Jonah Solem’s recent double-medal win at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) swimming championships in Toronto tastes extra sweet.
One year ago, the Barrie teen was immobilized by a complicated recovery following surgery to address a brain abscess, a rare condition that could easily have cost him his life.
“After all the adversities he went through, to be able to have that kind of a comeback is actually amazing,” says his beaming mom, Tina.
Jonah, formerly a competitive athlete with the Barrie Trojan Swim Club, decided to dive back into swimming when he got to high school.
“I did the swim team (at Maple Ridge Secondary School) in Grade 9 and I had some pretty good times and I thought maybe I’d go back” to swim with the Trojans, he recalls. “I was placed in the lowest group at first.”
His times were quickly improving and when he returned to training at the start of the season the following fall, he set his sights on making the team’s high-performance group.
But then in December, he seemed to have come down with something he couldn’t shake and he was out of the pool for three weeks.
“It just got worse and worse and I was sick all the time,” says Jonah, who is 16 and in Grade 11. “They thought I had migraines and stuff like that.”
By the time Christmas came around, it was clear he wasn’t suffering from a simple sinus infection.
On the drive home from visiting his grandmother, he was in crisis and could barely stand the trip.
In hindsight, his mom recognizes this as the moment that the bacterial infection crossed over into the brain.
Jonah remembers his mom insisting that he have a CT scan at a subsequent medical visit.
And there it was, an usual growth on his brain.
Doctors in Barrie were consulting with specialists at the Hospital for Sick Children and they were confident it was an abscess and not a tumour. But it required immediate surgery and he was prepared for transportation to Toronto.
It was January, a full-fledged winter storm had set in and Highway 400 was closed. The idea of helicopter transport was explored, but that also became impossible because of the severe weather.
Jonah and his mom were taken off the ambulance and forced to wait for the highway to reopen.
Finally, making it to SickKids in the middle of the night, Jonah had an emergency craniotomy for a brain abscess at 2 a.m. on Feb. 4, 2023. He remained in hospital for 10 days, where he recalls being well cared for.
The road to recovery turned out to be anything but smooth, though. A PICC line, which stands for peripherally inserted central catheter, was inserted into his arm to allow antibiotics direct access to the large veins near the heart.
Instead of the typical six to eight weeks, Jonah had to live with it for close to five months as his body needed the extra help fighting the infection.
He gradually returned to school, doing some work online. But he had to drop his construction class.
He also returned to the gym to regain his strength, although the PICC line prevented him from doing any upper-body work, restricting him to lower-body exercises.
Suddenly, he was struck by severe bouts of gut aches. The strong medication caused him to develop gallstones so severe it caused pancreatitis, requiring the removal of his gallbladder.
Finally, on June 15, Jonah returned to SickKids to have the PICC line removed, a process that he was dreading.
“A little girl said it was fine,” he says now, finding some comfort in the consolation, but still describing the whole process as gross.
Back at home and without the PICC line, he was looking forward to get back to his full exercise regime.
“When I first came back, I was really weak,” he recalls. “I went to the garage trying to see how much I could bench and it was like nothing.”
Returning to school last fall for Grade 11, Jonah felt he had fallen too far behind to catch up to his goal of joining the high-performance group with the Trojan swimmers.
But he rejoined the high school's swim team. Hopeful, he got ready and attended the practices twice per week and qualified for the OFSAAs held at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre last week.
He came home with two medals for the 100-metre individual medley and 50-metre fly, in which he posted his personal best time, both in the qualification and final swims.
Jonah is, for the most part, fully recovered. He has some lingering peripheral neuropathy in his feet – another side effects of the drugs. That, too, however, is expected to dissipate with time.
The focus now is the future and his plan is to do a co-op in Grade 12 with the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program.
