With hockey shirts decorating the wall, a favorite video game on television and a mobile phone not far away, Henry Black Is all you could expect from a 16 year old child.
But on June 25, 2024, a bicycle ride changed his life forever.
“It started a very average day,” said Black, recalling the day he bicycle with a friend to the water in Scarborough bluffs, a popular place in the East End of Toronto.
The friends planned to go swimming, but the water was too cold, so they continued to cycle. It was dark and the teenagers found themselves at the top of a hill. Black saw a small stump towards the bottom and wanted to jump over it with its bike.
“I started to go down and I was, as” wait, I’m like going very quickly “, and then I remember saying” Oh shit “.
He hit a tree.
“Instantly, I couldn’t feel (where) my body was in space and I couldn’t watch where my legs and arms were,” he said.
His friend called 911 and Black’s parents.
Black’s father, Gary, was out of the city for business.
“I am four o’clock in Windsor, so I immediately left dinner, I got into the car and dried,” said Gary. “It was probably the quickest journey I have ever driven from Windsor to Toronto.”
Imaging revealed that black has a lesion of the spinal cord C4-C5. The Toronto Sickids Hospital team transferred it to Sunnybrook for surgery.
“I remember how much the Toronto roads were bumpy at the back of this ambulance and knowing that Henry had a broken neck,” said Gary.
“I was nervous about (what) something could happen, you know, it could be more and more damage, how rush these roads were … I was just trying to reassure him that he was in the best possible hands.”
The accident made the black a quadriplegic.
For 11 months, he has lived at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Center in Toronto. There, he worked to regain strength in his limited amplitude of movement.
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The pediatrician of complex care, Dr. Priya Sayal, says that there were great victories during the recovery process, because Black learned to sail in his new reality.
“When he came to us, he had a tracheotomy and he needed support for breathing,” said Sayal.
“During his stay here, his lungs were stronger, his respiratory muscles have become stronger.”
But recovery has not always been easy.
“He had a few cases where he was transferred to Sickkids for admissions, for various health reasons, and some of them are longer and some are shorter,” said Sayal.
“It’s difficult because it comes back … It is weaker and it seems that we have to rebuild some of these earnings that we have made.”
An operation giving new hope
Black cannot walk and has a limited movement in his hands and arms. Three weeks ago, he met Dr. Jana Dengler, a peripheral nervous surgeon of the Sunnybrook Health Center.
On June 13, Dengler and another surgeon will carry out a triple nerve transfer surgery on Black. He will be the youngest patient in Ontario to undergo the procedure.
“This is a procedure where us essentially reclaim the nerves of the upper end to make a function,” said Dengler. “We connect the nerves that work on nerves that do not work.”
Dengler said that surgery is not a well -known option for patients with spinal cord, but hopes to change this with greater conscience. She notes that there have been hesitations on the clinical side.
“”One of the problems is that it is a new application of a surgical technique established to a new population of patients, “said Dengler.” We know that the evolution of the clinical medicine practice takes a long time. »»
The ideal window to operate is between six and 12 months after the injury.
“Hope with this next nervous surgery is to make some of these muscles stronger and give it more innervation to the muscles of the upper limbs that it may not have had before,” said Sayal.
There is no guarantee that surgery will work, but black and family remain optimistic.
Black said he would love to have a greater opening capacity and close his fingers and the ability to push with his triceps.
“It could really open a lot of doors for more independence,” he said.
Another long -term goal is to go home Black. The family is currently collection of funds To try to build an accessible alley house.
“If it was me, I don’t think I would be so positive,” said Gary. “Perhaps because he is young and he doesn’t know better, or I just think that his personality is such that he is like a sunlight. He brings this hope.”
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