It all started with a tingling sensation in his right foot.
Little did LSU senior Mark Bowtell know, but that tingle he felt at the start of the spring portion of the 2011-12 season was about to threaten his career in the sport he loves: tennis.
The sensation Bowtell felt turned out to be an autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barré, also known as Landry’s paralysis. Guillain-Barré occurs in one or two people per 100,000 people annually, but is most common between ages 30 and 50.
The syndrome attacks the myelin sheaths of the body’s nerves, a process known as demyelination. This leads to significant muscle weakness and loss of reflexes in the arms and legs.
While most cases see full recovery within the first month, worst-case patients can still experience muscular weakness after three years.
“It eventually got so bad that I wasn’t even able to hold a racket in my hand,” Bowtell said. “I would try to grip it and I just wasn’t able to.”
LSU coach Jeff Brown said it got to the point where Bowtell and the coaching staff didn’t know if he’d ever be able to play again.
The syndrome eventually brought Bowtell to Baton Rouge General, where he spent three days in the hospital receiving IVs designed to flush his system and start him on the road to recovery.
The treatment is known as plasmapheresis, which according to nationalmssociety.org, is a process involving three steps: withdrawing whole blood from the patient, removing the plasma from the blood and replacing it with fresh plasma and then transfusing the “new” blood back into the person.
Once out of the hospital, Bowtell experienced significant atrophy to the muscles on the right side of his body. It had deteriorated so badly that Bowtell developed a limp, as the muscles on the left side attempted to compensate for the body’s weakness.
“At first, there wasn’t even much they could do,” Bowtell said. “We were just trying to improve my balance so I could walk normally again.”
Bowtell worked with LSU men’s tennis trainer Paul Porter during his recovery. While the original mission was to return basic functionality to Bowtell’s muscles, the aim quickly shifted to get Botwell back out on the court once the training staff saw his competitive fire shine through during rehab.
“When I got him in August [2012], he had significant weakness in not only his ankle, but also his dorsal flection, his hip and his quads,” Porter said. “We basically had to start from scratch.”
After going through various off-court rehab drills, Bowtell was allowed to play in scrimmages against some of his teammates during practice.
“It was tough for him because he wanted to go from about 10 percent of what he was, all the way to winning the matches that he used to win again,” Brown said. “We had to try to hold him back a little so he wouldn’t injure himself.”
But in the fall portion of the 2011-12 season, Bowtell was allowed to return to competitive play and travel with the team.
Brown cited Bowtell’s return as something the team was able to rally around and said it gave everyone extra motivation after seeing what Bowtell had gone through.
“The guys are really happy to have him back in good spirits,” Brown said. “He’s a funny guy, so he can really lighten the mood with some of his outrageous Irish statements.”
All of the treatment, rehab and work culminated during Bowtell’s first competitive match back with the team.
Bowtell not only won in his first match back from Guillain-Barré, but took the No. 64 rated player in the nation — Alabama’s David Vieyra — to a third set tie-breaker, which tested every bit of Bowtell’s conditioning after his rehab.
“I was really proud of him and it was a great moment for [Bowtell],” Porter said. “Just being out there was a tremendous achievement in itself, but him winning was just the icing on top of the cake.”
“I was really proud of him and it was a great moment for him [Bowtell]. Just being out there was a tremendous achievement in itself, but him winning was just the icing on top of the cake.”
