ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605240016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
FOR 16-YEAR-OLD TAYLOR WILLIS, recovery after suffering several strokes means returning to music, school, friends - and his old self.
Taylor Willis chased the amp plug with his right hand for a few moments before he got a grip, plugged in and joined his guitar teacher, Phil Holland, in playing CCR's "Who'll Stop the Rain."
"It was real exciting to have Taylor back," Holland said. "A friend of mind told me he never would be able to return."
"Say, `Ha Ha' to him," Taylor suggested.
Control of his right hand will be a long time coming for this 16-year-old, who is recovering from strokes he had 10 months ago. But his wit is as good as ever.
Taylor has taken guitar lessons from Holland since the third grade and was lead guitarist for a just-formed band when he had the strokes.
Playing the guitar is about the last thing the Patrick Henry High School student remembers doing before he landed at the University of Virginia Medical Center for more than three months last summer.
On the Wednesday before his July 17 stroke, Taylor joined his sister, Lauren, who plays hammer dulcimer, and several other members of St. John's Episcopal Church to play for a Communion service held in the church gardens.
He can recall only bits of information about the three days between then and the time an artery in his brain exploded and sent him into convulsions while he was taking a shower.
Taylor has been getting "back" ever since, but returning to his Gibson ES 135 is a milestone, even if he has had to revert to playing "slower" music.
His left hand is a six-year veteran, but his right hand is just learning to work the strings again. Before his strokes, he was tackling scores from Pink Floyd, complex because they allow the player so much leeway to interpret.
For now, Taylor is more comfortable with Creedence Clearwater Revival and songs like "Melissa" and "Jessica" by the Allman Brothers.
No one can say whether Taylor will ever be a lead guitarist again. A lead has to have every note of every song in his head; Taylor is sometimes a little forgetful.
But he has come so far, said his mother, Sandy Willis.
"Some parts of it have been joyous. We've watched our child being reborn.''
Last July, Taylor was lying in a bed at the University of Virginia Medical Center drooling and unable to sit up.
A few days before that, he and his dad, Martin Willis, were home together, the father on the sofa, the son in the shower.
Martin Willis believes he dozed off, and then woke thinking Taylor had been in the shower longer than usual. He knocked on the shower door. When he didn't get an answer, he pushed the door in and found his 15-year-old son convulsing on the shower floor, water pouring over him.
Taylor was taken to Carilion Community Hospital, where he had a second seizure. Tests didn't reveal anything, but doctors speculated that Taylor had had a severe epileptic seizure called a grand mal. Taylor was then put in intensive care where he spent an uneventful Sunday night and Monday.
Then, his condition worsened.
His breathing became shallow. His eyes began tracking left and then right, then rolled back in his head. By Monday night, he was on a ventilator.
The next day, tests revealed an artery had broken near his brain stem, the part of the brain that controls life-support functions such as breathing. He couldn't talk, move or breathe on his own.
Taylor was transferred to the University of Virginia, where more tests revealed that he'd had as many as seven strokes.
Doctors believe his brain artery had either "bowed" outward or inward - a condition he had likely had since birth - creating a pocket that collected blood. When that area burst, it caused the first stroke.
And it sent out reverberations that caused Taylor to suffer six more strokes by Monday evening.
A stroke victim is in danger of having additional strokes for at least two weeks after the first brain attack, the Willis family learned.
Taylor Willis was in the UVa hospital for a month and at its Kluge Center for 2 1/2 more months. For five weeks, he couldn't move his tongue or swallow. No one knew whether he'd be able to eat or talk again. He didn't eat for a month but was kept alive with nutrition pushed through a tube in his stomach.
"They wouldn't give us much hope. They didn't know if he'd live," Sandy Willis recalled, the pain of the experience still evident in her voice.
The parents thought music might help bring their son back to reality, so they went shopping in Charlottesville and bought a player and tapes.
Taylor's room was never silent.
Tony Bennett's "Unplugged" and Pink Floyd tapes mingled with voices of visitors and a regular bedside companion, Richard Gandee, Taylor's best friend.
Richard visited Charlottesville nearly every week. When Taylor lay almost comatose, Richard talked about school and music and what their friends were doing, hoping that his voice would help bring Taylor back.
"I'd talk to him like he could respond," Richard said. "I'd ask questions."
Richard said the week he and several other friends played their homemade video for Taylor, "we could see clearly that he thought it was funny."
Taylor was never in a coma, but he was almost unresponsive for the first five weeks, Sandy Willis said.
When he began to learn to speak again, he first worked on his vowels. Then came the word "Mom." Then phrases. Finally, sentences.
He couldn't see for a month, and when he did it was like looking through a kaleidoscope, he remembered. A stroke on his optic nerve gave him a fractured view of the world.
