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By Bill Koch
GoBEARCATS.com Columnist
For University of Cincinnati men's basketball coach Mick Cronin, the hardest part was not knowing.
After he decided to see a doctor because his persistent headaches would not go away following the Dec. 13 game at Nebraska, Cronin underwent a CAT scan. When he was not informed of the results right away, he knew something was seriously wrong. He just didn't know what it was.
He didn't sleep well that night as he prayed that what he had was not inoperable. He thought a lot about his 8-year-old daughter, Sammi. And he waited for the verdict.
"In the morning I called our trainer (Robb Williams)," Cronin said. "I had called him that night and he tried to distract me and I just let him. I knew the whole time he was talking that something was wrong. They were either trying to figure out how bad it was or they already knew and didn't want to tell me until the morning. Or maybe they were getting second opinions.
"When you get a CAT scan and you're the head coach at UC and they don't tell you it's clean, that's not good. So in the morning, I called them and I said, 'Look, I've got to know where we're going to meet. I'm on the way. I know something is wrong.' He said, 'We want to tell you in person.' I said, 'I know, where's the meeting'?"
The 43-year-old Cronin was diagnosed with an arterial dissection in his brain that will likely prevent him from coaching for the rest of the season, although Cronin still holds out hope that he might be able to return in time for the NCAA Tournament in March. The good news was that a Dec. 22 angiogram confirmed that he does not need surgery. The artery is expected to heal itself with medication and rest and Cronin is expected to return to coaching next season.
Cronin says he has followed doctors' orders to the letter. He does not travel with the team or attend home games. He doesn't conduct practices, but lately has been attending them, sitting on the side with his dad, Hep, and leaving the gym when he knows a drill is coming up that might get him upset if he sees a player not hustling.
He still goes to his office every day, but doesn't stay as long as he used to. He watches film. He makes recruiting calls. He provides input to associate head coach Larry Davis, who is coaching the team in his absence.
It's a severe departure from the way Cronin has always operated, but he does it willingly and tries to keep a positive attitude.
"Everything I do is to be conducive to my artery healing as quickly as possible," Cronin said, "so keeping a normal blood flow and staying relaxed and stress free, getting more rest than I would normally get. It's not getting upset as much (that would be a problem) but sudden spikes in your blood pressure. That would be non-conducive to my healing process, but it is also not good for anybody. But for somebody who is trying to let an artery heal that has blood flowing through it, the sudden change in blood pressure is what they wanted me to avoid.
"Some people live life clear-headed. Nothing bothers them. I know some people like that, so I'm just trying to be like them. Getting myself into that mode has taken time, but I've gotten there because I get it and it all makes sense to me. The more I rest the better I feel, but then the more I want to coach."
Cronin is still getting accustomed to watching the Bearcats play on television. He sends text messages to coaches before and after games. Cronin says they're mostly words of encouragement.
"It's gotten much easier," Cronin said of watching his team on television. "It was extremely weird. It's still extremely weird. For me, I look at it like my control is the preparation. Obviously it's hard, but what are you going to do? It's not something I want to get used to."
Another coach in Cronin's position might have decided to disappear for three months and let his staff figure things out, but Cronin didn't want to do that. More importantly, he didn't believe it was necessary. He told his doctors that he was both smart enough and disciplined enough to handle being involved with his program in a limited role without further risking his health.
So far, it has worked.
"The hardest part has been to get down to a state that I've never really lived my life in," Cronin said. "You live in our world of production or get fired. And you know it. It's real. You don't realize the effects it has on your body until you go through what I've gone through and now it's like, OK, I've got to let all that go. It's been five weeks now (since the diagnosis). It took me about four weeks to get there."
Cronin views this as a challenge, much the same way he viewed it as a challenge to spend 2 ½ hours in a metal tube when he had an MRI. He spent an hour and 45 minutes in the tube, was given a break to have some dye shot into him, and then was placed back inside for another 45 minutes. He did it because he knew he had to, which is the same approach he's taking to doing what he needs to do to get healthy.
"There's no doubt what I have and there's no doubt what is going to help me heal," Cronin said. "You start to realize the world goes on no matter whether you get upset or not or whether you get excited or not."
Cronin says he does not sit around and wonder why this happened to him. He has been assured by doctors that neither his lifestyle nor his coaching style had anything to do with it. More than anything, it was the luck of the draw - or more accurately the misfortune of the draw - that saddled him with this condition.
"When you make the money that I make the worst thing that people can do is to ever complain about anything," Cronin said. "People don't want to hear it because the guys that I grew up with are just trying to pay the bills and save enough money for their kids to go to a good school.
"I get it because I grew up in Groesbeck. I never had my own bedroom, so I stay away from that. Does that mean certain things are easy? No. It's not easy. But from a health standpoint, one out of every 50 people in their 40s deals with some kind of stroke-type thing. So basically there's a 2 percent chance that people in their 40s are going to deal with what I'm dealing with at some level. I caught a bad break there. But of the two percent, having an arterial dissection is a lot better than having an aneurysm or a stroke. I try to look at the positive side. That's all you can do."
Cronin says this experience has not given him a new outlook on life because he believes he already had a pretty good one. If anything, it has reinforced his belief that he's lucky to have the job he has.
"I just feel like I won the lottery," said Cronin, a UC graduate who grew up rooting for the Bearcats. "I got a great opportunity and I made the most of it. This is how I want to live is to coach at Cincinnati, living in Cincinnati around my friends and family and most importantly being able to raise my daughter."
There has been some good to come out of this. Since his condition has become public, Cronin has received at least 10 letters from people who have told him that their wife or husband or someone else close to them also suffered from headaches the way he did. They tried to persevere without visiting a doctor, but when they heard about what happened to him, they decided to see a doctor and discovered that they, too, had an arterial dissection.
There's no way to know if that saved them from ultimately having a stroke, but as Cronin said, "Any time you can get awareness and possibly help people and save them from possibly having a stroke, that would be the best thing to come from it. That's by far the best thing."
Bill Koch covered UC Athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBEARCATS.com in January, 2015 as featured columnist.
The Bearcats play host to UConn Thursday night at 8 p.m. The game is the team's annual White Out and will be broadcast on ESPN2. For tickets, call 877-CATS-TIX or visit BearcatsBasketball.com.