On a tranquil day when everything seemed right with the world, I got a call that changed my life. I was outside in the sunshine when I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. Somebody was leaving a loud and demanding message on the answering machine. I hurried in, gritted my teeth, and hit the "play" button. Then my knees went weak.
The caller was my friend and former colleague Neil MacVicar, a journalist who had worked with words all his life. His speech was guttural and slurred. "Barb, it's Neil," he bellowed, in the struggle to make himself understood. "I've had a major stroke."
The next morning I was on my way to see Neil at Toronto Rehab's University Centre, a slab of dirty bricks and even dirtier windows set back from the corner of University Avenue and Elm Street, near the city's finest hospitals yet somehow apart. As I was standing across the street and staring at the sign high atop its façade – "Help us do everything humanly possible" – it struck me that I had never noticed the place in all the years I had visited loved ones next door at Mount Sinai and Princess Margaret hospitals.
Rehab hospitals: Unglamorous and unknown
It was little wonder. Except for the survivors of catastrophic events, and their friends and families, rehab hospitals are little known to most of us. In fact, if saving lives makes for high drama, the process of putting them back together is far less exciting, unless, like me, you're given a chance to see it firsthand.
Behind the University Centre's grimy walls, every year thousands of men and women get back on their feet, literally and figuratively, after suffering from traumatic brain injuries due to aneurysms, car accidents and strokes. What the place offers – to those whose brains are not so badly injured they can't do the work – is speech, physio and occupational therapy. But it offers something more. Good humour. A caring environment. Hope. And, in Neil's case, a group of disparate patients, 24 at a time, who support one another through weeks of rehabilitation.
Dr. Mark Bayley, medical director of the centre's neuro rehabilitation program and a researcher in the field of brain recovery, says most people think of the University Centre as "a black box where some miracle happens." If ever anyone needed a miracle, it was my friend Neil.
When I first met Neil, in the late 1980s, he was a witty and urbane person, kind and incisive. By last Christmas a minor stroke had left him less vigorous. Still, at 63 he was reading the latest novels, overseeing the painting of his Victorian home and tootling around town with his longtime companion. He was informed and interested in the world. The man I found waiting for me when I came off the elevator on the fifth floor of the rehab centre that first day was hunched in a wheelchair, his face sagging, his hands shaking. It was all I could do not to cry.
The second stroke happened in his doctor's office at the end of February, he managed to tell me. "That was lucky," I said. "Yeah, some luck," he responded ruefully. Saved from death, he was now faced with a recovery that looked almost impossible.
Page 1 of 4 -- Learn the extraordinary resilience of the patients behind the rehab hospital's walls on page 2.