Taylor's eyes have healed except for an almost undetectable loss of peripheral vision. Contact sports are still a no-no, though, because of the medication he takes each day to keep his blood thin and ward off any other strokes. (Doctors have no reason to think he will have more strokes, but the medicine is a precaution, his mother said.)
As Taylor began to recover at UVa, the family took him out for recreational therapy to the mall, or a movie or to a music store.
He used a wheelchair while at the Kluge center, then graduated to a four-legged cane, and finally to a simple cane. He had to learn to walk all over again. He had to learn how to kneel.
Now, except for a slight hesitation in his walk and the fact that his right arm gets so tired sometimes it just wants to hang, it's hard to imagine that this 6-foot-2, lanky youth with the gentle smile could have been so near death a year ago.
In January, Taylor Willis dyed his almost shoulder-length hair fuchsia and went back to school for half days. He still needed a cane to keep his balance, but it went almost unnoticed as he grinned and kidded with a table of friends at lunch the first day back.
These were some of the 60 friends who stood in the front yard of his South Roanoke home to greet him when he got back from the UVa Medical Center on Oct. 20.
Taylor missed all of the fall 1995 semester and had been anxious about returning when school resumed after the December holidays. His stroke had caused him to have a problem with math, he said. His writing hand was weak.
"But it's kinda boring not doing anything, staying home," Taylor said.
Since he got out of the hospital, Taylor's days have been filled, but not with the things he used to do such as running and riding his bike. He takes physical and occupational therapy in the morning and is tutored in English and biology in the afternoons. In between, he rests and exercises.
Three years ago, Taylor scored beyond high school level in standardized academic tests. In national tests for sophomores, he placed in the top 5 percent.
Now, Taylor has trouble processing information, especially understanding abstract language. "Flying" is easily associated with a plane, but not with a fast movement on the ground.
As with most stroke victims, his short-term memory "comes and goes," said Sandy Willis, a former teacher. "He can't retain information well enough to put it on paper."
He's doing well writing with his left hand, however. Teachers have helped him keep up by letting him copy their lecture notes. A laptop computer on loan from the school also helps him communicate about his classes.
Sandy Willis said she and her husband look at Taylor's efforts to return to his old self as a "process of education."
"You really do have to focus on what you have," she said.
Just before Taylor went back to school in January, he said what he really wanted to do most of all was to be able to talk well.
He's pretty much there. His speech is no longer slurred, unless he is really, really tired.
His emotions also are returning. One of the strokes Taylor had centered on the thalamus, one of two egg-shaped masses at the front of the brain where conscious awareness of sensations begin. Always low-key, Taylor became more emotionless.
By January, he was telling the family he didn't need so much attention, to leave him alone.
On Easter, when Sandy Willis gave her son a big hug and said, "I love you so much, and I almost lost you last year," his joking comeback was, "Haven't you gotten over that yet?"
But also on Easter, Taylor passed out handwritten notes enclosed in plastic eggs to each family member.
"The things he said were personal but were about what we meant to him," Sandy Willis said.
Taylor's hair is much shorter these days, even shorter than a few weeks ago and it's no longer red. He's letting it return to its usual summer-blond shade.
He's near to accomplishing another goal in recovery, getting his driver's license.
He's taken special driver's education training at Lewis-Gale Hospital for people with physical limitations; he's also finished a regular driver's education course.
The family hasn't decided when he'll get his driver's license, though. Part of their reluctance is just normal parental concerns about a teen-ager driving. In Taylor's case, there is a second concern: the blood thinner he takes, which would put him in greater jeopardy in the case of an accident. Doctors will decide in June whether he will continue the medication.
For now, Taylor has a learner's permit, and drives his mother to and from his appointments in the '79 red and white Lincoln his dad bought and fixed up for him.
It has a new stereo, which Sandy Willis jokingly refers to as a "knee-jerk reaction to a near-death experience."
Last month, Taylor ran for the first time since his strokes. He didn't go far, but he ran.
"It was really hard," he told his mother.
"At this point, there are so many things they told us he'd never be able to do, and he's already done them," she said.
"It makes the negatives not quite as bad."
LENGTH: Long : 203 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. 1. Ten months after hisby CNBstroke, Taylor Willis (above and 2. below, with guitar teacher Phil
Holland) is determined to get back to normal. 3. Occupational
therapist Karen Shields (above, right) puts Taylor through exercises
to strengthen his right arm and increase his shoulder control. 4.
Taylor had to learn to walk again and still needed a cane in January
when he returned to Patrick Henry High School, where he kidded with
friend Megan Lawson. 5. Pride and joy: Taylor is close to
accomplishing another goal in recovery, getting his driver's
license. He has a learner's permit and a 1979 Lincoln his dad bought
and fixed up for him. 6. A family portrait: (from left) Lauren,
Martin, Taylor, Sandy and Claire Willis with the family cats in
their South Roanoke home. color.