His voice is raspy, the words come slowly. Trevor Greene says it is because he no longer has the reflex to breathe before he speaks, so he has to remind himself constantly to take in air while he talks.
Yet that he speaks at all, let alone in front of large crowds, as he did in Toronto this week, defies the grim prognosis that doctors described to his fiancée, Debbie Lepore, when he was in a coma after suffering a horrific brain injury almost four years ago. One physician told her to put him in a long-term-care home. She told herself, “They didn't know Trevor.” She was right.
The 44-year-old harnessed his willpower to the latest neuroscience, to build new pathways to get signals from his brain to his muscles so he could move and talk again.
He can talk, type, sit up and stand. He vows he is going to walk down the aisle at his July 24 wedding. Ms. Lepore said she doesn't expect that dramatic an entrance. “I'll be happy if he takes one step.”
Their love for each other, and the role it has played in his against-the-odds recovery, has come to define Captain Greene far more than the attack that damaged his brain when was serving in the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan. Canadians were horrified at the news that a fighter had driven an axe into his brain, but are heartened by how far he has come – and impressed by the woman who cheered every baby step along the away.
She has put aside her career as a chartered accountant to focus full-time on Capt. Greene's rehabilitation and takes a supportive role – quite literally – in his physiotherapy by helping to hold him up while he learns to control his muscles.
It takes a lot of willpower to retrain the brain, to put in the hours of physical and occupational therapy he does every day. He said he is motivated by his love for Ms. Lepore and their four-year-old daughter, Grace.
“Willpower is willing your body to do things you can't do,” he said. “When I was an athlete, I would use willpower to go beyond the pain. Now I'm willing my legs to flex when I push up. It is a conscious thing: I think, now gluteus maximus, now thighs, now calves, like that.”
Sometimes, he said, he can almost feel new pathways forming from the pins and needles in his arms or legs that mean his brain is being activated. His motor cortex, the region of the brain that usually controls movement, was badly damaged in the attack, so he has had to retrain his brain to make his body move.
“It is neuroplasticity,” he explained in an interview this week, before returning to Nanaimo, B.C., where he and Ms. Lepore and Grace live. He had been in Toronto to speak at the inaugural gala for the True Patriot Love Foundation, which supports the families of Canadian soldiers.
“They used to think the brain was like a computer chip. If it was damaged, the chip wasn't any good any more. Now they say there is a possibility that the brain can compensate. In the back of the skull, where my brains leaked out, it has to compensate for that.”
The neuroplastic revolution, as some call it, stems from discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s that showed how the brain physically changes as we learn, think and move.
This adaptive potential means the brain has the capacity to heal after an injury, to find new ways of doing things. With the right input, it can repair damaged circuits or create new ones.
Capt. Greene said progress is slow.
“I feels like being frozen in an iceberg and slowly thawing out.”
