Spotlight: Patty De Guia

Patty De Guia defines unstoppable.

The mom of three has had four significant health challenges in her adult life.

Cancer.

An amputation.

An aneurysm.

A stroke.

And yet, this summer she stood amongst Canada’s best amateur bakers competing on the 8^th season of The Great Canadian Baking Show.

In 2006, Patty was diagnosed with skin cancer, which lead to the loss of her right leg above the knee. She came to West Park to learn how to live without a leg. The prosthesis she needed was unaffordable, so for nine years she went without, using a wheelchair or crutches.

She was now able to walk her kids to school – a dream she’d had since she lost her leg. She continued to bake – a hobby she picked up during the early days of her cancer diagnosis.

But in May 2020, Patty suffered a sudden and traumatic brain aneurism requiring surgery, during which she had a sub-arachnoid brain hemorrhage that caused a stroke affecting the left side of her body.

Her days in acute care were lonely and frightening. Due to pandemic restrictions, she couldn’t see her family in person, having to settle for phone and video calls instead of physical contact.

The stroke left the left side of her body feeling “dead” and the physical and neurological affects of the aneurysm and stroke required rehabilitation. Patty requested to be sent to West Park, wanting the comfort of a familiar environment.

And she got it.

“When I got to West Park, everybody remembered me.” Patty says. “Everybody. The nurses, the prosthetics team. So I didn’t feel like I was alone. I didn’t have my family, but they’re like my family. I cried – knowing ‘I’m not alone.’ I will never, ever, ever, ever forget that.”

The staff at West Park rallied around Patty. Nurses, therapists and physicians streamed in from the amputee unit to visit her on the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit.

She had to work on recovering movement to the left side of her body and re-learn cognitive tasks. She had trouble with adding and subtracting – crucial skills for any baker – and re-learned them in Occupational Therapy (OT). In OT she also solved puzzles, worked on memory tasks, and spent time in the Activities of Daily Living kitchen, re-orienting herself to a kitchen environment, including remembering to turn off the stove and re-learning cracking eggs, culminating in the preparation of a breakfast sandwich.

Patty left West Park a week early, the speed of which she credits to West Park.

“The warmth and familiarity and comfort I think are part of the reason recovery and rehab was so good and so fast. Just the fact that everyone wanted to cheer me on to get better, I think that was part of the reason why,” Patty says.

Soon after arriving home, in July 2020, she baked a chocolate cake. It took her four hours. She couldn’t have imagined that just four years from that moment she’d be baking in the iconic tent of The Great Canadian Baking Show for an audience of millions.

Today Patty says “I will always, always be grateful. I wouldn’t be here without them. I would not be the functioning human that I am without West Park. I owe everything that I am as a functioning person to West Park because of the staff.”