December 23, 2007

     She looks pale, ghost-white. Laura Menty's eroded and overtaxed lungs fail to deliver enough oxygen to her bloodstream, draining color from her skin, causing her fatigue and leaving her short of breath.
     In medical terms, she is suffering from esophageal motility disorder.
     In laymen's terms, she is suffocating.
     And her game begins in minutes.
     "How are you?" her coach asks.
     "OK," Menty says.
     Menty is always "OK" or "all right" or "hanging in there." But those close to her know what all that really means.
     This is OK: She wakes up every morning feeling like she has strep throat; she sleeps on an inclined bed to stop stomach acid from accumulating in her upper respiratory system (the acid burned four cavities into her teeth in the past six months); her back and chest ache; exercise gives her asthma-like attacks.
     This also is OK: Soon after this brief conversation with her coach, Menty played 31 minutes and led the Siena women's basketball team with 19 points against Iona. For the season, she leads the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference in scoring and leads her team in rebounding. She averages the third-most minutes on the team.
     Her health is far from OK.
     Her game is far better than OK.
     And how she reconciles the two, never allowing the former to affect the latter, makes her a remarkable example of playing and persevering through pain.
     ***
     Laura Menty arrives at Alumni Recreation Center. She looks fine and feels fine. Her breathing is normal, and the pain that racked her body has disappeared. She pulls on her uniform, heads to the bench and readies for tip-off.
     And then ... nothing.
     She sits on the bench.
     The minutes tick off the game clock. Players enter the game and leave the game. Menty remains in her seat, waiting for the coach to put her on the floor. It never happens. She can't play, she's told.
     Then she wakes up.
     It's all a dream.
     Menty endured nights of restless sleep -- broken up by this nightmare -- all summer long, while instead of preparing for her senior year of college and final season of college basketball she struggled with a much more grave concern: "What if I drop dead on the court?"
     Menty "was never sick a day in her life," her mother says. She fractured her hand once as a kid, broke her wrist in high school and turned an ankle at Siena. That was it.
     But toward the beginning of her junior season, she felt short of breath. Her throat always felt sore in the morning, and certain foods upset her stomach. She also developed an aching pressure in her back and chest.
     She skipped a practice in December to see a doctor. She arrived at the appointment in such bad shape that the doctor described her as in a state of respiratory distress. He sent her to the hospital.
     Still, Menty played on, missing only one game all season. She still finished third in the league in scoring, still made the All-MAAC First Team and still delivered six 20-point games.
     But something was wrong.
     Her breathing problems grew so serious that she began keeping an inhaler on the sideline, just in case of an attack. The pains in her throat, chest and back worsened. Harder still, doctors couldn't agree on a diagnosis, leaving Menty and her family uncertain about what was causing a well-conditioned Division I athlete to develop severe health problems.
     "Nobody but me and Laura knows how concerned we were at every single game," says her mother, Linda Menty.
     "She left everything on the court, and after the games she came back and collapsed onto her bed," says her roommate, guard Liga Alpe-Luka.
     After a double-overtime game last January against Iona, Menty left the court looking worse than ever to her mother, who found her outside the locker room, placed her hands on her daughter's face and said, "Laura, it's over. I can't do this anymore. I can't worry like this anymore. I can't even sleep."
     "Everything is fine, Mom," Menty told her.
     So Menty finished the season. A few months later, she wondered if she had played her last game.
     ***
     Menty maintains a self-deprecating sense of humor about her struggle. Of the ramp that she places under her bed, propping it into a slant that elevates her head, allowing her to sleep without too much acid settling in her throat, she jokes, "It looks like a skateboard ramp. Maybe when I'm done with it, I can go rollerblade off it or something."
     She talks about her health only when prompted. Aside from her roommates, her teammates know not much more than they see on the court. Coach Gina Castelli says, "Laura is so private about it, so low-key, that they don't even realize what she goes through."
     Her illness is an personal struggle.
     And it's not her only one.
     Menty also deals with a learning disability called dyslexia, which is characterized by difficulty with reading comprehension and spelling. She sometimes has difficulty reading words, and she sometimes sees words or letters backward.
     Dyslexia is not an intelligence deficiency, but it requires that Menty spend extra hours in study hall and that she take more time for exams. At the beginning of each semester, she seeks out tutors for classes she thinks will require extra attention.
     As with her health, Menty shrugs off questions about her need to devote more time than most students to schoolwork. She has been eligible to play every semester at Siena and is on schedule to graduate on time in May.
     "I think that it's just helped me with working harder at everything I do in life," Menty says. "People have their disadvantages. That's one of mine. But I've learned to cope with it and take the extra time I need."
     As a kid, Menty played for an AAU basketball team based in Connecticut, about 90 minutes from her home in Wilbraham, Mass. She traveled all those miles twice a week for practice and a few more times for games. She played basketball and soccer for Minnechaug Regional High, too.
     She juggled that with her classroom duties. After school, she participated in the Benchmark Reading Program, which taught her strategies for improving her reading skills. She did more reading-comprehension exercises than the rest of the students and did so without complaint, her mother says. She graduated with a grade-point average better than 3.0.
     Menty majors in marketing and management at Siena. She hopes to someday work in human-resources management or as an event planner. This past summer, she took an internship with a local wedding planner.
     But by summer's end, she wondered what the future held. She worried she might miss the basketball season, maybe even the entire year at school.
     And so began the nightmares.
     ***
     The doctors ran so many tests Menty hardly can recall them all. There were X-rays and MRIs and a two-hour stress test.
     They all found problems.
     Her disorder at first seems something like severe acid reflux. When the acid travels to parts of her body it shouldn't, it erodes tissue -- in her lungs, her esophagus, her throat and even her teeth. Her voice became raspy during the summer because of damage to her vocal cords.
     Beyond that, Menty has digestive problems: Her stomach digests food much more slowly than the average person's. Also, there are side effects from the handful of pills she takes each day; one causes sleeping problems, which further contributes to her fatigue.
     After one trip to the doctor, her mother, who has missed only one game of Menty's college basketball career, said to her husband, Ronald, "You're going to have to tell yourself she's probably never going to play again."
     As late as August, her return to school was in doubt. Castelli suggested even if Menty did return, she might be able to play in games but not practice. Menty refused any sort of special treatment.
     "It's my last year of playing," she kept telling doctors. "I don't want to let my team down."
     A team of doctors at Tufts University began piecing together the first complete diagnosis. They assessed the damages, weighed the risks, and on Sept. 6, about five weeks before the start of practice, they told Menty this: Go ahead and try to play, see if you can make it through the season.
     "I think she was confident to go back, knowing how well they took care of her," her mother says. "She needed to hear that she wasn't going to drop dead on the court."
     Proper medication now controls her condition. But some days remain difficult. And her future -- even for the latter part of the season -- is far from certain.
     But for now, she has emerged as a contender for the conference's player of the year award. Iona coach Tony Bozzella says of Menty, "I'm just so in awe in her being able to do what she's done. It shows her will to win, her desire to win. She has a tremendous heart."
     Every two weeks, Menty's mother drives to Siena to deliver her medications, which Menty keeps in a box about the size of shoe box. She totes the box on all of Siena's road trips.
     Doctors told Menty there is no known cause for her condition and no cure. She might have to cope with it for the rest of her life, though her symptoms might ease after her playing career because many of them are exercise-induced.
     But she's hardly worried about that now.
     "I'm just happy to be playing," she says, smiling a smile that suggests, for the moment, things really are OK.