HERSHEY, Pa. — Matt Stoner was lying in his hospital bed at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center watching “The Waterboy” ― a movie about college football ― when suddenly what was on the screen seemed to come to life in his doorway.
Six hulking Penn State football players in their jerseys appeared and asked to come in.
Stoner blinked. He’d been in the hospital for two days because doctors thought he’d had another stroke. An earlier one had just struck two weeks ago, and that had prompted a stay at a different hospital. Now he no longer seemed capable of moving anything on the left side of his body, which is why they’d brought him here, to the Neuroscience Critical Care Unit on the fourth floor.
Whatever had happened had bruised his memory. “You tell me a number, and I’ll forget it 30 seconds later,” he said. His left arm and leg laid on the mattress like unfeeling weights as the big visitors he wasn’t expecting filed in.
Penn State football players regularly visit patients at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital to help brighten the days of families struggling with unthinkable illnesses. But during the busy pop-ins, the players don’t often have a chance to meet patients on the adult side of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. This time, on May 31, during their first in-person visit since before the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire team arrived on multiple buses and spent an hour or so dropping in on patients of all kinds — including the people in the Neuroscience Critical Care Unit.
The visit was a moment to remember for patients whose memories sometimes come dear. People occupying rooms on this floor have suffered strokes, brain hemorrhages and other traumas that affect the delicate machines inside their heads that recall dates, phone numbers and events both bad or, like this one, pretty amazing.
“These visits make those involved feel valued and help motivate patients and caregivers alike,” said Dr. Kevin Cockroft, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery.
Good defense
For a few glorious minutes Stoner and the six players chatted. One of them, No. 96, Matt Groh, a redshirt sophomore punter, hails from Dallastown in York County ― just a half hour drive from Stoner’s home in New Cumberland. They made small talk about weather, and all six players signed a football for him before moving on to the next room.
“My son’s even more into Penn State football than I am,” Stoner said, grinning. With his good hand, he texted his son, who’d also been struck by a number of strokes over the years. Eleven, in fact. The strokes had cost him his eyesight, but his son is such a rabid Penn State fan that he always puts the games on the TV anyway, cranking up the volume so loud “two-thirds of the neighborhood can hear it.”
On the opposite side of the unit, when the team handed Tom Lynn of Lancaster County an autographed football, the Vietnam veteran cocked a wrist and threw a spiral to his daughter, Dominique Miller. Her husband, Marlin, jumped in front of her at the last moment and caught the ball before she could lay a finger on it.
Everyone laughed.
“Defense,” Marlin announced, “has got to do its job.”
Dominique is a Penn State alumna, and she was thrilled when the team marched into the room. They chatted about their majors and their training.
Lynn was OK, they said. He had been admitted to the hospital to get restabilized, that’s all, Marlin said.
Lynn had been in the hospital for three days because of a complication with his myasthenia gravis, a chronic neuromuscular and autoimmune disorder that causes weak limbs and difficulty breathing, talking and swallowing.
“I’ll be stabilized when I can go back to putting food in my mouth,” Lynn said. He pointed to the tube running into one nostril. “Right now, it’s coming in through my nose.”