Mullen Undeterred By Medical Challenges

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — University of Virginia men’s lacrosse players know that if they have routine matters to discuss with athletic trainer Rebecca Vozzo, they should contact her before 9 p.m.

“For an emergency, you can call whenever,” Vozzo said.

And so when she saw an incoming call from goalie Matthew Nunes at 10:20 one night last fall, Vozzo braced herself. When she picked up, Nunes handed his phone to Tucker Mullen. Earlier that evening, Mullen had informed several of his teammates, including Nunes, that he’d been having chest pains for several days. They went online and plugged his symptoms into Doctor Google, a medical search engine. What they saw alarmed them.

“We were like, ‘Do we need to go to the hospital right now? Is Tucker gonna die right here?’ ” Nunes recalled. “After researching the Internet, we were like, ‘OK, this is something that could be bigger than just a little bruise on the chest.’ ”

Unsure how they should proceed, Nunes ignored Mullen’s objections and called Vozzo. “Tucker didn’t want me to know because he wanted to practice,” Vozzo said, “but by the next day he was in so much discomfort, he would not have been able to.”

Thus began a medical odyssey for Mullen that included open-heart surgery in late November 2023. The fourth-year attackman has had setbacks in his recovery, including three bouts with pericarditis—inflammation of the lining around the heart—but Mullen was able to participate in most of Virginia’s fall workouts and expects to play in the spring.

“It’s startling,” UVA head coach Lars Tiffany said of seeing Mullen back on the field. “When the diagnosis came down a year ago, playing again wasn’t really one of the first things we thought about. It was, Let’s just get this man healthy so he can stay alive. Honestly, when you hear ‘open-heart surgery,’ the assumption is he’s never playing again.”

When freshman Ryan Duenkel asked him this fall how it felt to be playing again, Mullen said, “I was like, ‘Dude, it was the most fun I’ve ever had playing the sport,’ because it’s been so long since I got to do it, and there was part of me that didn’t know if I was ever going be able to do it. That was definitely part of the equation. I never knew how I was going to respond to the surgery.”

Tiffany said: “We all create our own life experiences based on what we want, our motivation, and that man Tucker Mullen wants to play lacrosse. He loves this game, and he’s absolutely driven to be back on the field. So he’s doing everything he can, and he’s doing it well.

“Honestly, he can help us. Tucker Mullen is not just a nice story. He’s got fantastic hands and poise in the forest of 6-foot-6 trees, and he finishes better than anyone on our team in tight and in traffic. There is a role for Tucker Mullen on game day. So we’re really feeling blessed that his career is not over, and hopefully he can be on the field helping us score goals.”

Mullen grew up in Delray Beach, Fla., about 30 miles north of Fort Lauderdale. He graduated from The Taft School in Connecticut in the spring of 2021 and enrolled at UVA that summer. He went through fall ball with the team, and everything was “pretty smooth sailing until February [2022],” Mullen said.

After playing in two games that month—he scored his first goal as a Cavalier against Air Force—Mullen took a blow to the shoulder and tore his labrum. He didn’t play again that season and, after rehabbing didn’t ease his shoulder pain, underwent surgery that summer. Mullen missed fall practice in 2022 but was cleared to play in 2023.

He appeared in six games for the Wahoos that spring and scored one goal, and he entered his third year in high spirits. “Everything was good for about two months,” Mullen recalled. “I was healthy and made it into October, and then bang!”

During a practice last fall, Mullen noticed some pressure in his chest. “It wasn’t like a pain,” he said. “It was more kind of like a light hand pushing, and I didn’t think anything of it. I made it through like two days of practice, and then I was like, ‘OK, this feels a little wonky. Something’s not totally right.’ I was really reluctant to say anything, because I had typical athlete mindset of, ‘We’ll get through it.’ ”

Once he told his teammates, however, the Cavaliers’ medical staff got involved, and the search for the cause of Mullen’s problems began. It didn’t go well initially.

“There was about two months of just constant tests, blood tests,” Mullen said. “They probably did like 10 of those. EKGs over and over again, different kinds of screening. We did a lot of heart echos. And everyone was like, ‘We have no idea what’s wrong.’ They couldn’t figure out anything.”

Mullen’s sister, Taylor, who played for the UVA women’s lacrosse team as a graduate transfer in 2023, had interned for Dr. Charles Berul, a cardiologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. The siblings’ mother, Lisa Mullen, contacted Berul, “and he was like, ‘All right, bring him in, and let’s see what we can figure out,’ ” Tucker Mullen said.

