Rachel Blount: Collapse, surgery lead to new outlook

The day after Matt Bowman nearly died, he watched a video of his collapse on Augsburg's soccer field, along with coach Greg Holker and the school's athletic trainers. He needed to see it only once. Bowman and Holker destroyed the footage, a symbolic way to erase one reminder of that sobering day. Neither of them wanted to ever look at it again, because both knew they would never forget what happened that August afternoon in 2008. Besides, looking back seemed so pointless when there were so many reasons to look ahead.

Bowman, a sophomore, rejoined Augsburg's soccer team this fall after surgery to repair the heart defect that nearly killed him. He is the second-leading scorer for a team that has been ranked as high as 14th in NCAA Division III this season. The Maple Grove native is also a rare young athlete who glimpsed his own mortality, allowing him to return to sports with a deeper understanding of fate and grace.

"At night, I get really scared sometimes, just thinking about everything," said Bowman, who has a goal and three assists for the 5-4-1 Auggies. "That feeling I had when I was on the field. The fact that it could have happened at any time, anywhere.

"I'd wake up in the night, and I had to get out of bed and calm myself down. You hear all the time that you can't take anything for granted. But it goes over your head until something like this happens."

Bowman came to Augsburg with a vision for the next four years of his life, as one of the players who would aid Holker in rehabilitating a program that had just ended a streak of 26 losing seasons. As a freshman, he started 14 games, and his superb fitness allowed him to play 80 to 85 minutes a game.

He occasionally wondered, though, about an odd episode during the summer before his senior year of high school. While Bowman was running, his legs suddenly felt heavy. He got dizzy. His chest tightened, he dropped to the ground, and his run ended with an ambulance ride to a hospital.

A series of tests didn't reveal a reason, and doctors assumed Bowman was felled by dehydration. "In the back of my head, though, I knew that wasn't good," he said. "It just wasn't right."

Suddenly, Bowman howled, then began kicking and thrashing. "All I remember is fighting for air," he recalled. "I felt OK, but I thought, 'They'd better figure this out.'"

A week later, a CT angiogram revealed that Bowman had an anomalous coronary artery -- that is, an artery connected in the wrong place. He learned that 80 percent of the people who have the condition never find out. It kills them first. But he also discovered that open-heart surgery can properly reconnect the artery, and a three-hour procedure on Sept. 12, 2008, corrected the defect.

Thanks to his athlete's fitness, Bowman was out of the hospital in four days. He returned to school in a week and was cleared to play in November, though he remained on the bench as the Auggies completed a 12-4-7 season and made the Sweet 16 in their first NCAA tournament appearance.

Bowman still is struggling to regain the level of conditioning that came so readily before his surgery. He tires after 40 to 50 minutes, and he hasn't been on the field as much as he and Holker would like as the Auggies have lost four one-goal decisions in a row.

But he did score the first goal of his college career against St. John's on Sept. 16, a little more than a year after his surgery. As soon as he made that 25-yard free kick, in a packed stadium, Bowman knew he wanted to do it again -- and felt grateful just to dream of the possibility.