A rough but steady road back from a stroke
Niantic man struggles, ‘but I just keep going’
“Ichi! ... Ni! ... San! ... Shi ...” As karate sensei Chad Merriman barked out the numbers one through four in Japanese, Ted Phillips let go of a cane in his left hand and lurched barefoot across a rubber mat.
“... Ku! ... Juu!” After calling out nine and 10, Merriman paused while Phillips caught his breath.
“OK, now we go backwards,” Merriman directed.
Eyes focused like laser beams, Phillips set his jaw, slowly elevated his left leg, swung it a few inches behind him, and gently lowered the limb. He then halted, repeated the motion with his right leg, and began shuffling heel first.
“Excellent! Excellent!” Merriman exclaimed.
Just then Phillips stumbled and would have toppled if trainer Rich Cochrane, poised alongside, hadn’t grabbed his arm. A moment later, Cochrane released his grip and Phillips resumed trudging across the padded floor of Merriman’s Niantic dojo.
In many ways, the December workout reflects Phillips’s slow, labyrinthine route to rehabilitation after he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on July 15, 2017: Sometimes forward, sometimes backward, with a few missteps along the way, including a fractured hip from a tumble this past July — but always with fierce determination.
“It’s tough,” he said after the 45-minute karate session, “but I just keep going.”
Phillips, 78, of Niantic, once attained a black belt in karate. He also ran marathons, played the bagpipes, guitar, mandolin and a veritable orchestra of other instruments, competed in a vintage baseball league (no gloves), earned a doctorate and spoke several languages.
“We called him the renaissance man because he did a number of things, all of them well,” Tom Amanti, a retired principal at Montville High School, where Phillips had served as head of the counseling department, told The Day a year ago.
“I could tell right away he was going to be a fighter. He and Pat, working as a team, really stood out. You just want to help them.” TAMI MCGUNNIGLE, OCCUPATIONAL THERAPIST, ON TED PHILLIPS AND HIS WIFE
Now, Ted continues putting the pieces of his life back together, relying on a method that has always served him well.
“I study, study, study. Work, work, work,” he said.
During the past year Ted and his wife, Pat, have continued supplementing regular doctor visits with an exhaustive regimen of treatments and therapies, many of which have morphed from such sports as swimming, weightlifting, cardio training, treadmill workouts, bike riding and even boxing. He also has incorporated music classes, tai chi, acupuncture, hypnosis and speech therapy into his ever-evolving routine. Some appointments are in southeastern Connecticut, others are more than an hour’s drive away.
Ted and Pat additionally are considering therapeutic horseback riding, and this past summer acquired a threewheeled bicycle that Ted can pedal, a battery-powered arm brace controlled by Ted’s neurological impulses, and a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that attaches to a shoelace, allowing Ted to strum a guitar by tapping his foot.
Initially Ted’s medical insurance helped pay for much of this treatment and equipment, but when some coverage lapsed the family got busy. Pat, along with sons Brennan and Simon, lined up free and lower-cost treatment provided by the University of Connecticut, local and state governments, and such institutions as Gaylord Specialty Healthcare in Wallingford, which Ted regularly visits for pool therapy, and treadmill and stationary bike exercises.
Although Ted has shown steady progress with mobility, cognitive function and speech, the slow pace occasionally has proved frustrating for him and Pat, a gregarious couple whose default attitude has always been upbeat.
“If you had told me we’d only be this far along after twoand-a-half years, I’m not sure ...” Pat said, her voice trailing off.
Then she broke into a smile, not needing to finish her thought. She would have responded exactly the same way: with love for and devotion to the man she married 48 years ago, while applying skills developed from her background in special and early education.
A former teacher and assistant principal in the East Lyme public school system, Pat, 72, received a doctorate in educational administration and served as head of the preschool program at Mitchell College in New London before retiring to help care for her husband.
The stroke also forced Ted in 2017 to leave his job as a guidance counselor at St. Bernard School in Montville. Previously he had been a Spanish instructor at Mitchell College, taught English and then became a guidance counselor at
East Lyme High School, and served as headmaster of Waterford Country School before taking the position at Montville High School.
Though Ted’s recovery has been gradual, his improvement is readily apparent to a visitor who hadn’t seen him in several months.
His gait, though halting, is more assured; his smile, broader, his speech more fluid. Ted’s struggle to articulate — the stroke created lesions in his brain’s left hemisphere, resulting in a communication disorder known as aphasia — has been one of his most nettling challenges.
You can see by looking in his eyes that Ted knows what he wants to say, but can’t always get the words to come out.
Hearing this observation, Ted’s face brightened, and he took a moment to formulate a response.
“That’s it! Exactly!” he blurted.
He can be full of surprises. This past summer, he stunned guests at a family wedding by reciting from memory Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” which has nonsensical verses capable of twisting the tongue of even those without speech limitations:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe ...
Merriman, whose weekly one-on-one karate classes began about a month ago, said Ted’s relentless drive is tempered by the methodical approach of a longtime educator.
“He gets mad at himself, but then he works through it,” he said.
Merriman, a seventh-degree black belt, is the son of karate legend Chuck Merriman, who started teaching in New London in 1970 before moving to Niantic, went on to attain the discipline’s highest level, 10th-degree, served as head coach of the AAU National Karate Team, and is credited with helping popularize karate throughout the Western world.
Chuck Merriman, now 86 and living in Arizona, was among the first people to call Ted after his stroke. His simple message: “You can get through this.”
Tami McGunnigle, an occupational therapist with the Visiting Nurse Association of Southeastern Connecticut in Waterford, was one of Ted’s first caregivers after his stroke.
“I could tell right away he was going to be a fighter,” McGunnigle recalled. “He and Pat, working as a team, really stood out. You just want to help them.”
McGunnigle also treated Ted after he fell and fractured his hip. “It was heartbreaking at first,” she said, upon seeing Ted back in the hospital after he had made so much initial progress.
“But he overcame it,” she added.
In 30 years of helping patients recover from devastating injuries and medical events, McGunnigle has never treated anyone quite like Ted, she said. He is among the rare patients who refuse to give in to disability, “who don’t accept that’s the way life is going to be.”