Last updated: February 7, 2012 11:22 am
Dustin Pollack — The Ryersonian (Ryerson University)
TORONTO (CUP) — Susan Stewart couldn’t walk and couldn’t talk. She couldn’t eat without a feeding tube or breathe without medical support. But her situation was better than the doctors at the Mercy Medical Hospital predicted.
When she was admitted to Mercy Medical in Canton, Ohio, on April 13, 2005, her family was told that not only did most people who suffered her type of injury not survive; they usually didn’t make it from the ambulance to the hospital.
Stewart’s brain was bleeding and the doctors said that if they operated she could die, and if they did nothing and her brain continued to bleed, she could die.
“When they told me I was going to die, I remember the chaplain came in and read me my rites,” Stewart said. “I was very afraid because I was in a condition that I had no control over.”
In the late ’80s to mid-’90s, Stewart was a Canadian basketball star. She played for the Canadian national team, won two national championships with Laurentian University and competed for her country at the summer Olympics in Atlanta, Ga., in 1996.
After retiring from the game she became a coach and it was while coaching in a tournament with a bantam girls’ team from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, that her life took a disastrous turn.
After one of the tournament games, Stewart went back to her hotel room to take a shower. While in the shower, she slipped and hit her head on the showerhead. Although feeling pain, she didn’t think much of it and decided to try and sleep it off. But that night, while giving her team a pre-game speech, she began to vomit profusely and it continued later that night on the bus ride home to Chagrin Falls.
She decided to go right to bed when she got home, but when she couldn’t fall asleep, she went to the bathroom to try to gather herself.
“I remember looking up in the mirror and then falling backwards,” she said.
That’s when one of her roommates, who heard the fall, came running and called the ambulance. She had suffered a brain aneurism on the second fall and was bleeding from her brain stem. She spent nearly a month as a patient at Mercy Medical Hospital until the bleeding stopped and she was healthy enough to be airlifted to Trillium Medical Centre in Mississauga, Ont. where her family lived and she could begin rehabilitation.
“I had to relearn how to be a person again,” she said.
After years of speech therapy, physiotherapy and interval training to work on her motor skills, Stewart was able to begin doing things day-to-day just like the average person. But when the late Ryerson Rams women’s basketball coach Sandy Pothier approached her in 2009 to join the Rams’ coaching staff, she didn’t feel right.
“[Pothier] was doing a girls’ basketball camp and she encouraged that I come in the fall and coach, but I wasn’t ready yet,” Stewart said. “I didn’t feel I was at the point in my rehab, where I could take the train and walk and do all that I’m doing right now.”
But two years later when the Rams approached her again, she decided she was ready to get involved and now is working through her first season as an assistant coach and recruiting co-ordinator with the team.
“We talk a lot about challenges and overcoming adversity, and she personifies that,” said Charles Kissi, head coach of the women’s basketball team. “I think our girls value that. Anything that can teach them perspective at this point in their lives is very valuable.”
But things still aren’t perfect. While Stewart’s independent in many ways — she can do most things the average person can do — there are many things she can’t. She can’t live independently, so she lives at home with her parents in Mississauga and commutes to Ryerson, and she is still unable to drive.
And while Stewart admits that the progress she’s made since 2005 is remarkable, it’s been a frustrating journey.
“I kept asking the nurses, how long will this take? I wanted it over,” she said. “You know when you sprain your ankle or break your foot, they give you a guesstimate; well this is something [for which] they can’t give a guesstimate, because it depends on the individual.”
But for now she’s happy to be back in basketball.
“I enjoy working with the Ryerson Rams women’s basketball team. That’s really my joy; to be around them and encourage them and to inspire them. That’s really what I’m about,” said Stewart. “The way I look at [my situation] is it’s a challenge,” she said. “It’s not going to be an easy road; it’s going to take some time.”
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