Jamie Heath, Back to the

BACK TO THE

After relearning how to use her right side, Heath is back in the water and coaching

swimming. Photo by Michael Menn

BUTTERFLY

AFTER A STROKE PARALYZED HER RIGHT SIDE, JAMIE HEATH DREAMED OF SWIMMING WITH TURTLES. THAT DREAM, WITH SOME HELP FROM A NUMBER OF ORGANIZATIONS, GOT HER BACK TO SWIMMING BUTTERFLY.

“I’ve always loved turtles and wanted to swim with them,” says Jamie Heath, now a junior at Norwich University. Growing up in Barre, Heath learned to swim at age 6. Then, a year later, a rare tangle of blood vessels, a condition known as arteriovenous malformation, caused a stroke. After spending two weeks at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, and going through weeks of physical therapy, she made a full recovery.

“I bounced back very, very quickly because I was so young and the brain tissue was so fresh and new, that the brainwaves were able to connect back together,” she explains.

But then, at age 14, she experienced a second stroke. This time it impacted her ability to use her right side. She couldn’t lift her arm or do many of the things she used to be able to do. She couldn’t ski or run, play soccer or lacrosse.

“My whole right side was impacted. I can feel the line where it divides—there was just this numbness down one side” she said. There was lasting damage, and she wasn’t sure if she would ever recover or be able to swim again. There were more doctor appointments and physical therapy.

“I was really depressed at the time,” Heath recalls. It was hard for her to do anything, even get out of bed.

To lift her spirits, her family encouraged her to apply to the Make-AWish Foundation, which grants wishes to children who have critical illnesses. Heath had one wish: She wanted to swim with the turtles in Hawaii. And part of that was learning to swim again.

“My mother knew about Green Mountain Adaptive and I started out by skiing with them,” says Heath. The Stowe-based organization provides grants to people with a wide range of disabilities to help them get the equipment and training they need to be active and recreate—be it skiing, kayaking or swimming, indoor rock climbing or movement classes.

After skiing with them, GMA connected Heath with Cara Hancy, at the time the coach for the Central Vermont Swim Club and a certified physical trainer. “Cara looked at me and said: ‘Ok, you are on my swim team,’” recalled Heath, who then worked with Hancy and her physical therapists to relearn how to swim.

“I remember intensely trying to do laps because that’s what I was used to,” she says. “One day we had gotten my right arm out of the water and something in my head just knew. I took it out of the water for like a couple of strokes and I looked back at my mom and I was like, ‘Oh my god, did you just see that?’ It was awesome!”

Heath got her wish and in 2015 she flew to Hawaii to swim with the sea turtles. At the urging of the MakeA-Wish Foundation, Heath wrote a book about her experience, Wishes Are Medicine: How Make a Wish Gave Me Hope and Helped Me Heal, with illustrations by Vermonter Leonard Wells Kenyon. Make-A-Wish published it and since then, Heath has gone on to speak about her experiences.

She’s also back to swimming regularly. Her freshman year she joined Norwich University’s swim team, though she left the team a year later when too many other school requirements got in the way. Now a junior, Heath maintains a 3.9 grade point average, and while she’s no longer competing, she is swimming every weekend as a coach at the pool where she learned to swim.

And about that right arm that she thought she might not lift again? Heath is now swimming laps doing the butterfly. —L.L.