After Jonathan Lehe’s last three weeks, it’s only appropriate that his boat made a miraculous comeback to win its race at Eastern Sprints yesterday.

Lehe, a junior in the Harvard heavyweight second varsity, suffered a stroke on April 20 and after surgery and nine days in the hospital returned to rowing last week.

“I was ready to come back,” Lehe said. “The doctor told me I had to wait three or four days. Beyond that point, I didn’t really feel like I had an excuse not to row. Also, for purely personal reasons, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

“We’re lucky that he was able to still be alive and functioning and able to come back to school, but to be able to come back to rowing a week after heart surgery—he’s committed,” captain Mike Skey said. “I have no idea what sparked him to do that. It’s a miracle.”

Three weeks ago, rowing wasn’t Lehe’s primary concern. When he got out of bed to turn off his alarm clock on April 20, Lehe managed to get one foot on the ground before he collapsed.

“The whole right side of my body…I could move it but I didn’t have fine motor skills,” Lehe said. “I couldn’t stand up. I was trying to talk and the right side of my mouth was drooping. I guess the language part of my brain was totally shut off. I had this idea going through my head that I was never going to talk again.”

After he gained control of his legs, Lehe got back into bed and waited out the 45-minute episode before walking to University Health Services (UHS) for attention. UHS sent him to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where an MRI revealed that he had a stroke.

“I just really didn’t have any idea of the seriousness of it,” Lehe said. “I kind of thought it was just a weird migraine or something.”

A blood clot had formed in Lehe’s legs and moved into the right atrium of his heart before flowing through a hole between his left and right atria and traveling up to his brain.

“I’ve been healthy my whole life,” Lehe said. “Nothing’s ever been wrong with me so it was just really freaky. Being in the hospital made it seem all the more real. You could tell [the doctors] were just trying to put on this face and try to be really gentle with me. The weird thing is in my ward in the hospital, I was the only person under 70.”

Lehe’s family has a history of heart disease, and his grandfather passed away after a stroke.

On April 24, Lehe had heart surgery to insert a metal device through a catheter in his thigh and into the hole between his atria. The surgeons also inserted a camera in his throat to monitor their progress.

Meanwhile, Lehe’s teammates prepared to race Navy and Penn.

“Because they only told me one day at a time what was going on, I held out hope that I was going to get to race that Saturday,” Lehe said. “I got out on Friday morning, and basically thought everything was back to normal.”

However, heart surgery confined him to land.