Written by Janet Orgain
The recent death of a Michigan teen athlete has stunned the usually rowdy March Madness mania throughout the U.S.
Wes Leonard, only 16 years old, collapsed after hitting the game winning shot for his Fennville High School basketball team on March 3, 2011. Leonard died from what was determined by a medical examiner to be an enlarged heart.
This tragedy resurfaced painful memories of my own. I also had a teammate who collapsed on the court during a high school basketball scrimmage. She was pronounced dead an hour later. The autopsies showed she died of a heart aneurism that had been present since birth.
When we recall teen athlete tragedies, we grapple with questions of how and why. What I want to know is, could these deaths have been prevented?
Are current athletic physical procedures sufficient enough to detect problems? From my experience, athletes usually spend about 30 seconds with a volunteer community physician to get the “OK to play” sign- off. The physician checks the athlete’s sitting heart rate and asks about past injuries.Neitherparty expects abnormalities from such a healthy, active teenager. My main objective always was to get in and out as fast as possible. I had more important things to do, like practice, right?
Wrong. Normally I breezed through questions like,”Have you ever had palpitations or felt faint while exercising? Have you ever passed out while exercising? Has anyone in your family died suddenly?” A positive response to any of these questions means a red flag for heart conditions. Yet I gave them very little thought and a quick “no” response. It was and is my responsibility as the athlete to be informed, candid and honest about past experiences.
But what if these three questions are not enough? What if warning signs are obvious, just not sought after? Perhaps the standard physical performance test should also include a stress test, an EKG and an ECHO screening. All three of these procedures test in detail how the heart functions and may bring out glaring or underlying heart conditions.
However, some critics might argue that it is not worth all the trouble. These procedures are by no means free and would cost collectively hundreds of dollars to perform on every athlete. Does responsibility belong to the school, or the personal insurance, or an athlete’s parents? Is it worth all the trouble? I think so.
The time has come to stop being shocked and start taking preventive action seriously.
