CVU's Matt Bauer endures bad break after beating cancer

By John Fantino for the Burlington Free Press

Champlain Valley Union High School football player Matt Bauer has been sidelined for three weeks with a broken finger and is unsure whether he’ll be cleared to play again this season. For any other high school athlete, it would be considered a major setback. For any other senior, a major disappointment. For Bauer, it’s devastating. Especially when taking inventory of everything he went through to make it back to the football field.

Bauer, 18, is a cancer survivor, a student-athlete only two years removed from a grueling fight with myeloid leukemia while living in Florida. “When you’re 16, you’re worried about school, about females, about sports,” Bauer said. “Hearing the word ‘cancer’ in the same sentence as your name was a complete shocker.”

A receiver, a defensive back and kick returner, Bauer was shining in the sport he loves and contributing to CVU’s strong start to the season before falling out of the lineup with the injury. He fractured his middle finger while catching a ball in warmups before CVU’s victory over Essex, a freakish injury that required microscopic surgery and a long layoff from sports.

“We were asking a lot of him,” CVU coach Jim Provost said. “He was playing offense, playing defense, playing special teams. Then he gets injured. It hurts not having him in there, team-wise, but it breaks my heart when I think of what this kid went through to get to this point.”

Bauer recalls the ordeal in vivid detail. He has all the dates memorized. July 9, 2009: That’s when Bauer was diagnosed with myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

Bauer, born in Rutland, was living on Florida’s Gulf Coast at the time. A headache and swollen lymph nodes were the first signs, and then he blacked out for about 40 seconds while working part-time at a local bakery.

“My mom said ‘let’s go to the hospital,’” Bauer recalled. “I said, ‘it’s hot out, it’s Florida; I just need something to drink.’ A couple days later I completely blacked out at work again, fell over onto the table.” He was rushed to the hospital and quickly advised to go to St. Petersburg, about an hour away, for more blood work, bone-marrow testing and a spinal tap. “Within 10 minutes, they told me I had a form of cancer,” Bauer said. “The next day I started chemotherapy.”

Bauer went through five rounds of chemotherapy. He’d stay in St. Petersburg for 30 days while receiving treatments. Once his immune system returned, he was allowed to return home for a few days. Then it was back to St. Petersburg for more rounds of chemo.

His hair was gone. A strong athlete who played football, basketball and baseball, he lost 31 pounds, wilting to 129. And he was in dire need of a bone-marrow transplant.

Oct. 21, 2009: Bauer is approaching the two-year anniversary of the day his sister, Whitney, saved his life by donating her bone marrow. “I only have one full sister and they told me it’s a 20 percent chance she would be a match,” Bauer said. “She was a perfect match — 10-for-10. “If I wouldn’t have had a bone-marrow transplant I would have died.”

With the transplant a success and no ensuing infections, Bauer began the long road to recovery. He said his strength was so sapped that when he tried to play basketball, his 3-pointer attempts came up 5 feet short of the rim. “It took months to get my strength back,” he said.

Bauer moved back to Vermont last year and has returned to life as a teenager, which has involved lots of football. He hopes his hand heals quickly, allowing him to return to the Redhawks before the end of the season. “I really hope he can get back,” Provost said. “That kid deserves to play some more football.”