Lehe Returns Weeks After Stroke

After Jonathan Lehe’s last three weeks, it’s only appropriate that his boat made a miraculous comeback to win its race at Eastern Sprints yesterday.

Lehe, a junior in the Harvard heavyweight second varsity, suffered a stroke on April 20 and after surgery and nine days in the hospital returned to rowing last week.

“I was ready to come back,” Lehe said. “The doctor told me I had to wait three or four days. Beyond that point, I didn’t really feel like I had an excuse not to row. Also, for purely personal reasons, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

“We’re lucky that he was able to still be alive and functioning and able to come back to school, but to be able to come back to rowing a week after heart surgery—he’s committed,” captain Mike Skey said. “I have no idea what sparked him to do that. It’s a miracle.”

Three weeks ago, rowing wasn’t Lehe’s primary concern. When he got out of bed to turn off his alarm clock on April 20, Lehe managed to get one foot on the ground before he collapsed.

“The whole right side of my body…I could move it but I didn’t have fine motor skills,” Lehe said. “I couldn’t stand up. I was trying to talk and the right side of my mouth was drooping. I guess the language part of my brain was totally shut off. I had this idea going through my head that I was never going to talk again.”

After he gained control of his legs, Lehe got back into bed and waited out the 45-minute episode before walking to University Health Services (UHS) for attention. UHS sent him to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where an MRI revealed that he had a stroke.

“I just really didn’t have any idea of the seriousness of it,” Lehe said. “I kind of thought it was just a weird migraine or something.”

A blood clot had formed in Lehe’s legs and moved into the right atrium of his heart before flowing through a hole between his left and right atria and traveling up to his brain.

“I’ve been healthy my whole life,” Lehe said. “Nothing’s ever been wrong with me so it was just really freaky. Being in the hospital made it seem all the more real. You could tell [the doctors] were just trying to put on this face and try to be really gentle with me. The weird thing is in my ward in the hospital, I was the only person under 70.”

Lehe’s family has a history of heart disease, and his grandfather passed away after a stroke.

On April 24, Lehe had heart surgery to insert a metal device through a catheter in his thigh and into the hole between his atria. The surgeons also inserted a camera in his throat to monitor their progress.

Meanwhile, Lehe’s teammates prepared to race Navy and Penn.

“Because they only told me one day at a time what was going on, I held out hope that I was going to get to race that Saturday,” Lehe said. “I got out on Friday morning, and basically thought everything was back to normal.”

However, heart surgery confined him to land.

Instead of making the trip to Penn, Lehe traveled to Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester—the site of Eastern Sprints—to watch his high school, Kent, race against Phillips Exeter Academy. But Lehe’s trip was cut short when he suffered a transient ischemic attack, a stroke that occurs when the brain’s blood flow is briefly interrupted, in the car.

“It was just a little bit of numbness in my left arm and my mouth,” Lehe said. “That one was just five or 10 minutes. It’s something I wouldn’t have noticed a week earlier.”

Lehe took an ambulance from Worcester back to Brigham and Women’s, where he was assured that the attack was a natural side effect that occurred before the blood thinner could take effect.

“While I was on the Coumadin [the blood thinner], until it really kicks in, I was in a two-three day risk period,” Lehe said. “They kind of half expected that to happen, but they didn’t tell me.”

Lehe was released again on Monday morning. This time, he was instructed to administer a different blood thinner by giving himself shots in the stomach twice daily. The bruising resulting from the shots was made even more severe by the effects of the blood thinner.

Just days later, Lehe was back in the water, hurting only from the time off.

“Honestly, a bunch of us were surprised he could even come back so quickly,” sophomore coxswain Kit Randolph said. “He really wanted to be back in this boat.”

—Staff writer Jessica T. Lee can be reached at lee45@fas.harvard.edu.