Instead of making the trip to Penn, Lehe traveled to Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester—the site of Eastern Sprints—to watch his high school, Kent, race against Phillips Exeter Academy. But Lehe’s trip was cut short when he suffered a transient ischemic attack, a stroke that occurs when the brain’s blood flow is briefly interrupted, in the car.

“It was just a little bit of numbness in my left arm and my mouth,” Lehe said. “That one was just five or 10 minutes. It’s something I wouldn’t have noticed a week earlier.”

Lehe took an ambulance from Worcester back to Brigham and Women’s, where he was assured that the attack was a natural side effect that occurred before the blood thinner could take effect.

“While I was on the Coumadin [the blood thinner], until it really kicks in, I was in a two-three day risk period,” Lehe said. “They kind of half expected that to happen, but they didn’t tell me.”

Lehe was released again on Monday morning. This time, he was instructed to administer a different blood thinner by giving himself shots in the stomach twice daily. The bruising resulting from the shots was made even more severe by the effects of the blood thinner.

Just days later, Lehe was back in the water, hurting only from the time off.

“Honestly, a bunch of us were surprised he could even come back so quickly,” sophomore coxswain Kit Randolph said. “He really wanted to be back in this boat.”

—Staff writer Jessica T. Lee can be reached at lee45@fas.harvard.edu.