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Helping Tara on her journey
Published July 9, 2008
It isn’t in Tara Way’s nature to let people spend much time worrying about her, her parents said.
Less than two weeks after two life-saving brain surgeries, Tara Way let her mother know she would be OK.
It came out like a whisper, the promise of a sound, really, more than the actual thing.
“The other day I was over,” Rosemary Kuban said. “And she looked at me, and kind of mouthed and said, ‘I remember everything.’”
Tara doesn’t have medical insurance, and Medicaid allowed her only 10 days in the hospital after two brain surgeries and an emergency Cesarean section. Family members believe she should have been there longer, said her brother-in-law, Jeremy Way, who is a paramedic and firefighter.
When Tara went home on June 8, she couldn’t move her right side and she couldn’t speak. Her right arm hung useless beside her wheelchair. Her right leg was dead weight.
Much of the light brown hair which covered the left side of her head was gone after being shaved for two brain surgeries. Her smile stretched only halfway across a pretty, youthful face — roadblocked by a trio of conditions named aphasia, apraxia and dysarthria, said Alisha Way, her sister-in-law and speech therapist.
Aphasia inhibits general word recall, apraxia is a motor skill disorder and dysarthria is a weakening of her facial muscles.
“She has a triple-whammy,” Alisha Way said. “As part of the aphasia, her brain will spit out the wrong word. For some reason, she recognizes things but her brain triggers a different word. The dysarthria had her face kind of drooping on the right side. She was very worried about that.”
A LONG ROAD
The first major breakthrough came before Tara was even released from the hospital. Matt began to sing a song the two had written for their daughter. Tara’s face registered recognition, and she tried to join in, but the words came out only as unrecognizable sounds. Until the last line.
“Point her to you,” Tara said, joining Matt.
To members of her family, it might as well been a Grammy performance.
“Jeremy and I were jumping up and down,” Alisha said. “... She wasn’t supposed to be able to do that.”
Since coming home, Tara has followed a strict, daily regimen of often agonizing physical and speech therapy.
The former Needville High School basketball player strains to lift her right arm, flex her right wrist or move her right leg only an inch or two.
“You can do it, Tara,” her husband, Matt Way, said as the new mother tried to flex her right tricep for a 15th time during a grueling workout at Alisha and Jeremy Way’s house outside Sweeny.
“It’s hard,” she said through clenched teeth.
But not so hard she doesn’t keep trying. Following a brief rest, Tara was back at it, moving a right arm that just one week before wasn’t strong enough to hold her 38-ounce, 3-week-old daughter, Myla Faith.
And laughing from lips almost immobile following her stroke.
And moving her right leg eight inches off a black mat placed on the hardwood floor of Jeremy and Alisha’s home.
“You’re doing great,” her husband said. “You couldn’t even get that leg to the edge yesterday.”
Because the family can’t afford a physical therapist, Matt and Jeremy team up with Alisha to take on that role. Both men participated in high school athletics and know something about muscle functions, plus a physical therapist at UTMB gave them some pointers before Tara was released.
With help, Tara rolled onto her back to work on another muscle group.
“Swing at Matt,” Alisha joked while asking Tara to rotate her right shoulder.
Not many men would be excited to be smacked by their wife, but Matt seemed elated when Tara’s fingers brushed his cheek. Tara laughed, then took another swipe at Matt.
Her speech also is improving at a surprising rate, Alisha Way said.
When the family began speech therapy, Alisha asked simple yes and no questions. Sometimes Tara responded correctly, other times not. The first concern was Tara’s ability to comprehend words. Exercises were meant to determine, to some extent, damage to her ability to think.
“When she began to be able to speak a little better, we started working with normal household items because they were familiar to her,” Alisha said. “At the beginning, she was not catching the difference. I’d hold up a knife and she’d say fork.”
It didn’t take long for Alisha to realize Tara recognized items but was not yet able to say what she wanted.
“I’d hold up a toothbrush and she’d say ‘hairbrush,’” Alisha said. “Then she’d correct herself.”
Tara’s comprehension was good five weeks after the stroke, Alisha said. While her speech still is broken and comes in five or six words at a time, she recognizes objects and the actions they perform. If shown a hammer, Tara can show it’s something to swing. When shown a needle, she makes sewing motions.
Tara has never been one to burden others with her own problems, said her father, Robert Kuban.
“She’s the kind of person who really would rather give than receive,” he said. “She doesn’t want other people to do for her. She wants to do things for others and has always been that way.”
And so far, the young mother is doing all she can to give assurance to her family, and to prepare for the day her daughter comes home.
“Her speech is like baby talk, but she’s trying so hard to get better,” Rosemary Kuban said. “When she first came home and someone pointed to me, she could say, ‘Mama.’
“When I’d ask what her favorite color was and she’d said, ‘Urple,’” Kuban said. “We’re so grateful she knows who we are, and that she’s married and has a little baby.”
BABY STEPS
As small as progress might seem to those who see her every day, UTMB nurse Karen Garcia is pleasantly surprised twice a week when the family visits Matt and Tara’s daughter, Myla Faith. Born at 1 pound, 13 ounces and dropping to 1 pound, 7 ounces before beginning her own recovery, Myla will be in the hospital until she reaches what would have been a normal birth weight, Garcia said.
The registered nurse doesn’t see the work done in Jeremy and Alisha’s home each day, but she does see the result.
“It’s awesome,” Garcia said. “She’s better every time I see her.”
Myla’s pediatrician, Dr. Karen Shattuck, also notices the change.
“She’s an amazing young lady,” Shattuck said.
Matt’s father, Pastor Jim Way, shares the medical establishment’s incredulity at Tara’s rapid recovery. It might be a medical miracle, but Jim Way believes there’s more to it than happenstance.
“The surgeon said he couldn’t believe he was talking to her two weeks ago,” Jim Way said. “He said God has a wonderful plan for her life.”
John Lowman is a reporter for The Facts. Contact him at (979) 849-8581.
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