Beating the odds has always been a strength for 45-year-old Johnny Renaud. The father of two from North Dakota is no stranger to hard work and rehabilitation. His family says when doctors told them he wouldn’t wake up from a coma after a stroke in September, they knew he would prove them wrong. Ten years ago, a coal mining accident nearly killed him. He lost a leg, but lived to tell his story as a safety specialist for the company he worked for.
“He was not supposed to live,” his wife, Bethany, said. “But, he rebounded quickly from that. Again, showed his strength and his willpower to live. He had one daughter at the time then, Alannah, and she got him through that. He survived because of her.”
Now, Johnny has two daughters cheering him on in his recovery at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals. His youngest, Jaxyn, was an active participant in therapies, encouraging her dad to reach a little higher and speak a little louder. Johnny’s care team of brain injury specialists worked with him and his family to get him safely back to his life roles as a husband and father.
When he got to Madonna, physically, Johnny was weak from a month in the hospital. Specialized technology allowed him to do mass repetitions to regain strength in his arm.
“I felt like his hand had a lot of good strength and movement, but there was nothing else up higher,” Abby McClure, MOT, OTR/L, CBIS, a Madonna occupational therapist, said. “Every day that we worked, you could just see the muscles starting to activate, slowly but surely, moving up his arm. We started first with our functional electrical stimulation bike. Then, we moved on to our Armeo machine, which was able to be more of an exoskeleton and provide him with the support while letting him do all of the movements actively versus the stimulation provided to really create a stronger connection. Then finally, we paired all of that with functional tasks using the XCite that we have here.”
Functional tasks included brushing his hair, reaching for tools and reaching for his daughter’s hand.
“Incorporating his wife and his kids into some of those motions with his arm was awesome to see,” McClure said. “Seeing him reach so high–that’s when you saw his motivation come through the most. Like, I don’t need to reach for a hammer, give me my daughter’s hand. I think you get a lot more motivation from the patients when they see something so familiar and something they love so much, or someone they love so much being the one pushing them.”
Therapy can be hard work, but it can also be fun for both patients and their families. While working on his speech and motor planning, Johnny challenged his daughter, Jaxyn, to a friendly game of “Go Fish.”
“Johnny had both aphasia and apraxia,” Liz Rogers, M.S., CCC-SLP, CBIS, a Madonna speech-language pathologist, said.
Aphasia is a language disorder in which the brain has a hard time understanding language and getting words out. Apraxia is a motor disorder where the brain doesn’t have the right plan for the mouth to make the desired movements.
“When I first started working with Johnny, it was heavily aphasia, so he had a hard time understanding what you wanted and getting the words out,” Rogers said. “Then, as he progressed, it turned into more apraxia. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, he just couldn’t get his mouth to move and get the right sounds out.”
But words and phrases that are familiar to a person tend to come out easier than others. For example, “Go Fish.”
“You could tell when we first started playing it, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, he just couldn’t get those words out,” Rogers said.
“But, there’s just the innocence of Jaxyn. She didn’t care that her dad couldn’t get the right words out, didn’t know what he wanted to say all the time, but she was just happy to have her dad playing a game with her.”
Jaxyn was also ready for her dad to be home. After being in a hospital for two months, Johnny was ready too. His care team did extensive caregiver training with both his wife Bethany and his close friends and family to make sure everyone was comfortable.
“We have seen miracles,” Bethany said. “Prayers have been answered. The staff here has been phenomenal, beyond phenomenal. It’s been a struggle. We had some ups and downs but we got through them and now we’re on our way home.”
Johnny’s next goal on his recovery journey is to return to driving so he can take Jaxyn to hockey practice. Bethany’s goal is not to be back in a hospital any time soon.
“I told him between the stroke and the coal accident, we do something expensive every 10 years,” she joked. “If he wants to do something expensive again, let’s do a nice, tropical vacation. No more hospital stays.”