LEBANON — The longest 15 minutes of Noah Tyler’s life crawled past with the Lebanon High student on his side in a hospital bed, knees clutched to his chest and under strict orders not to move. Behind him, doctors forced a large-bore needle through his skin and into his spinal column to withdraw a fluid sample.
Tyler was given a numbing agent to mask the needle’s initial entry, but it only provided so much relief. Then a sophomore, he underwent the procedure in the winter of 2018.
“You can feel this huge needle inching into your spine, and I was terrified,” Tyler recalled. “I just kept telling myself ‘Everything is all right. Everything is all right. You’ll never have to do this again.’
“But it definitely was worth it in the end, even though I hated every minute of it.”
That’s because, improbably, Tyler will start on Lebanon’s offensive and defensive lines on Sunday when the top-seeded Raiders tackle No. 2 Trinity in the NHIAA Division III football championship game at the University of New Hampshire. The 5-foot-11, 240-pound senior has been outstanding for a team that’s attempting to capture its first title since 2010.
“He’s always been one of the kids with the most heart,” said Lebanon co-captain Wade Rainey, a senior who’s played with Tyler since seventh grade. “He’s a driving force behind the team.”
Tyler saw varsity playing time as a freshman and, the next season, was competing against visiting Plymouth on Oct. 17, 2017, when he began showing signs of distress. Tyler left the action with the stunned expression and glassy eyes typical of having suffered a concussion.
That was the best guess of Lebanon’s athletic trainer and an orthopedic resident on the sideline, but Tyler himself was puzzled. He’d suffered a concussion before, and this felt different. However, he was dizzy, confused and struggling to move — in no condition to dispute the initial diagnosis.
Teammates later draped Tyler’s arms over their shoulders and all but carried him out of the locker room and to his mother, Donna, an emergency room nurse. She also thought Noah was concussed, but shortly after arriving home, he suffered multiple non-epileptic seizures, his body stiffening while he also shook and became unable to speak.
Donna Tyler called 911 and her son spent the night in the hospital, his football season over. He was given an electroencephalogram to monitor his brain’s electrical activity, with electrodes placed over his entire scalp. No additional diagnosis was forthcoming, however, and his condition continued to be treated as a traumatic brain injury. A magnetic resonance image and another EEG, this time while being videotaped, came up empty.
Sensitivity to light and sound marked Tyler’s condition, and he tended to wear sunglasses and ear plugs when he left the house. His first attempt at returning to school ended when he suffered a seizure in geography class, requiring another 911 call and medics to wheel him away on a stretcher. In the months to come, Tyler would learn to anticipate such episodes by his heart racing, profuse sweating and a clicking feeling inside his head.
“You all of a sudden just pass out and see nothing but darkness,” Tyler said. “Then you wake up and now you’re in the hospital, this unrecognizable place, and that just scared me a lot.”
During the winter of his sophomore year, Tyler began suffering numbness, sometimes on one side of his body and sometimes in a specific limb. Searching for answers, his doctors ordered the spinal tap procedure and sent the sample to a state lab for analysis.
After a wait of a couple of months, results revealed Tyler was suffering from Jamestown Canyon virus, which attacks the neurological system. Severe cases can cause infection and inflammation in various tissues, from the membranes surrounding the brain to organs composed of “smooth muscles,” or those not under voluntary control.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website notes that Jamestown Canyon virus often doesn’t result in any symptoms for those bitten by the mosquitoes through which it is spread. Those who do suffer symptoms mostly exhibit them for only a couple of weeks. The affliction is so rare that Donna Tyler said she discovered fewer than five people a year are typically infected in New Hampshire.
There’s no vaccine and no cure for Jamestown Canyon and, in Noah Tyler, it also triggered an autoimmune reaction that left him overly susceptible to colds and pneumonia, which he’s suffered twice since his diagnosis. Donna Tyler said the length of her son’s seizures usually ranged from 30 seconds to 10 minutes and resulted in four ambulance trips from her house and several from school.
No less stressful than the physical challenges was the emotional upheaval in Noah Tyler’s life. Although inclined to be in the background rather than in front of a group, he’d always enjoyed school’s social aspects and played basketball and lacrosse in addition to football. Now he was spending considerable time at home, often alone while his parents worked and sleeping because he didn’t know what else to do.
Tyler’s condition required him to acquire reading glasses and, when in class or watching instruction via Skype or FaceTime, he struggled to hear the teacher’s voice clearly and focus on lecture points. When teachers moved about, Tyler’s constant headache worsened as he tracked them with his eyes.
“There were a lot of days I wanted to give up,” said Tyler, adding that he suffered from anxiety and depression. “You’re sitting in your room in isolation with no one to depend on. It’s the loneliest feeling.”
In an attempt to reverse Tyler’s autoimmune issues, his medical team prescribed intravenous immune globulin therapy. On back-to-back days once a month, he would be hooked to an IV for two to four hours at a time, receiving a super-concentrated collection of antibodies designed to fight infection.
The sessions left Tyler exhausted, and he would sleep much of the following day. However, his symptoms lessened and he returned to football for the 2018 season’s final two games. His parents knew he wasn’t fully recovered, but he’d been cleared by his neurologist and they wanted their son to regain some sense of normalcy.
“You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Jay Tyler, Noah’s father, said of the decision to let his son compete again. “But he had lost confidence in himself, and you wanted a way for him to relieve some of that stress.”
Noah Tyler briefly joined Lebanon’s fledgling wrestling program last winter but suffered a seizure on the mat during a bout. He was a reserve on the lacrosse team during the spring but wasn’t headache-free until June of this year. By that time, the rising senior had so much pent-up energy that he spent six or seven days a week working with former Raiders football player and personal trainer Ethen Perkins through a local gym.
Gorging on burgers, steak and protein shakes, Tyler gained more than 30 pounds and again became an anchor on Lebanon’s football line. The Raiders (10-1) have held eight opponents to seven or fewer points, sparked by Tyler, who transforms from a quiet student to a tenacious, raucous leader on game day.
“He used to have to watch from the sidelines, and it was like he was there in person but not in spirit,” said senior guard Mason Adams. “You wondered if he’d ever return. He has the highest motor of any kid on the team, and to see him out on the field is the best thing in the world.”
Said head coach Chris Childs: “When he came back, he gave our line a boost, an attitude we didn’t have. He’s got a personality that makes other kids want to get after it.”
Tyler, 18, recently earned his driver’s license and plans to attend college next year. He said the illness changed him.
“I definitely appreciate things more,” Tyler said. “I’ve been playing with these guys since I was in third grade. Seeing how we’ve grown up and to be on our way to a championship is amazing.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.