Golfer Gary Woodland Overcame Brain Surgery and Returned to Playing the Sport

Gary Woodland had brain surgical treatment and was back to golfing simply 4 months later.

Apr. Eleven 2024, Updated 10:Forty four a.m. ET

Every primary golf match has various narrative threads operating through it, and each and every of those threads is value pulling on. One of probably the most fascinating coming into the 2024 Masters Tournament is the story of Gary Woodland, whose own health problems virtually stored him from competing in the tournament.

Gary, a one-time US Open champion, spent all the 12 months coping with some beautiful making an attempt health issues. Now, he's opening up about them, and about his final recovery.

What happened to Gary Woodland?

Gary spent much of the previous year dealing with panic attacks and seizures that have been led to through a lesion on his brain. Not best did the lesion motive bodily problems, it additionally led to adjustments in his persona that left him terrified.

“That used to be the person who scared me probably the most,” Gary defined previous this 12 months, consistent with the Associated Press. “I’m an excessively positive particular person. I believe excellent things will occur. I used to be very fear-driven every day, mostly around dying.”

Gary's struggles with the lesion began all the way through the 2023 PGA season, and he started having what he believed were critical panic attacks all through the 2023 Mexico Open.

"Saturday night before the last round, I had a nightmare," Gary explaind to ESPN. "[I] jumped up in the middle of the night out of bed — tough to go back to sleep — and I was almost fearful to go to the golf course."

Gary persisted to play, but his loved ones changed into increasingly curious about his overall health as he defined to them what he used to be experiencing.

"He calls me and he's like breathing heavily, and he's just like something is wrong," Gary's wife Gabby mentioned. "He's like, I'm tremoring I can't even pull back the putter you know, this is like career ruiner and he's just panicking. I'm like, what is going on?"

Gary had to have mind surgical operation to take away the lesion.

After multiple scans and exams, doctors were able to ascertain that Gary had a lesion on his mind that was once causing him to really feel extra frightened than standard.

"It was like somebody was coming into bed scaring me in dead sleep and I'd just jump out," he defined. "I have a fear of heights, and I literally jump out of bed at 2 a.m. and feel like I'm falling to my death to a point where I'm laying on the bed for an hour face-down grabbing the bed as hard as I can to tell myself I'm laying down."

Doctors in the long run drilled a "baseball-sized hole" to extract the lesion, and came upon after they went in there that it wasn't cancerous.

"They couldn’t get it all out from where it was located," Woodland said. "It was benign. If it was cancerous they would have removed it all. It’s up against my optic tract."

Gary were given at the trail to restoration shortly after surgery, and used to be able to return to golf after best 4 months away, which is a quite brief stint given how major his surgical procedure used to be. Now, he is as soon as again attempting to win all of it.

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