This feature originally appeared in the 2024 Fall edition of the Cal Sports Quarterly. The Cal Athletics flagship magazine features long-form sports journalism at its finest and provides in-depth coverage of the scholar-athlete experience in Berkeley. Printed copies are mailed four times a year to Bear Backers who give annually at the Bear Club level (currently $600 or more). For more information on how you can receive a printed version of the Cal Sports Quarterly at home, send an email to CalAthleticsFund@berkeley.edu or call (510) 642-2427.
“You have a large mass in your upper left lung and your upper left lobe has collapsed.”
Those are the words that Coco Thistle of the California women’s soccer team heard over the phone from her latest physician as she was driving back up to Berkeley from her hometown of Encinitas last March. Her post-spring break commute was interrupted, not by her first doctor, or her second, but her sixth. While he was unlucky in having to deliver the results of the CT scan and Thistle unlucky to receive it, especially while motoring up I-5, the discovery ended a nearly four-year long mystery.
And that is exactly what he and his colleagues chalked it up to – bad luck.
“They don’t know the cause, they told me it was just bad luck,” Thistle said with a laugh. “So, I was just like, ‘um wow, okay for sure.’ My friend was in the car with me and we both just kind of looked at each other. I missed our exit.”
Thistle first noticed symptoms in late 2020, two years before beginning her collegiate career as a midfielder for the University of Colorado. It all began with chronic wheezing and coughing.
“The most popular diagnosis I got was allergies,” Thistle said. “I was prescribed allergy medication and three inhalers but they didn’t really help. It was on and off – it didn’t really feel like it affected my play.”
The symptoms took a turn for the worse in 2022 when Thistle arrived in Boulder for her freshman season with the Buffaloes. Not only did she make the jump from high school to Division I soccer, but also from an elevation of 82 feet to 5,430 feet. The wheezing, coughing, and discomfort sent her to the emergency room on multiple occasions after causing a bronchitis infection.
“We heard several diagnoses – allergies, a virus, an infection,” Thistle’s father, Bryan Thistle said. “Then she transferred to Cal and the symptoms continued. The barking cough, wheezing, she couldn’t lay on her…
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