CLEVELAND — Robbie Boyce is about three years removed from suffering a stroke that left the whole right half of his body paralyzed.

What You Need To Know

  • Robbie Boyce survived a stroke and returned to the baseball field months later 

  • Boyce won the 2022 Courage in Sports Medicine Award at the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission Awards

  • Boyce is now in college, studying to become a doctor

“It felt so weird, thinking about maybe one day getting back to that spot,” Boyce said. “But now, actually being here, being able to live my normal life feels awesome.”

This rare kind of stroke caused him to collapse, requiring emergency brain surgery. The Cleveland Clinic said about half of the people who suffer this kind of stroke don’t survive. Only a third who do survive make a full recovery.

Boyce didn’t just recover, he made it back to the baseball field five months after his stroke. He won the Cleveland Clinic’s Courage in Sports Medicine Award at the 2022 Greater Cleveland Sports Commission Awards ceremony.

“It feels like this is something that everyone just takes for granted,” Boyce said while on stage at the awards ceremony in 2022. “You can just get up and go get yourself a glass of water or something. But when you’re unable to be doing any of that, it’s so disheartening. And then once I was getting my strength back and being able to actually get up and do normal everyday things and be a regular teenage boy, that was just, it made me so happy.”

Now Boyce is a student at Case Western Reserve University with plans to go to medical school and become a doctor. His recovery helped him find his calling.

“I wanna be able to help these and people, whether it’s telling my story or being a doctor,” Boyce said.

He’s taking courses like chemistry and biology to start, and he was excited to tell the staff that helped him at the Cleveland Clinic.

“I told some of the nurses and the people that I know there that that’s my goal,” Boyce said. “And they’re being really supportive and telling me to keep working at it.”

He said the connections he made there allowed him to participate in brain injury lab research with the Cleveland Clinic.

“I thought that was a really good opportunity to try to contribute to what those doctors that helped me, so I jumped at that opportunity,” Boyce said.

Boyce said he hopes his story can inspire others and hopes his future as a doctor can spread positivity through medicine.

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