of Hawai'i Press
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When life kicks you, let it kick you forward. —KAY YOW, Hall of Fame women’s basketball coach 4 JOANNE BOYLE: Hoop Dreams Spunky Joanne Boyle survived a life-threatening cerebral hemorrhage to lead the University of California’s women’s basketball team to national prominence.© u n i v e r s i t y o f c a l i f o r n i a , b e r k e l e y [34.231.109.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 17:00 GMT) 69 THE OCCASIONAL TREMORS remind Joanne Boyle that being a head coach isn’t so tough. The fourth-year honcho of the University of California ’s women’s basketball team is almost eight years removed from lifesaving brain surgery to correct an aneurysm. But tremors in her hand are a constant reminder that a game—or life—can turn in a second. November 28, 2001: That’s the day a near-death experience transformed an unassuming assistant coach at Duke to one of the nation’s rising stars in women’s basketball. Boyle, thirty-eight at the time, had finished her regular run on the Duke Golf Course. Perfectly fit and training for a marathon, she had just taken a shower in the locker room and was blow-drying her hair, when she felt a searing pain in the back of her skull. “It was like a knife going through my head,” she recalls. “I looked behind me to see if someone was stabbing me.” A strange sensation overcame her; her body tingled. “I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.” The sensation didn’t pass, and Boyle knew something was terribly wrong. She hoped that she would find help in the hallway on the way to the elevator, but there was no one. As she stumbled to the elevator, she thought she was going to pass out. “The elevator is usually never there,” she recalls. “It’s almost always a five- to seven-minute wait.” Not this time. When the elevator doors opened, she somehow made it to her fourth- floor office, where Gale Valley, another Duke assistant, immediately called for an ambulance. By this time, Boyle’s stroke-like symptoms— slurred speech, nausea, and an excruciating headache—were evident. Fortunately for Boyle, she was just a five-minute ambulance ride from the renowned Duke Medical Center. An initial angiogram was inconclusive, because so much blood had pooled in the back of her head. 70 bright triumphs Although doctors quickly stopped the bleeding, the medical staff was concerned about her survival. In the meantime, Boyle was incapacitated. “It was my left cerebellum and it affected my motor skills, speech and balance,” she says. Her first two days were spent in intensive care, where she wondered: “If I go to sleep, will I wake up? I didn’t know if I was going to make it, and there were people who thought that I’d be a vegetable if I did survive.” Boyle’s mother, Joan, remembers: “When we went into the hospital and saw she couldn’t move or talk, I thought it was over—that she would never be on the bench again.” In another twist of fate, Dr. Allan Friedman, a top-flight neurologist at Duke (who operated on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in 2008), and an avid basketball fan, would come to the rescue. He had been on his way to the Raleigh-Durham Airport when he was recalled to consult on the case. Dr. Friedman sensed that Boyle had a neurological arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a genetic defect of the circulatory system that affects about 300,000 Americans, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. In Boyle’s case, the AVM had produced an eruption of blood vessels, causing the stroke-like symptoms. After ten days in the hospital, she had made little progress. The vertigo and nausea continued, and she was sensitive to everything, especially light and noise. On December 8, however, a second angiogram con- firmed AVM. “Thank goodness, they found something,” Boyle exclaimed, hearing the news while awake during the procedure. Immediately surgery was scheduled, a delicate four- to six-hour operation in which doctors removed an abnormal cluster of blood vessels. The procedure eliminated any chance of another hemorrhage and jump-started her recovery. Forty-eight hours later, the strong-willed coach was making tremendous improvements. “After the operation, the doctors told us to go...