Elliot's Story

Speaker 1: ... he saw on his phone that you had phone calls from the Highway Patrol, the Ohio Highway Patrol. And he came down and he grabbed me and he said, "Something's happened. We got to go."

Speaker 2: We received a phone call that Elliot had been transported via care flight to the Miami Valley Hospital.

Speaker 3: So, the report that I got for Elliot was that he was, I think, a 22-year-old young man. A new college graduate. He had been in a horrible automobile accident.

Speaker 1: Two nurses and a fireman were the first responders, and then another gentleman who'd actually had a cervical injury, so, he was also a first responder. Then, they were monitoring Elliot and lost his pulse.

Speaker 5: When EMS arrived on scene and found Elliot, they began their care and they immediately loaded him into the ambulance and took him immediately to Atrium Medical Center, which is a level three trauma center.

When he arrived at Atrium Medical Center, that was where the procedures were done where they did a needle thoracenteses, where they put the hole in his chest to alleviate pressure that was being placed on his heart from his lung. That was actually potentially stopping his heart from beating. When they placed that needle in his chest, he had return of spontaneous circulation and his heart began to beat again.

Speaker 3: Elliot had a severe brain injury, which is why he was transferred to Miami Valley Hospital, which is our level one trauma center.

Speaker 2: Initially, we did think about, did we need to get him closer to home. You know, back to Cincinnati. That was a short discussion that we quickly determined that Miami Valley was the place for Elliot to recover.

Speaker 3: With the bleeding in the brain, the body's normal response is to begin swelling and we have to do everything possible to prevent the swelling within the brain.

Speaker 1: So, they had to install a bolt into his head, which is what monitors your cranial pressure.

Speaker 3: If the pressure had not been relieved, then the cervical injury would probably not have mattered, because it's doubtful that he would have survived.

Speaker 1: We had several layers then, at that point, so we were working with Doctor [Kyanga 00:03:40], who is your cervical, your spinal cord surgeon, but then we were also working with the physicians who were monitoring his cranial pressure, so, I guess, neuro. So, there was a little bit of difference in trying to arrive at when he should have a spinal cord surgery. There's a window, apparently, of opportunity and you need to get him in, I think, in 72 hours. So, we had a 72 hour window, but we needed his cranial pressure to go down before he was stable enough, I think that they considered him stable enough. So, we literally did it at like the 75th or 76th hour.

Speaker 2: Things were changing fast. You don't have a whole lot of time. He was in brain surgery at a, what felt like, five minute notice. But we had complete confidence with people that we didn't know, you know, prior to any of this, that they would be able to do the job, and they did it.

Speaker 3: In the surgery, itself, they used some electromagnetic pulses in order to see whether or not signals would travel through the spinal cord. There was some damage to the spinal cord, itself, in Elliot's case, which we knew at that point likely meant some level of paralysis for him.

Speaker 1: As soon as we heard that he was paralyzed, literally, paralyzed from here down, we started researching it and then we had the spinal surgery, and we were told ... Doctor Kyanga came out of the spinal surgery and told us that it was considered incomplete. Incomplete means that when they ran some electrical tests, that there were some ... something was firing and running down through his hands and his fingers, half way down one leg, and all the way down to his toes in the other. So, I think that gave Craig and I, sort of, a sense of hope that, you know, maybe there's potential here.

Speaker 2: In my mind, there was never a concern with whether Elliot was going to survive. It was going to be what condition would he be upon surviving.

Elliot: I don't remember what happened. It's honestly just like you're living normal life at 23, and then you fell asleep and you wake up and suddenly you don't really know what happened. You just like, I guess this is what I have to do now. This is what I'm dealing with. You'd be surprised how well you can deal with something, like when it's your only option. So, when it's all you have to deal with, it's just, you'll figure out a way to look at the bright side.

Speaker 1: You know, when you think about it, they're seeing us in our most vulnerable. When we're in there, we're so exposed and so vulnerable, so, to be able to somehow manage Elliot's care while managing us, is, I guess what I appreciated.

Elliot: Just the whole way of my injury, the events played out. The fact that there was a nurse, the firefighter, right behind me when I crashed, as well as being so close to a level one trauma care hospital, that's just all been so ... it's odd the way that certain things play out and I'm very grateful to have ended up at Miami Valley.

Speaker 2: From not being familiar with Miami Valley Hospital, this will forever be a part of our lives then, as well as the staff there. Just in an instant like that, we became a part of Miami Valley and Dayton for a 30-day period and that will continue on in the future that they played a critical and vital role with getting Elliot to the next step of therapy and will continue to build from there.