The Incredible Power of Neuroplasticity

Stéphane Rouleau used to be an ultramarathoner and a cross-country mountain biker with Olympic potential.

He’d had a few concussions in the past– each time, the doctor would have him sign a form promising that he would buy a new helmet, then he would sleep it off. Then, one night, Rouleau passed out while sitting in his car after a first date.

“I was a cardio machine, and funnily enough, I had a stroke,” Stéphane says.

The stroke was caused by a carotid dissection, the most common cause of stroke in people under 50. It was bad enough that he was told he would never walk again.

But Stéphane was determined. He worked with a physiotherapist and eventually regained his ability to walk. Just over a year later, he was back at work.

Stéphane has had a remarkable recovery But it wasn’t easy. The first year, he slept almost nonstop. Four and a half years after the stroke, he still deals with memory issues and muscle atrophy on his left side. He also has a significant visual impairment, which means he has to be tested annually to keep his driver’s license – a test that makes him increasingly anxious, as he lives in a small town, Paris, Ont., with few transportation options.

And of course, he has to protect his head, which means no more high-risk sports. Though he misses his high intensity lifestyle, Stéphane says he feels “healthier, smarter, wiser, and better” since his stroke.

“I used to take crazy risks,” he says, describing himself as an adrenaline chaser and a workaholic.

“The stroke made me realize that I have only one life to live. I have to take care of it. Because if I’m not there for me, how can I be there for others?”

He credits his successful recovery to his attention to health and nutrition, his physical condition before his injury, and one key ingredient: neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to regrow new pathways to compensate for damaged or lost cells. At one time, it was thought that adult brains were stagnant; now we know this is not true, a fact that offers incredible hope to TBI patients, though research in the area is still scarce.

This is particularly remarkable in Stéphane’s case. A while after the stroke, a doctor showed him a picture of his brain: a chunk of the right hemisphere was gone. His brain had figured out how to work around the lost section to regain function.

“I would like fellow survivors to know that there is hope,” he says. “There is another life after the injury.”