AVON LAKE — Avon Lake High School basketball player Maya Austerman has played basketball since she was little, but in 2019 while she was in middle school, she began to have breathing issues.
Early on in games, she’d suddenly get out of breath.
“I was thinking that this was happening to everyone this was a normal thing,” she said.
But the feeling persisted to the point where she knew it was more than just feeling winded.
“The second I would start doing any physical activity and the second I would run just for 5 seconds, it would just immediately hit me that I couldn’t breathe anymore,” she said.
“You could tell that she just wasn’t herself,” her father, Joe, said.
Her parents took her to the doctor, where she was diagnosed with asthma and given treatment, but the symptoms still showed up on the court.
“With her, it was immediate,” Joe said. “As soon as she started to get on the court and started to run, her face became beat red she couldn’t get air in.”
The next stop for her family was a specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Claudio Milstein did some tests and found she has something called exercised induced laryngeal obstruction, or EILO. It’s when the vocal cords close when someone’s breathing in, when they should be opening.
Milstein took part in a study of 112 patients with EILO. That study concluded that most of the patients in the study participated in sports.
“The vocal cords are working in reverse,” Milstein said. “They are coming together and leaving a very small space for breathing when the patient is breathing in.”
Milstein said EILO can often be misdiagnosed as asthma. One reason is due to the sound someone makes while breathing with symptoms.
“That sound is called strider,” Milstein said. “It’s a sound that comes from the vocal cords when they are breathing in. It’s often confused with wheezing.”
In Maya’s case, she went to therapy sessions with Milstein, where she learned breathing exercise, and she had to do them at home. She said she essentially had to learn a new way to breathe.
“It was really weird, doing this really helped me feel the kind of what supposed to be happening with my body,” Maya said.
But she really had to test herself when she did these while working out.
“Being so overwhelmed not being able to breathe, it was really hard to just retain myself and switch that thinking mentality of breathing how I used to breathe to breathing how I breathe now,” she said.
Even though Maya has to practice breathing properly before hitting the hardwood, it’s a worthy trade off. She can get her mind off her breathing and back on the game.
“Sometimes I even contemplated just quitting for my own mental health because it was so draining, just trying to breathe,” she said. “But I personally just love basketball so much and I would really do anything to keep playing it.”
Because of her strength and facing down her medical challenges, she received the 2023 Cleveland Clinic Courage in Sports Medicine Award. The award “is given to an athlete who displays courage beyond the boundaries of their playing field, in order to inspire those around them,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Maya is now a junior and is on the varsity team. According to the Cleveland Clinic, she hopes to pursue a degree in the medical field.
