Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Marz battles back onto the court at SJU after stroke
CHERRY HILL, N.J. » Avery Marz was doing what any newly minted college daughter would do ... arguing with mom on move-in day.
“My mom and I were kind of arguing about putting my clothes away,” Marz said Monday. “She said, ‘Hey, you can do this when I’m gone . ... Let’s move the fridge; let’s do other things that I have to be here for.’”
So Marz, a just-arrived, 17-year-old freshman at Saint Joseph’s University, went to move the micro-fridge in the dorm room.
“My knee gave out,” said the Division I scholarship athlete out of Wilson-West Lawn High. “I thought, ‘That’s weird.’ ... So I sat on the bed and lifted my feet up and within about five seconds from sitting down it was like a gust of wind came at me from the right side. I collapsed completely onto the floor. It was then that I realized my left leg was trapped under my other leg. I went to pull it out and I realized I couldn’t.
“I looked up and I said, ‘Mom, what’s going on?’ She said, ‘Avery, I think you’re having a stroke.’ At that point the whole left side of my face was collapsed, so that’s how she knew.”
That’s how one of the more heavily recruited freshmen on the Saint Joseph’s women’s basketball team on that late-summer day in 2014 almost had her highly anticipated collegiate career derailed before it began. It also would be a moment of awakening for the strong person of courage Avery Marz would prove to be.
Over the next three years, through countless days of physical therapy and the eventual strengthening of character that saw her not only be on track for graduating with her class in 2018, but also return to an important position with the Hawks’ women’s basketball team, Marz was presented with the Most Courageous Award at the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association’s 114th annual dinner Monday night at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.
“I honestly was lucky enough to not have that bumpy of a road until college, and then all of a sudden I had this huge thing that came into my life,” said Marz, who helped lead Wilson-West Lawn’s girls team to four consecutive District 3 Class 4A titles. “At that point, I think I had to be courageous. I had to find a way to find some type of strength in me, no matter what I had to do to get over it.
“All odds are against you, but to still be able to motivate yourself every day and work toward a goal that most people think you won’t be able to do, for me that’s being courageous.”
But Marz had to muster the courage it took to face up to a diagnosis that night, Aug. 23, 2014, which she spent at Lankenau Hospital. Her mother Mary Beth’s fast assessment had been correct. Avery said her naturally high Lipid A level combined with a prescription medication she was taking formed a blood clot in the right side of her brain.
While paramedics readied her for transport, and even after arriving at the hospital, paralysis would come and go. She thought it was a matter of time before it would simply go away. So naturally, she idled time away in the hospital on her phone.
“I had a group chat with my high school friends: ‘Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I just had a stroke,’ she recalled. “It sounds crazy now but at the time I didn’t know how big of a deal it was, and I just sent it out.”
The reaction was swift. One of her friends that was a nursing student at Pitt called immediately in full sobbing mode. Two others admitted to her much later that they were so upset by checking Google to see and read about strokes that they would have to see counselors to get through those first few days.
“I think it caught a lot of people off guard that were friends with me,” Marz said. “But my teammates, I think it put a lot of things in perspective for them. So it’s something good that came out of it, just in terms of enjoying life and knowing that anything can happen on any day.”
But that night would turn into a three-year grind. She underwent IV therapy to break up the clotted blood, choosing that method over surgery because “there was a 50 percent better chance of me fully recovering.” Her intent was to get back on the basketball court, of course; no matter that the therapy also brought with it a chance of turning the clot “into a bleeder.”
Having endured that safely, and after a stay at Children’s Hospital after the initial procedure, Marz undertook physical therapy that took up many of her waking hours at Wyomissing Health and Rehabiliation Center in Reading.
“Eight hours a day of PT,” she said. “(Eventually) I could speak completely fine, I could read, I could eat fine; those are things that they check.
“The first month ... touch exercises. I had all sensations; I could feel people touching me and I could feel hot and cold, but I couldn’t move anything.”
Finally movement began in her left leg. Eventually, her arm left began to give. She’d spend the first year of the rehab “just getting back to doing normal things, like walking and going to the bathroom on my own and just becoming a normal person where I could take care of myself,” Marz said. “After that year I fnally went back to school.”
She started with three classes, worked her way back into a full-time schedule, and somehow is on track to graduate this spring. She also took it slowly returning to her Hawks teammates. Just sitting in on practices and meetings at first, eventually working her way into a practice role last year. And this season, with junior eligibility, she’s a reserve and sometimes starter who has a lot more of a personal story than most people have in a liftime.
“It took a lot of patience; I can say there were a lot of days, too, where I gave up on certain things,” Marz said. “My parents and my physical therapists allowed that for me. They knew some days you weren’t going to do anything; I was going to get frustrated and upset. Them allowing me to do that actually gave me more motivation the next day.”
Marz recalled one of the first days that realization set in for her. Frustrated at the painful process of rehab ahead, she was watching ESPN showing a women’s game being played two weeks before the 2014-15 season was to start. Like Marz, Lauren Hill of Mt. St. Joseph’s was a college freshman. She was battling terminal cancer. The school received permission from the NCAA and opponent Hiram College to move the date of the game up and change its location.
Hill, who would pass away the following April, played in the game, an inspiration to any and everyone. She didn’t know what the game meant to Avery Marz.
“I remmeber watching it on ESPN and just sobbing, because I felt so selfish,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m so upset that this happened to me and yet Lauren Hill ... she knows she’s going to pass away; she knows this is her last game. I don’t know what my future holds.’
“That just kind of woke me up.”
More than three years later, Marz’s long delayed return to competitive action finally took place in November, in a game against Niagara. She missed her first two shots, both 3-point attempts. But then came a pass from freshman teammate Mary Sheehan, the All-Delco forward from Cardinal O’Hara.
“(Sheehan) just drove toward the basket and I kind of rose up and she just kicked it to me and I hit it for three,” Marz said. “I was nice because it wasn’t planned. It was just, whatever happens, happens. And if I didn’t score I didn’t score ... I ended up scoring in other games, too, ... but if it ended up that I never scored again, it wouldn’t matter that much to me.
“For me, it’s the fact that I’m out there. All that matters is I’m out there and it is a miracle that I’m out there every day.”
As if she needed a reminder, Marz, who had never been allowed by her mother to get a tattoo, had one drawn on her left arm and back. It’s a way of marking her miracle ... the tat reading “8-23-14,” the date of her stroke.
“It’s a permanent thing, it’s going to be there for life,” she said. “But with my stroke ... it just kind of puts it into perspective for me every day, when I see it in my mirror. On my left side, which is what was affected, and on my back, so that it’s a part of me and it always will be, but is something I want to put behind me.”