MAKING MEDICAL HISTORY
Nearly four decades after a stroke, sensation begins to return to hand
John Humphrey is making medical history with one hand.
He recently marked the 38th anniversary of the stroke that paralyzed his left side by discussing how he is — after almost four decades — now winning the use of his hand back. But don’t call it a miracle. “A miracle would have been if I woke up the day after and my hand was working,” said the 53-year-old Windsor freelance writer. “What I’m doing now, I’m working at.
“My brain is re-wiring itself. It can be done — but it’s not normally done 38 years after a stroke.”
Humphrey’s life changed around 5:30 p.m., Dec. 9, 1979, after the 15-year-old Grade 10 Riverside Secondary student returned to Windsor by train with his parents from Toronto where they visited a King Tut show.
“I walked from the train to the car and as soon as I got in the car I slumped over to my left side,” Humphrey recalled. “I woke up six, seven days later in the hospital in London.”
“They told me I had a stroke. What’s a 15-year-old kid know about a stroke?”
A rare extra rib pinched an artery in his arm, sending blood clots to his shoulder. Five blood clots collected in his brain. The right side of his brain swelled so much, it pushed the left side over a quarter inch, a potentially fatal condition. Doctors worried his left-side paralysis might be permanent, and that even his right side might end up failing.
Despite the grim prognosis, even in those dark days, when his left arm and leg lay still and he suffered vision loss — when his world might have seemed hopeless to some — he never lost hope.
“I knew from the very beginning that I was going to recover,” Humphrey said. “I was damned if I was going to let that kill me or keep me in a wheelchair.”
The vision returned in a few days, the left leg worked normally within a few months, and the right arm never deteriorated. But the left arm barely budged. And the left hand, not at all — for 23 years.
Then Humphrey started swimming and somehow, his left hand started tingling. Responding. So he worked at it even more with hours of physiotherapy.
“It was hard, but what’s the alternative, sit in a wheelchair?” he asked. “I’ve never had one day when I said, ‘Poor me.’ ”
So he kept up the physio. Then a year ago he added electrical-stimulation therapy to his routine, and his long-dormant left hand started coming around so much, he now hopes — believes, even — he will regain almost full use of his hand by the 40th anniversary of his stroke.
His against-the-odds success inspires others, too.
“My mom was my hero then and she still is,” he said about his lifelong champion, Louisa Humphrey. “She’s 86 now and she cries when she sees my left hand moving.”
Some medical experts are similarly encouraged, such as Dr. David Spence, the renowned stroke specialist Humphrey has seen since the day he landed in hospital.
“It’s very unusual,” said Spence, director of the Stroke Prevention and Atherosclerosis Research Centre at the Robarts Research Institute at Western University in London. “Most people think after six months or a year there’s not likely to be any recovery. So such a late recovery is very unusual.”
Spence considers the improvement a medical breakthrough and not only wonderful for Humphrey but for stroke survivors in general.
“His case tells us that we shouldn’t give up on recovery as quickly as we have been over the years,” said Spence.
Meanwhile, Humphrey plans to keep the inspiration going.
“Rocky Balboa shocked the world. I’m going to stun the medical world.”