“I could die.”
Demi Washington will never forget the cold jolt of fear she felt as a doctor explained what could happen if she kept playing college basketball with a heart damaged after a battle with Covid-19.
“This is bad,” she remembers telling herself. “This is really, really bad.”
It was in December, early in a four-month stretch that she now describes as a nightmare.
Washington, a 19-year-old sophomore guard on the Vanderbilt basketball team, listened in stunned silence as a doctor discussed the diagnosis. She had myocarditis: heart inflammation that can lead to cardiac failure and that doctors believe was connected to her contracting the coronavirus in November.