“He basically had to rewire his brain to acknowledge his feet and his legs.”
As his mom, Amanda, described, this would be the new normal over the next few months for 12-year-old Mason Doherty, whose life changed after suffering a concussion in a flag football game this past October.
Mason, an avid Eagles fan from Orlando, Florida, went home after the game and began to experience concussion symptoms. Over the next few days, he began walking with his legs and feet crossing over each other and was eventually admitted into the hospital.
“He was able to, kind of walk into the hospital, but by the end of it, I mean, they were lifting him with sheets just to get him on a stretcher because he couldn’t feel or move anything from the waist down. It was a gradual regression. He went from walking funny to barely being able to stand. He was in so much pain,” Amanda said.
Despite being diagnosed with a concussion, no one could understand why Mason’s condition was regressing, as he lost feeling in his toes, then his feet, and up to his waist.
After numerous blood tests, MRIs, X-rays, and dozens of other tests, Mason was diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), which is a result of the body sending too many pain signals to a certain area, leading to the brain no longer sending signals to the rest of the body.
“We wanted to bring him home, but there was no physical way we could possibly do that, because it took three people and a machine to lift him up just to get him to go to the bathroom,” Amanda said. “We knew we couldn’t support him in that way, and he needed around-the-clock speech, OT (Occupational Therapy), PT (Physical Therapy), every day because he was still having a lot of the concussion symptoms that come with it, like memory loss, childlike behavior, and confusion.”
After 10 days in the hospital, Mason was moved to Nemours Children’s Hospital, which had an in-patient rehabilitation program.
With FND, there is no timetable or guarantee as to how long – or if – someone will be fully healed. The Doherty family found hope when Mason began wiggling his toes and moving his feet.
After spending the first 10 days in a hospital bed not being able to move, he lost a lot of his muscle strength and function. At Nemours the goal was to start building that back up, starting with moving into a wheelchair on day one.
“He basically had to rewire his brain to acknowledge his feet and his legs, and so that was a big part of what Nemours Hospital did for him, was having him perform physical therapy exercises while simultaneously working on cognitive skills,” Amanda said.
Since football was so important to him, one of the trainers at Nemours, Jermaine, would throw the football with him every day during his physical therapy sessions while he practiced walking. The exercises made his brain focus more on throwing the ball rather than the physical act of walking, which gave the same result without focusing on the problem of his legs not functioning properly.
For Mason, along with the support of his family, friends from school, and those in the hospital, there were two things that helped him during his recovery – the Eagles and a Rubix Cube.
