DEL.ICIO.USStroke survivor lacing up for AJC Peachtree Road Race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, July 03, 2009
Lying on the operating table, Wes Varda was groggy from anesthesia. Not so groggy, though, that he didn’t recognize the last rites being administered.
“I guess it was because of the anesthesia. I didn’t feel scared or anything,” said Varda, who until that December day was just a single-guy account manager from Atlanta, with a lot of friends and a running jones. “I was just like, I’m not going to die. Who are they kidding?”
Phil Skinner/pskinner@ajc.com
Wes Varda, 32, of Dunwoody, suffered a stroke last December and was so close to death he was given last rites. Saturday he will run in the AJC Peachtree Road Race.
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But Jim and Jinks Varda had ample reason to summon a priest for their son; he had suffered a severe brain stem stroke. A large blood clot in the back of his head had choked the oxygen supply to his brain stem, the brain’s control center. The stroke had rendered him “locked in” — able to hear, see and feel but unable to move or speak.
They chose for him a risky procedure that had the potential to save him but also to kill him or leave him “locked in” for the remainder of his days.
Even after the roughly two-hour surgery, in which a one-millimeter diameter catheter carrying a clot-busting chemical was threaded up from his groin into the basilar artery into the brain stem, Dr. Michael Pont wasn’t sure if Varda would survive the night.
“I was hoping that we’d have a good outcome, that we could break up the clot and he’d get better,” Pont said. However, “Not everybody gets better.”
Around 9 a.m. today, a host of eyes will moisten about midway through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race course. Seven months after the stroke that left him paralyzed, Varda, 32, will stop at the Shepherd Center half-way up Cardiac Hill to thank those people who helped him learn again to walk, talk, swallow and, notably on this day, run.
Said Kendra Moon, Varda’s case manager at Shepherd’s outpatient center, “He’s kind of an amazing guy.”
There is no telling why Varda, a Chattahoochee High School graduate, suffered the stroke. It generally strikes older victims. It might be because his blood is thicker than normal. (He is now on blood-thinning medication.)
It is of some mystery, too, how the clot broke up overnight, perhaps saving Varda’s life. Pont said he was surprised and “ecstatic.”
Said Jim Varda, “My wife and I really do believe in prayer after all this has happened, I can tell you that.”
Those who have witnessed Varda’s recovery are certain of this, though. The speed at which he has come from being unable to move without assistance from his bed to a wheelchair to running with just a slight hitch; from lacking the coordination to swallow to being able to eat and drink anything; and from being barely able to talk to conversing with little problem is astounding.
“I’ll tell you what. His ability to live independently again, to me, it was fast,” Moon said. “Many times it takes months. Sometimes it takes years.”
Moon cites two factors in the celerity of his rehabilitation: “First of all, his willingness and openness to the therapy suggestions. Everything that we really would ask him to do, he was willing and open and followed through. The other thing that I think is, he just has a really good sense of humor and a way of being in the world. If you’re around him, you feel good.”
Varda worked full days, first at the Shepherd Center, which specializes in the care and rehabilitation of people with spinal, brain and neuromuscular injuries, and then at Shepherd Pathways, an outpatient facility in Decatur.
About five weeks ago, his parents moved back out of his apartment, leaving Varda to live again on his own. He still lacks full function of his left hand, which prevents him from driving.
Regardless, “It’s just incredible what’s happened for him,” Jim Varda said. “He’s going to have a life.”
The journey has had its frustrations. He remembers, for instance, wondering if he would ever be able to hold his hands steady again. But a support network of family and friends has helped, as has his broad perspective. All around him at Shepherd, Varda saw patients destined to live out their lives in a vegetative state.
“People have horrible things happen to them all the time,” he said. “I figure I’m bound to have at least one big catastrophic event. If this is the worst there is, then it’s not that bad.”
Varda even finds blessing in the ordeal. He said he had been living “in a rut” before the stroke and now feels divine calling, to be a better steward of his life. He has felt a pull toward motivational speaking.
“Because I think I’m pretty good at helping people discover what they want to do and also actually helping them implement it,” Varda said. “But always before, I was like, I can’t be a motivational speaker. No one’s going to listen to me. I don’t have a story to tell.
“Now, I kind of have a story to tell.”
He can start Saturday on Cardiac Hill.
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