20 year-old Lincoln Southwest graduate makes remarkable progress after debilitating stroke

If this is a surprise then that original hospital was a complete failure at getting him recovered. There should be no surprises. After an objective damage diagnosis you select the exact stroke rehab protocols proven to get to recovery.  Yes, this is pie in the sky right now but until we get there survivors will be screwed with just fucking lazy rehab guidelines.

20-year-old Lincoln Southwest graduate makes remarkable progress after debilitating stroke 

 

The first sign that Tyler Henshaw’s life was about to change, to become something he’d likely never even conceived as a possibility in his 19 years, was a headache.

The 2018 graduate of Southwest High School who loves math and science and history had just started his second quarter at Southeast Community College on that first day of February when he told his mom his head hurt.

Kerri Henshaw remembers her son holding the right side of his head, and she gave him something for a migraine, because it looked bad and she figured Tylenol might not do it.

She told him to go downstairs to his room, that she’d check on him in a half-hour or so. She heard the door shut. Thirty seconds later, she heard him bang against the bookshelves and wall.

She ran downstairs, saw her son on the floor, vomiting. She called 911, turned him on his side, tried to calm his twin 3-year-old brothers standing in the doorway crying. She remembers their new puppy going nuts.

“It was scary,” she said. “It was terrifying.”

It would get worse.

At the hospital, doctors told her and her husband that her son had suffered a debilitating stroke and there were no neurological responses in his brain.

Essentially, Kerri Henshaw said, doctors were saying their son was brain-dead.

Doctors could perform surgery, the outcome unknown, or let him go.

Tyler, now 20, is the oldest of James and Kerri Henshaw's six children, including 17-year-old twin boys, a 13-year-old daughter and the 3-year-olds.

Doctors told them Tyler was young, healthy and strong and surgery seemed like a reasonable option. His parents did not hesitate.

Operate, they said.

A condition he’d had since birth but no one had known about caused the stroke: arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, involves an abnormal tangle of blood vessels connecting arteries and veins in the brain. The tangle disrupts the process of arteries taking oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the brain and veins taking the oxygen-depleted blood back to the heart and lungs.

During surgery, doctors removed the tangled blood vessels and stopped the bleeding. They drained more than a liter of blood from Tyler's brain, his mom said.

He made it through surgery, but doctors worried he wouldn’t survive, said Dr. Matthew Driewer, one of the medical directors at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln.

Three days after the surgery, they saw some slight movement of Tyler's extremities. Three days after that, he opened his eyes.

* * *

Today — nearly 11 months after his stroke — Tyler is living at home with his parents. He's beginning to speak and communicates by pointing to letters on a whiteboard. He'll soon get an electronic pad to help him communicate. He’s regained the use of his right arm, which allows him to maneuver his wheelchair on his own. He can get up without the use of a lift and he’s taken a few steps.

He’s doing the college-level calculus he’d been doing before the stroke. His personality is poking through the wreckage of the trauma, his dry wit, his humor, as Tyler hangs out with his 3-year-old siblings at Madonna, where he spends three days a week doing physical, occupational, vision, recreation and speech therapy.

“R-U-G-R-A-T-S,” he spells out on his white board for a visitor, throwing a glance to Alex and Landon lying on the mats next to him.

His recovery, doctors say, has been remarkable.

“It happens, but not very often. Most of the time the story is very sad, and it takes a long time for families to understand they aren’t making any progress,” Driewer said. “He’s the shining star.”

It’s been a long road, though.

Doctors had to do surgery to put in tubes for feeding and medication, and a day later nurses cleaning the wound nicked the feeding tube. The subsequent leaking caused Tyler to become septic, which led to another surgery.

Then he had surgery to remove a cyst and later, surgery to drain an abscess. During that procedure, his lung was punctured, which led to more infection doctors attacked with high doses of antibiotics. That was followed by surgery to remove his gall bladder.

He's struggled with sickness that causes him to aspirate, though it's getting better.

“It’s just been a roller-coaster,” said his mom.

Along with the lows, there were highs: When Tyler first opened his eyes, Kerri Henshaw remembers thinking "I just hope he remembers us." During therapy at Madonna about a month later, therapists told him to look at his mom, and he turned his head, slowly, to look at her.

In July — five months after the stroke — Tyler moved from Madonna’s specialty hospital to its acute rehabilitation hospital, and the rate of his progress sped up.

"There was something new every week," his mom said.

He operated his first wheelchair by pressing his head against a headrest, but, within weeks, he could use his arm well enough to drive a wheelchair with a joystick.

The first words he pointed out on the whiteboard: "I love you, mom."

He has gaps — he doesn’t remember starting school at SCC, or getting a new puppy three months before the stroke, nor does he remember the five months in the specialty hospital.

But his mom is keeping a journal — just in case he wants to read it someday.

He’s doing college-level schoolwork and likes to talk politics with his dad.

“He’s just as sharp as he ever was,” his mom said.

* * *

In October, doctors determined there were no more tangles of arteries and veins that caused the earlier stroke — good news.

On Oct. 9, Tyler moved home.

The family’s living room has turned into his bedroom, though his family hopes to renovate the home so that ultimately he can have his own space.

His parents had to learn how to fill and clean his feeding tube, suction his tracheostomy and give him medication. Until recently, his mom slept nearby on the couch.

For Kerri Henshaw, who brings her son to Madonna's rehabilitation day program —  along with the young twins — three times a week and is his primary caregiver at home, it’s hard to recognize the progress sometimes. But then she thinks back to where they started and where her son is now.

They take one day at a time, she said, and don’t take the good stuff for granted.

“You never think something like this can happen. Life can change in an instant,” she said. "The little dumb stuff doesn't matter anymore."

Tyler’s siblings help out, and the young twins play with him, their toys helping him with his fine motor skills. 

His mom thinks Tyler's plans before the stroke — to apply to engineering college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — could still be in his future.

"It might take a little longer, but, hey, that's OK," she said.

Driewer thinks Tyler's parents, who fought for him relentlessly, are a big part of his progress.

“I think it has a lot to do with the person and a lot to do with their attitude and grit,” he said. “For Tyler, it has a lot do with the grit of his parents, because they were by his side all the time — even with the twins.”

Tyler's mom thinks her son's stubborn streak is one of the things that helps him keep pushing. 

And he knows exactly what he wants for Christmas. He spells it out, without hesitation.

T-O W-A-L-K.