Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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Under the Dome Matt Hegarty Healing After Heart Surgery Irish sophomore Matt Hegarty was running through non-contact drills at Notre Dame's practice Nov. 8, the Thursday before a game at Boston College, when suddenly he couldn't speak. Coaches yelled for him to make his line calls. He tried to yell back and when his voice failed him a second time, he knew he had a problem. Blood was pumping through the 6-5, 296-pound reserve center's heart and smashing into a wall that should not have been there. Hegarty would later discover he was born with two small holes in heart that had left him deprived of oxygen for the first 20 years of his life. On Nov. 8, those holes started re-routing the blood in Hegarty's heart in the wrong direction, forcing a clot into his brain and causing a mini-stroke that left him speechless. "He was totally freaked out," said Bryan Hegarty, Matt's father. "He wasn't sure if he was going to ever be able to talk again." Trainers took Hegarty to a hospital in South Bend that afternoon where it took almost 24 hours to discover the holes in his heart that explain the mini-stroke. Hegarty had successful surgery Dec. 14 and is starting a slow rehabilitation process that he hopes will get him back on the field in time for Notre Dame's spring practice. Irish head coach Brian Kelly acknowledged that Hegarty had a medical procedure a week after the injury, but said at the time privacy After suffering a mini-stroke during practice Nov. 8, Hegarty discovered he was born with two small holes in his heart. photo by joe raymond laws prevented him from revealing any details. "I can't get into the specifics of it," Kelly said Nov. 15. "I don't want it to be a cloak and dagger situation. He's fine, but we have to shut