Megan's Story
Months after her therapy, Scottsdale resident Megan Dyer returned to HonorHealth Rehabilitation Hospital to thank some friends she’d never met. Not in this life, anyway.
The staff was eager to reunite with Megan. For 13 days they helped guide her on a miraculous journey over a mountain of cognitive and physical aftereffects of a sudden brain illness. Megan was equally excited to meet the team she knew only from photographs, stories and dreams.
Megan was piecing together a puzzle of several missing months. The then-healthy 30-year-old had suffered from Brain on Fire disease, a rare condition that caused her immune system to create antibodies that attacked receptors in her mind. Those receptors control memory, learning, breathing and locomotion. It struck out of the blue, and though there are theories, nobody is sure of the cause.
She checked in at the emergency room at HonorHealth Scottsdale Thompson Peak, where she received spinal tap testing for encephalitis. She stayed for three weeks before being transferred to John C. Lincoln Medical Center, where she began her journey back to health. She was in critical condition. She’d been in a medically-induced coma to stop her seizures. She needed a tracheostomy and a ventilator to breathe.
Physician-led teams of respiratory, physical, occupational, recreational and speech therapists at Select Specialty Hospital ― Phoenix and HonorHealth Rehabilitation Hospital helped bring her back. First, the team at the critical illness hospital worked to free her from the ventilator, teach her to breathe on her own again, and start her journey toward self-reliance. Finally, therapists at the rehabilitation hospital helped her learn to speak, brush her teeth, walk, talk and think again.
She’d lived in hospitals for 130 days, in all.
For Megan, it was as though she went to bed after a golf game and awoke nearly half a year later in a strange new world where she felt weak and confused.
Her parents shared with her photos they’d snapped of a woman who bore a passing resemblance to her in rooms she didn’t recognize. And she had what seemed like dreams. Half remembered faces that floated up out of the blackness. In one dream, she pretended to bowl with someone on a television screen. Who? She couldn’t say. In another, she dabbed water colors from a paint brush to make a picture.
Her family told her that experts at each hospital on her journey had rescued her from what might have been long-term damage. Her family had been afraid she’d spend months or longer in a mental institution or skilled care facility.
Instead, she made steady progress toward her old self.
And now that she’d returned to visit the inpatient rehabilitation hospital after recovering, she’d found the faces from her photos there, smiling.
The TV bowling turned out to be a specialized therapeutic video game that requires the players to stand and make movements like they’re rolling a ball. The friend she teamed with was an occupational therapist. The game was among many activities therapists used to help her recover lost balance and motor skills.
Vague memories Megan had of working out with weights became clear during her visit. In therapy, she’d exercised with a physical therapist, who took her to the gym to help rebuild muscles that had dwindled during her weeks in a hospital bed.
But the main focus of Megan’s therapy at the rehabilitation hospital had been cognitive. Tests showed she was suffering from problem-solving, memory, reasoning and attention deficits. These are some of the dangers of encephalitis, therapists explained. Megan’s brain had been inflamed and swollen, and often in the tight quarters of the human skull, where a swollen brain has nowhere to expand, damage is common – and dangerous.
As she made her way through the hospital, one of the faces Megan recognized turned out to be her speech pathologist. When she’d first arrived at HonorHealth all those months earlier, time on the ventilator had weakened Megan’s voice to a whisper. While the speech expert had Megan perform vocal exercises, she focused more attention on cognitive defects. Megan could recognize and process language, the therapist explained. Her problems had more to do with reasoning.
During therapy, the speech pathologist worked with Megan and her family on problem solving. The therapist was gentle and encouraging. She helped Megan with basic hygiene, walking through how to wash her face and brush her teeth, for example.
Milestones seemed small, but they came steadily. One day when she was an inpatient, Megan had put toothpaste on a toothbrush and brushed her own teeth. Her therapist celebrated as if she’d just scaled a steep cliff.
Now that she’d returned to visit months after her stay, Megan didn’t remember any of it. The therapists, who remembered it all, were thrilled to hear her voice. Gone was the whisper they had to lean in close to hear. Megan had continued with home and outpatient therapy after she left the hospital. She was strong again. Now they could hear Megan’s full voice booming across rooms.
When she recognized a therapist from a photo or dream, the therapist would blink back tears.
The staff was meeting a new Megan. Really, it was the old Megan they’d helped find again.
“I wanted to show them who I really am,” she said.
