With hockey shirts decorating the wall, a favourite video game on TV, and a cellphone not far away, Henry Black is everything you might expect from a 16-year-old.
But on June 25, 2024, a bike ride changed his life forever.
“It started off a very average day,” said Black, recalling the day he biked with a friend down to the water in the Scarborough Bluffs, a popular spot in Toronto’s east end.
The friends considered going for a swim, but the water was too cold, so they kept biking. It was getting dark, and the teenagers found themselves at the top of a hill. Black saw a small stump towards the bottom and wanted to jump over it with his bike.
“I started going down and I was, like, ‘Wait, I’m like going very fast,’ and then I remember being like, ‘Oh crap.’”
He hit a tree.
“Instantly I couldn’t feel [where] my body was in space and I couldn’t look down to where my legs and my arms were,” he said.
His friend called 911 and Black’s parents.
Black’s father, Gary, was out of town for business.
“I’m four hours away in Windsor, so I immediately left the dinner, got in the car, and drove,” said Gary. “It was probably the fastest drive I’d ever driven from Windsor to Toronto.”
Imaging revealed Black had a C4-C5 spinal cord injury. The team at SickKids hospital in Toronto transferred him to Sunnybrook for surgery.
“I remember how bumpy the Toronto roads were in the back of this ambulance and knowing Henry had a broken neck,” Gary said.
“I was nervous about (what) could something happen, you know, could it be further damage, how bumpy those roads were … I was just trying to reassure him that he was in the best hands possible.”
The accident rendered Black a quadriplegic.
For the last 11 months, he has been living at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Centre in Toronto. There he has been working to regain strength within his limited range of motion.
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Complex care pediatrician Dr. Priya Sayal says there have been some big wins during the recovery process as Black has learned to navigate his new reality.
“When he came to us, he had a tracheotomy and he required support for breathing,” Sayal explained.
“Over the course of his time here, his lungs have gotten stronger, his respiratory muscles have gotten stronger.”
But recovery has not always been easy.
“He has had a few instances where he’s been transferred back to SickKids for admissions, for various health reasons, and some of those are longer and some are shorter,” Sayal said.
“It’s hard because he comes back … he is weaker and it does feel like we have to rebuild some of those gains that we made.”
Black cannot walk and has limited movement in his hands and arms. Three weeks ago, he met with Dr. Jana Dengler, a peripheral nerve surgeon from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
On June 13, Dengler and another surgeon will perform a triple nerve transfer surgery on Black. He will be the youngest patient in Ontario to undergo the procedure.
“It’s a procedure where we essentially rewire the nerves in the upper extremity to give back some function,” Dengler explained. “We connect nerves that are working to nerves that (are) not working.”
Dengler said the surgery isn’t a well-known option for spinal cord patients but is hoping to change that through greater awareness. She notes there has been some hesitation on the clinician side.
“One of the issues is that this is a new application of an established surgical technique to a new patient population,” said Dengler. “We know that changing clinical practice in medicine takes a really long time.”
The ideal window to operate is between six and 12 months after injury.
“The hope with this upcoming nerve surgery is to make some of those muscles stronger and give him some more innervation to muscles in his upper extremities that he may not have had before,” said Sayal.
There are no guarantees the surgery will work, but Black and his family remain optimistic.
Black said he would love to be able to have a greater capacity for opening and closing his fingers and the ability to push down with his triceps.
“It could really open up a lot of doors for more independence,” he said.
Another long-range goal is to get Black back home. The family is currently fundraising to try to build an accessible laneway house.
“If it was me, I don’t think I would be so positive,” Gary said. “Maybe because he’s young and he doesn’t know better, or I just think his personality is such that he’s like a ray of sunshine. He brings that hope.”
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