Edmonton saxophone player learns to walk again, baffles experts
Quinn Wade lost the ability to move 25 years ago, but a bike changed that
He’s the saxophone player in the wheelchair. You’d recognize him if you saw him, busking on Jasper Avenue and at nearly every Edmonton festival.
Only this year, the wheelchair is missing.
“It’s funny. Sometimes people don’t recognize me,” said Quinn Wade, whose rapid recovery after 25 years in a wheelchair has left friends and strangers baffled.
He walks, bikes and even dances now — and gets stopped by strangers all the time downtown. “Weren’t you ...? Didn’t you used to be ...?” Wade just laughs and tells his story again.
“I don’t ever want to take my legs for granted,” he said, “ever.”
Wade’s medical story is still a bit unclear. Now 45, he came down with severe flu-like symptoms and stiffness when he was 20 and gradually lost the ability to move. Doctors diagnosed it as progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML, a brain virus, even though he didn’t have the usual immunosuppressive disorders than normally accompany that illness.
He was told he would die within months, then didn’t. It seemed the virus stopped. He recovered but scar tissue destroyed certain path- ways in his brain, including those that controlled his legs.
But friends helped him embrace life again, taking him lobster fishing and blueberry picking where he lived then, in Halifax.
In 2003, he moved to Edmonton and made his living playing soprano saxophone on the streets, dragging his chair behind him when he met a set of stairs and sometimes using crutches for short distances.
Then in 2014, he fell sick again, with a seizure on Whyte Avenue landing him in the hospital. A spinal tap confirmed the virus was back in high numbers but he didn’t stick around the hospital long enough to get a confirmed diagnosis. He thought he’d rather die at home.
That second illness was as bad as the first, with Wade even losing the ability to talk for about half a year. But again, he recovered. Now he believes that’s what shook things up again, enough for his brain to build new connections.
Last fall, on a trip to California, a friend noticed his legs jerking involuntarily as he climbed a rope ladder. When he came back to Edmonton, he started therapy at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital.
Things went really slowly, he said. It felt like those brain connections just kept shorting out. In January, he was still using his wheelchair full time. That’s when he got tickets to see Vicky Vox at Evolution Wonderlounge.
He won a dancing competition in his wheelchair and found a whole new motivation to get out of that chair. “I always loved dancing. I learned to dance in my chair and then when I won that contest, it become a motivator. It was something I wanted to do on feet.”
Lounge owner Murray Browatzke watched the transformation each weekend. “It was really quite dramatic how quickly things changed,” he said. “It was just shocking.”
“There was no question he needed the chair (at the beginning),” said Browatzke, who used to work with clients with disabilities. He watched how Wade would drag himself up the 10 steps in front of the lounge, pulling his chair behind him.
“Then we saw him standing against one of the counters with his cane. Then it seemed to change just overnight.”
The real breakthrough came in April, said Wade. His friend Randy Shuttleworth suggested he get a bike and took him to the Edmonton Bicycle Commuters shop to pick one out. He got a 10-speed road bike, exactly like one he used to have, and took it in his back alley to try.
“I was just flying on this thing,” he said. It felt as if his brain had no problem with the circular pedal motion, and he used that to learn walking. Within two weeks, he tossed the cane completely.
“It was incredibly fast, one of those gobsmacked, wow things,” said Shuttleworth, who’s known Wade for about six years and helped care for him when he got sick the second time.
“Something was working, whether it was rehabilitation miracles, divine intervention. Everyone who knows him just says ‘ Wow’.”
Postmedia wasn’t able to speak with Wade’s doctor. Two other specialists with experience with PML say his case doesn’t match their experience. Every other patient they’ve known or read about died from the brain virus or their underlying condition, such as multiple sclerosis.
“It’s extraordinary,” said Edmonton doctor Stuart Houston. “If this is PML, it’s extremely unusual in a number of ways.”
Wade says his doctor doesn’t understand it either and wants to do more tests. He won’t let him. “Quite frankly, yes, they would like me to Guinea pig it. I just want to get on with my life.”
Not knowing what happened bothered him for a while, especially wondering if this new-found ability might be lost. “But after a while, you don’t care because you’re well,” he said. If he ends up back in the chair, “I’ll deal with it.”
Lisa Robinson, another good friend, said she’s seen Wade’s newfound mobility transform his social life as well. When he was in a chair, so many people would talk above him.
“It would wear on him,” she said. Now “he’s just come out of his shell. He’s become a real pivotal part of the community.”
The chair becomes a barrier when people assume there’s a mental disability as well, said Browatzke, who has also been stunned at the change in Wade’s social life.
Now people look him in the eye and speak to his face. “Quinn’s still tiny,” said Browatzke, referencing his four-foot-10 frame. “But he’s two feet taller when he stands up. ... He has an opinion about everything. Now he’s in a position to share that freely.”