AUSTIN – Leaning back in his office chair, Steve Sarkisian taps on his chest.
His University of Texas T-shirt hides a seven-inch vertical scar stretching from the top of his rib cage to his stomach. Beneath it, his sternum is held together by wiring after doctors sawed through it three years ago. Beneath that, his beating heart pumps blood throughout his body with help from an implanted bioprosthetic valve from a farm animal.He means a pig valve, and for those who have undergone surgery to repair a congenital anomaly for a bicuspid valve, it’s quite common.
In July 2020, during an intensive physical exam that Alabama administers annually on its football staff, physicians learned of the heart issue and sent Sarkisian into emergency surgery, where doctors put him into deep hypothermic circulatory arrest. They slowed his heart to a crawl, dropped his body temperature and then cut him open.
In Year 3, Sarkisian has loaded up the Longhorns with talent and has a returning quarterback to boot. In Year 17, Saban is coming off consecutive seasons with at least two losses for the first time in a decade and has a quarterback situation that is, at best, an uncertainty.“He was a ticking time bomb,” Loreal said.
But the aortic valve is significant to a person’s blood flow. The valve, sitting between the heart’s two chambers, acts as a “doorway” for blood exiting the heart, says Matt Martinez, the director of Atlantic Health System Sports Cardiology at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey. Allen remembers receiving the first call from the doctor in Birmingham who’d administered the physical.“We’re a month away from the season!” Allen told him.
“They come out and say, ‘We have to let his body warm up. Like, come back to life,’” Loreal said. “That was scary. It’s like, ‘What if he doesn’t come back?’” Two weeks after surgery, he began Zooming in with coaches and players during NFL-like walkthrough practices that the NCAA approved during the pandemic.
He takes nothing for granted. On his expansive desk in the Texas football facility, he keeps a half-dozen motivational books, jots down inspirational quotes from them and has created what he calls a “Gratitude Tree.”
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