Wonder what this boy's life is going to be like after this. Steel rods holding his head onto his spine? Tragic.
Quote:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/goo...bfcL&ocid=iehp
A 4-year-old boy who was “clinically decapitated” in a recent car accident in Idaho survived after a rescuer resisted the urge to pick up and cradle the screaming child and instead held his head in place for a half-hour, most likely saving his life, his mother and the rescuer said.
The story of the boy, Killian Gonzalez, who endured one of the worst traumatic injuries that can affect small children in car crashes but escaped with his life through the actions of a good Samaritan, unfolded during a hailstorm on State Highway 51.
Killian’s mother, Brandy Gonzalez, said she was driving home to Nevada after attending a party in Idaho to celebrate the boy’s birthday when her car skidded and went into a lane of oncoming traffic, colliding with another vehicle.
“The last thing I remember is looking back at my baby,” she told a local television station, KBOI.
Killian’s skull was separated from his spine, and he also had a ruptured spleen and broken ribs and arms, KBOI said in a report from the hospital. Ms. Gonzalez suffered broken arms and legs. As for the condition of the other driver, Ms. Gonzalez described the person as having been pinned but O.K.
The accident happened in Owyhee County, which is in the southwestern corner of Idaho on the border with Nevada, at 3:14 p.m. on May 22, Chief Deputy Lynn Bowman, of the county Sheriff’s Department, said in a telephone interview.
Leah Woodward and her husband, Joel Woodward, an officer with the Nampa, Idaho, Police Department, were driving home from a camping trip when they saw the accident and stopped to help.
“We could hear a kid screaming, a little baby screaming,” she told the television station.
Officer Woodward broke into Ms. Gonzalez’s vehicle using a hitch. Ms. Woodward sat the boy upright and held his head in place, Ms. Gonzalez said.
“Inside, I am panicking, and I am thinking, ‘I don’t know what I am doing,’” Ms. Woodward told the television station. She held the boy still until emergency medics arrived, it said.
Ms. Woodward wrote on the Nampa Police Department’s Facebook page that her first instinct would have been to pick up the boy and cradle him.
“Thank God Joel knew what was needed because it definitely saved his life on that day,” she wrote, referring to her husband.
All three patients were flown by air ambulance to hospitals, Chief Deputy Bowman said.
Online and telephone messages left for Ms. Woodward and Ms. Gonzalez were not returned on Monday, and officials from the hospital, St. Luke’s Boise, where he was treated, declined to comment.
A fund-raising page for the boy said that he had “a fracture at the base of his skull where the brain stem connects to the spinal cord,” and that his neurosurgeons were considering a special collar to allow him range of motion.
Clinical, or internal, decapitation is a colloquial term for an injury known to surgeons as occipital-cervical dislocation. It happens when the ligaments, muscles and joints that connect the base of the skull to the top of the spine are damaged.
“So the term ‘decapitation’ in the true sense of cutting someone’s head off is a bit extreme,” said Dr. Nicholas Theodore, the director of spinal surgery at the Barrow Neurological Institute, who has operated on more than 60 patients with the injury. He has used titanium rods, wires or screws to reattach the base of the skull to the spine.
Dr. Theodore said the injury was almost always associated with high-speed accidents in which the head is pulled away from the spine, and it occurs more often with children than adults because their neck musculature is still undeveloped and weak.
“Especially younger patients, the head is like a bowling ball on a stick,” he said. “Their head sort of bobbles.”
Dr. Theodore, who treated a 2-year-old boy with the injury in 2010, did not comment on Killian’s case but said: “You don’t ever want to move an injury patient unless a car is on fire. Immobilizing a child is exactly what you want to do.”
In 2007, a Nebraska woman, Shannon Malloy, was internally decapitated during a car crash, but lived. Dr. Gary Ghiselli, an orthopedic spine surgeon at the Denver Spine Center, was quoted as saying in a report from CBS and The Associated Press that he had inserted screws in her head and neck and attached a device known as a halo to minimize movement.
“My skull slipped off my neck about five times,” Ms. Malloy was quoted as saying. “Every time they tried to screw this to my head, I would slip.”