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Gordie Howe making remarkable progress

January 25, 2015, 10:22 AM ET [3 Comments]
Bob Duff
Detroit Red Wings Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
The Howe family has chartered a private jet and it's full steam ahead in regards to plans for the patriarch of the clan, Detroit Red Wings legend Gordie Howe, 86, to make an appearance at the Feb. 6 Kinsmen Sports Celebrity Dinner in his hometown of Saskatoon, Sask.

Howe has made a remarkable recovery from the stroke he suffered late last October since undergoing experimental stem cell treatments last month in Mexico.

“We were just completely blown away by his response (to the treatments),” said Howe's youngest son Murray, himself a doctor. “I’m still astonished.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in medicine.”

Ever since the Dec. 8 treatments, Gordie isn’t just getting better, his condition is improving by leaps and bounds.
Howe’s first treatment involved an injection into his spine. Afterward, he was required to lie on a bed for eight hours.

Once that time passed, a nurse came to see if Howe needed to go to the bathroom. When Howe answered in the affirmative, Murray went and got a container.

“He was already using more words and that alone was amazing to me and then he said, ‘No, I’ll go to the bathroom,’” Murray recalled. “I said ‘Dad, you can’t walk,’ and he said, ‘The hell I can’t,’ and he sits up.”

Howe walked under his own power to the bathroom.

“To me it was almost a biblical moment,” Murray said. “I was absolutely stunned. He repeated that two other times during the night when he had to go to the bathroom.”

The next day, Howe underwent an IV infusion of stem cells and was discharged from hospital. The family returned to their San Diego hotel. Howe was so happy to be walking again he argued with staff that ordered him to obey hospital policy and leave the facility in a wheelchair.

“That evening, we were back in San Diego and he’s walking around the hotel room under his own power,” Murray explained. “He’s making the beds in the hotel. I said, ‘Dad, we’re in a hotel. The maids will make them.’ And he’s like, ‘No, I’ll give them a break,’ because he likes to make beds.

“Every day since then, he’s continued to improve. Down in Texas, we walked about a half mile in total to a mall. He had to sit down about two or three times just to rest, but he’s completely walking on his own.

“I kicked around a soccer ball with him. He’s playing driveway hockey with his grandsons. He’s faking out his great-grandson and then shooting the puck through the five hole. You really couldn’t even tell he had a stroke at this point.

“It’s so phenomenal.”

The Howes have also seen significant improvement in their father’s mental capacities. He can carry on conversations and identify objects, though there are still short-term memory issues related to his dementia symptoms.

“His sense of humor is just brilliant,” Murray said. “It’s really fun to be around him. He understands who he is and what’s going on.”

It's a compete reversal from Gordie's condition at the beginning of December.

“He pretty much had one foot in the grave at that point,” Murray Howe said. “He wasn’t really eating. He couldn’t stand under his own power. He wasn’t really talking.

“We just hated to see him in the condition he was in. We were thinking he maybe had two or three weeks to live."

As a physician, Dr. Howe is the first admit he originally scoffed when Dr. Maynard Howe – no relation – contacted him about their stem-cell program.

“I was more than skeptical,” he admitted. “I really didn’t know anything about it.

“It wasn’t really even on my radar screen.”

The way the procedure works is that first the stem cells infused into the body travel to damaged areas of the brain to begin repairs. Eventually, the stem cells enable regeneration of new brain cells.

Tests of the treatments are ongoing in the United States and no information can be released until those tests are finalized.
Dr. Howe looked at clinical studies that had taken place in Russia and Mexico, where the treatment is already approved. They considered the international attention that Gordie’s treatments would draw and figured that there was no way the company would offer to give their father this type or procedure if they weren’t confident that it would work.

“The more I read I just was astonished at No. 1 the safety of it, that really there’s very little chance of adverse reaction, and the successes that I’ve seen are just mind-boggling,” he said. “They said, ‘We can’t guarantee that your dad is going to get better, but we suspect that he will and we hope that he will. We’d really like to give it a try.’

“They had their reputation on the line. If something went wrong or if it didn’t really help, they would look silly.”

Instead, to the Howe family, they look like miracle workers.

“Really, if he gets no more improvement than what he has today, then we are still ecstatic,” Murray Howe said. “He’s happy as a clam, he’s strong as a bull. He’s gained 20 pounds.

“He’s so much stronger and he’s able to do all the things he likes to do now. We could have never asked for more than that.”

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