There’s no history of heart disease in the family, Mullen said, and Berul found nothing out of the ordinary. Another doctor came to the same conclusion after examining Mullen. Finally, though, an MRI revealed that Mullen had anomalous origin of the right coronary artery, a rare birth defect that occurs when the right coronary artery doesn’t originate in the anatomically correct place.

“So I was getting like 30 percent blood flow out of one of my arteries,” said Mullen, whose cardiologist at UVA is Dr. Peter Dean.

The condition often isn’t discovered until an autopsy is conducted, “so thankfully that did not happen for him,” Vozzo said.

Mullen learned from his doctors that, if he didn’t have surgery, the defect might prove fatal, even if he gave up lacrosse.

“So it was kind of a no-brainer for me,” Mullen said. “Even if I’m not playing Division I lacrosse the rest of my life, l don’t have to be worried about playing tennis when I’m older or something like that, and this being a problem. So it was a pretty easy answer for me. It was like, ‘Let’s do this, let’s fix it. I want keep trying to play and see what I can do.’ ”

Dr. Yves d’Udekem, a cardiac surgeon, performed the surgery at Children’s National Hospital, and Mullen’s rehab began. He stayed in the hospital for four days. His next stop was his grandparents’ home in Chevy Chase, Md., where he continued recovering while finishing his classwork for the semester.

“All my teachers were awesome,” said Mullen, an American studies major who’s on track to graduate in May. “Most of them moved my exams to online, just so I could take them from wherever I was and I didn’t have to keep coming back and forth and traveling [Charlottesville]. But I finished the semester off, not as well as I wanted to, but strong enough with what was going on.”

With a sizable scar on his chest, Mullen slowly worked his way back into shape. He contracted pericarditis for the first time in February, “and I actually went to the hospital for it,” he said, “because I was freaking out. I woke up at like 2:30 in the morning with intense chest pain and was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m having a heart attack.’ I actually thought I was dying, and I went to the [emergency room]. They diagnosed me with pericarditis and put me on meds. Then I started doing my return to play again.”

Mullen, who didn’t play last season, had a second bout with pericarditis in May. By the start of fall practice, though, he was healthy, and he turned in a memorable performance in one of Virginia’s scrimmages, scoring several goals against Georgetown in North Bethesda, Md.

“There was a diving one that everyone was pretty pumped up about, because that was the first play I’ve made since [the surgery],” Mullen said. “Everyone was going crazy. It was cool.”

Mullen wasn’t “a starter that day,” Tiffany said, “but they were good goals. I left there going, ‘This guy could be in our man-up [unit].’ That would be fabulous, right?”

Nunes said Mullen is “one those guys you’d describe as slick. He’s just super talented.”

Just as impressive has been Mullen’s positive attitude throughout his ordeal.

“He’s always such a bright, bubbly kid,” Nunes said. “He’s like, ‘I’ve never been down,’ and he’s so free-flowing and loose in everything he does, and that’s something that hasn’t changed. He’s had so many moments where he could be down in the dumps, whether it’s the pericarditis coming back or having to go do heart surgery, but he took it on the chin and just kept moving and kept being so positive.”

Mullen, who’s been on medication since his first bout with pericarditis, has been down “a really tough road,” Vozzo said, “but he’s always just very happy, optimistic. Obviously, there have been down days through this, as anyone would have, but he’s happy that he’s trying to improve and getting better.”

His teammates and coaches have supported him throughout his recovery, said Mullen, who lives with defenseman George Fulton.

“People were there for me every step of the way, texting me, checking in with me, making sure I didn’t need anything,” Mullen said. “And then as it went on, obviously it sucked more and more, because I kept getting these setbacks, but the coaches would always meet with me and check in and just let me know their door was always open. Everyone was very supportive, and we have endless resources. I’m way more fortunate than probably most kids that have to go through this. I have my whole team, the whole athletic training staff. I have sports psychologists if I need to go see them, I have endless resources. So I can’t really complain.”

In October, Mullen and his family organized a Hoos For Hearts team to participate in the Race for Every Child in D.C. The 5k run/walk is a fundraiser that supports the Children’s National Hospital in its work with heart patients. About 20 of his teammates made the drive from Charlottesville to Washington to support Mullen.

“We raised a ton of money, which was awesome,” Mullen said, “because I just wanted to give back and do what I could, because [the hospital] took amazing care of me.”

He smiled. “Here I am. I’m still here.”

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