On his nineteenth birthday Riley Dunda did the small things he loves to do.
He hung out with Kristy, his beautiful girlfriend of a year-and-a-half. He saw his best buddies—Mike, Nick and Jason—and a handful of old friends he grew up playing hockey with. Later, he’d head home for a birthday party with “the fam” at his parent’s place in Grimsby, which is still scattered with broken sticks and puck-marked drywall, the remains of battles with his taller-but-younger brother and best friend Liam, who is now a rookie with the Plymouth Whalers.
After his birthday party, Riley planned to watch the L.A. Kings try to sweep the New York Rangers in game four of the Stanley Cup Final. “It’d be a great gift,” he said about the Kings, his favourite team since his favourite player, Mike Richards, was traded from his old favourite team, the Philadelphia Flyers.
It was Richards he modelled his own game on—a mix of determination and grit, that “laid-back, but not afraid to get wild” persona, which made Riley a draft pick of the Sudbury Wolves and earned him a spot with the Hamilton Red Wings of the OJHL. And it was the Richards-style that he hoped would carry him to his goal of making the NCAA on a hockey scholarship.
It would be a simple nineteenth birthday—perhaps an unremarkable one, entirely ordinary—except that it was filled with the “many little miracles” of Riley Dunda’s life.
It was his dad, Richard, who said that—the part about the many little miracles—while his son and his friends were laughing and goofing around somewhere in the background at the Regional Rehab Centre at Hamilton General Hospital. It’s where Riley had spent most of his time since suffering a stroke on May 3. Richard was talking about the small miracles that kept his son alive that morning, when a tiny tear in the interior lining of his carotid artery caused a blood clot that travelled to his brain.
That Saturday, as Riley got up from watching TV to fix himself some breakfast, he collapsed. It was a miracle that his mother, Linda, a former nurse, heard the thud and ran for her son and recognized the stroke right away. It was a miracle that paramedics were just around the corner and that Hamilton General had a world-class stroke facility, and that an off-duty surgeon who happened to be at the hospital on a Saturday morning had studied for 21 years to specialize in the procedure that would save Riley’s life.
It was a miracle that Riley is one of the few people—“one in 1,000,” says Richard—who has extra blood vessels on the top of his head, carrying blood to his brain and limiting the damage.
Nine days later, Riley was out of acute care and entered rehab. He took small steps, holding onto a rail after a few days. After a couple weeks he moved from a wheelchair to a walker. Last week, he walked with a cane. By his nineteenth birthday he was able to walk on his own, though he’s not really supposed to. Not yet, anyway.
There is a long way to go, of course. The functionality of his right side is slowly coming back, but full recovery takes many steps. “He walked a kilometre the other day,” Richard said. “That’s like a marathon for you and me.”
It will take longer for other functions to return—he’s working hard on language structure, speech and writing. “He might stumble on the odd word, but his speech is doing really well,” says Richard. Doctors expect that Riley won’t have any long-term issues that will prevent him from doing things he would have done before.
Hockey is another matter, though. It will take a while to know if his refined spatial sense, the ability to keep up with the pace and movement of the game, will return. That’s many steps away. But he spent hours on his driveway doing exercises to work on his foot speed when he was younger, and he built his body into a machine that would carry him to his goal of making the NCAA, believing that the more time he put in, the closer he would get. That drive is built into him. He hasn’t lost a bit of it.
“I need to keep going, keep doing the workouts,” he said. “Hopefully we’re out of here quicker than expected.”
Support helps, too. From the friends and family that surrounded him—“They’re No. 1”—but also from new ones who connected with him. Like Richards, his hero, who sent him a tweet, and the Kings, who sent him a box of gear. “That was cool,” he said. And Brian McGrattan, the Flames enforcer from Hamilton, who spent a couple hours chatting with Riley in his hospital room. “That was sick.”
Those are all the small things that help along the way. And still recovering, Riley understood the power of those things and decided to raise $150,000 to support the care given through Hamilton General’s stroke program and West Lincoln Memorial Hospital. That might take some time, but there’s no doubt he’ll get there.
So there was a lot to celebrate on Riley Dunda’s nineteenth birthday. He did the things he loved to do, and loved that he could do them. Simple and ordinary, tiny things—the small miracles of his life.
