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McDonald Back on Her Game
10/20/2006 12:00:00 AM | Women's Soccer
by Katherine Hande, Blue Devil Weekly
DURHAM, N.C. - It couldn't have been more fitting. A corner kick. A lithe, graceful body jumps up for the header, knocks the ball past the goalkeeper to notch the sixth goal of her career. The perfect way to make her statement: I'm back in the game.
Of all the possible moves she'd make this season, no one expected Duke soccer player Christie McDonald, just four months removed from brain surgery, to be heading goals. In fact, there were plenty of people who doubted whether she'd be able to play again at all.
McDonald enjoyed a stellar freshman season last fall. The Newnan, Ga., native played in every Duke contest, registering five goals and one assist, including two game-winning goals against UNC Greensboro and Maryland. She was named an All-ACC freshman selection for her shining performance.
The only dark spot was a pesky ? and uncontrollable ? twitching in her foot that kept popping up at inopportune moments. The situation only got darker when McDonald sought an explanation.
? ? ? ? ?
Flashback to April: McDonald goes to see the trainer, then a few of the Duke Sports Medicine physicians, none of whom can make a diagnosis about the twitch. Perplexed, team doctor Allison Toth recommends that she get an MRI to look for lesions on her brain. She assures an anxious McDonald that it's extremely unlikely, but they should check just to be sure.
Understandably, then, it comes as a bit of a shock when McDonald receives a phone call at 7:30 one morning saying she needs to come into the hospital. She calls her father, an internist at Newnan Hospital. “He said, ?No, no, it's normal,'” she remembers, “but I could tell he was worried. He told me to call him back right after the appointment.”
McDonald isn't about to wait for answers. In the car on the way to the hospital, she presses trainer Elizabeth Zanolli for more information. Why couldn't they give her the results over the phone? And then, the news.
It wasn't a lesion, Zanolli tells her. Instead, they'd found a tumor on her brain.
For McDonald, the words trigger painful memories. Years before, in fifth grade, a close friend and soccer teammate had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Like her own, her friend's tumor had not been cancerous. But while McDonald had gone on to become Georgia's 2005 Gatorade Player of the Year, her friend had died just two short years after the diagnosis.
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Less than a month after that day at Duke Hospital, McDonald and her parents, Andy and Lisa, were en route to Los Angeles, where a team of surgeons at the House Ear Institute were preparing to extract the benign mass.
McDonald had a decision to make.
The tumor was pressing against ? and possibly wrapped around ? her balance nerve. Either the surgeons could make the incision in such a way that McDonald was guaranteed to lose hearing in one ear, or they could try avoiding the auditory nerve, but risk damaging her facial nerve, leaving her paralyzed on one side of her face.
Dr. Derald Brackmann is one of the world's specialists in auditory brain surgery. Until the day before the surgery, McDonald assumed that he and his team would perform the riskier procedure. “Normally,” she says, “they try to save your hearing by going in through a different part, but they're blind on the facial nerve, so it's more dangerous.”
After careful review, however, Brackmann and his colleagues recommended that she take the more conservative route, even though it meant losing hearing in her left ear.
“They said that if I was their daughter, they would not want to do that surgery. Where my tumor was located ? and my tumor was a centimeter and a half ? even if it was three centimeters, with where it was located, there was hardly any chance they would be able to save it anyway.”
It wasn't clear then how the surgery might affect her performance on the field ? assuming, that is, a successful procedure and full recovery. Even if she returned to peak condition, McDonald might have lasting dizziness or trouble regulating her sensory perception.
The surgery was a success, although McDonald recalls the weeks following the operation as some of the worst of her life. She wasn't allowed “to do anything” for fear of spinal leakage, and the fatigue was overwhelming.
“I'd have good and bad days,” she says. “For a month after the surgery, every other day would be a good or bad day. And then the bad days got less and less. I just took it day by day. On a bad day, I get dizzier a lot easier, I have no energy whatsoever. Any physical activity would wear me out completely. I would do a simple task: When I was finally allowed to wash my hair again, I washed my hair, then took a nap for four hours.”
Throughout her recovery, McDonald never doubted that she would return to the soccer field. By the time two months had passed, she was already taking the first steps toward preparing for the fall season.
She returned to Duke in time for the second summer session, and spent hours on the field doing rehab with Zanolli, learning how to adapt to the lasting effects of the surgery. It took time, for example, to regain her agility, and then to practice touching and tracking a ball. Without hearing and a sense of balance in one ear, the other ear had to learn to compensate. Eventually, she was even allowed to head the ball again.
Along the way, McDonald was fortunate to have the support of two families: her own and her team. While she was still in the hospital, teammate Rachel-Rose Cohen, who lives in San Diego, made the two-hour drive to Los Angeles to deliver a book of notes from teammates wishing McDonald a quick recovery.
She says the experience has brought them all closer together. “They've supported me through everything, and when I have a little breakdown, they're there to pick me up. They've been absolutely wonderful.”
These days, you would have to look hard to know that anything is different. One of the fittest players on the field, McDonald is careful to watch for defenders approaching from behind, or to listen for her left back or goalkeeper calling to her. She knows that she has a few weaknesses: “If I don't know I'm about to get pushed, and someone pushes me, I still fall a little bit easier than the next person. And I get dizzy still sometimes, but it's not that bad.”
“It's been so exciting and inspirational for me to see what this young lady has done,” says her Duke coach, Robbie Church. “She started our first game at forward, then we changed her in the middle of the year to center back, a position she hasn't played in a few years, and she's playing 90 minutes a game back there. She has just been phenomenal on and off the field, an inspiration to me and our entire team.”
McDonald's teammates aren't the only ones glad to see her back on the field. Before the Virginia game on Sept. 24, McDonald received a special welcome from the opposing team. While “we were lined up and they were calling (the lineup),” she says, “all the Virginia players came over and shook my hand, and said ?Welcome back' before they played the national anthem.”
It was a touching tribute in a year of incredible odds. After all, McDonald never experienced the symptoms that should have tipped off doctors long before the MRI: hearing loss, ringing in the ears, possibly some dizziness. Without the twitching in her foot ? which, ironically, appeared to be unrelated to the tumor yet has not returned ? who knows how long it might have been before the tumor was noticed?
“I feel lucky that they caught it when they did,” she says. “It was already pressing against my brain. If they hadn't found it when they did, I don't know what the repercussions would have been.”
Does she ever wonder, “Why me?” Without hesitation, McDonald shakes her head. “I just feel so lucky that they caught it when they did that I almost can't ask that question. It could have been so much worse.”
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