OWENSBORO, Ky. — Spencer Harris has had an amazing last two years; so much so, his story could be made into a movie.
The Senior at Owensboro Catholic was cruising through High School, earning a 4.0 grade point average and a 34 ACT score. He was President of the National Honor Society and a Governor’s Scholar. He was on the basketball and cross-country teams and an active volunteer in his community.
Then, the twist. As he says, “it was totally random. It was totally out of the blue. It was Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. Never forget that day.”
Out of nowhere, Spencer started to lose feeling in his legs due a catastrophic injury of the nervous system. Doctors think he had a stroke in his spinal cord.
He tells the story of that fateful day:
“I went to the gym that morning (and) lifted, nothing out of the ordinary. By noon I was starting to have some tingling, some pins and needles in my feet, which I thought was abnormal for sure. So I just kind of wiggle them around, like why are my feet asleep? And then eventually I (decided) I’m gonna go take a bath or something to try to wake my feet up, wake my legs up. When that failed, I was like, ‘I think we need to talk to somebody about this.’ So we called my uncle who is a doctor because he was the best connection that we had to somebody medical. We talked to him for a little while and ended up deciding that we needed to go to see somebody.”
“So we made our way to one of our local clinics in Owensboro and they basically said, ‘You need to go to the emergency room.’ At this point, I’ve gradually lost my sensation and my ability in my legs, I would say from noon to 3 p.m. was the biggest was the sharpest decline in my abilities,” he continued.
“What ended up happening was I lost all of my sensation and a lot of function from the waist down. I was essentially experiencing partial paralysis.”
His condition was not getting any better. “By this point it’s probably 4:00 or so in the afternoon and I’m really struggling. So we make our way to Owensboro Health Regional Hospital and we ended up waiting for five hours in the waiting room. Once we got in, they brought the doctor back and it was determined pretty quickly (that) we’re not equipped to keep you here. We need to send you to Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville. So they said it’ll either be an ambulance that comes and gets you or it will be a helicopter. They ended up sending a helicopter, which was so cool. I loved every second of it.”
He says they took the helicopter and landed in Louisville by around 3:00 a.m. local time and the medical team at Norton began running tests on him. Harris says he was there for the next three weeks.
“I was at a children’s hospital (but) I was 17. I still fit the criteria to be at a children’s hospital, but obviously I’m older than a vast majority of the patients that they see. So they’re not necessarily used to dealing with a 17-year-old kid who can fully comprehend every everything that they were gonna say to me about my case,” he shared. “The doctors weren’t saying anything necessarily about the future, but it was one of my nurses that came in and said, you know, they’re not gonna tell you this, but you really need to understand that there’s a realistic chance, a very realistic chance that you’re never gonna walk again. You know, I don’t want them to drop this bomb on you later.”
“I can’t remember if it was a doctor to give us the statistics or if it was something that we found online, but I think we heard a statistic at some point that from the rare cases of spinal strokes that we see, 25% are fatal within two weeks and 60% result in permanent paralysis. So that was what’s going through my head as far as that’s the expectation of, of what may happen to me. So I’m just sitting there, I’m trusting the Lord that he’s going to get me through it.”
Spencer says his faith allowed him to get through the process, saying, “I think I can honestly tell you that I did not panic once the entire way through. I can’t say the same about Mom and Dad. But I think I did a nice job of staying calm.”
“I go to a Catholic high school. I’m a very devout Catholic. I like to think that I have a very strong relationship with the Lord. I pray on the daily. So that definitely was what kept me through the whole thing was leaning on the Lord,” Harris shared. “So there was no reason why I shouldn’t respond in the best way that I know possible.”
He had several surgical procedures to treat inflammation in the spinal cord and spent two weeks at Norton Children’s Hospital, followed by a week at Frazier Rehab in Louisville. Amazingly, he was then cleared to return home.
He said the recovery process was “pretty remarkable.”
“You know, I’m sitting in the hospital at the beginning of it all and the nurse is telling me you may not walk again and then two and a half weeks later, I’m in rehab walking pretty well on my own,” he noted.
“Then you fast forward another two weeks and I’m at home and I’m doing outpatient therapy and instead of the focus being on, let’s get this kid walking again, the focus was on let’s play basketball this year. So within four weeks of this thing happening. I’ve increased exponentially in my abilities.”
But even with all that improvement, he still can’t fully feel his legs, and perhaps he never will. “I’ve yet to regain any sensation in my legs from the waist down. So even (if) you touch me today, it’s numb and tingly. I don’t feel it,” he explained.
Despite that, he went back to running cross country, even setting a personal record in a race when he broke his foot… because he didn’t realize he had broken it!
In the end, he doesn’t want his medical issues to define him. It will always be a part of who he is, but there are other aspects to his life, including his commitment to community service. He started the group “Seniors4Seniors” to visit residents at a local nursing home. The effort began when he had a random conversation with an older man at a local Panera and Spencer realized there was a need for interaction that wasn’t being met. He organized his fellow National Honor Society students to form a group to visit the Carmel Home. He says “we’ve logged hundreds of hours in the nursing home as a group. It’s just been really fantastic and I’m really proud that I took the initiative to get that going. You can physically see the difference that you’re making on somebody’s face and in their life.”
Jeff Fritz is chair of the Math Department at Owensboro Catholic and the sponsor of the National Honor Society. He says Spencer will make sure this group becomes a permanent part of the Owensboro community.
“He didn’t want this organization to be a one and done. He didn’t want it to be a senior year and then kind of dropout. He wants to make sure there’s a legacy of this when he leaves next year. He’s really trying to make a community within a community, which I think is really kind of neat. You know there’s a spark in him that everyone sees. He’s an amazing kid,” Fritz said.
Spencer’s future will also involve giving back, as his situation has convinced him to enter the world of medicine. He was accepted into his dream school of Notre Dame, where he’ll study neuroscience and minor in Spanish. “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. I’ve always believed that was the career that I was going to pursue,” he said.
Fritz says Spencer is a student who will be remembered. “In this world today, it seems like just good kids are hard to come by. In the 31 years I’ve been teaching, he’s in my top 5%. He is an outstanding kid. He is a self-starter. He doesn’t like to brag on himself, but he’s one of these kids that if an obstacle comes his way, he’s going to figure out how to get around it,” Fritz shared.
That’s been demonstrated in real life, making Spencer Harris a deserving Spectrum News 1 High School Scholar.