An Australian toddler who was internally decapitated during a near-fatal car accident is expected to survive after doctors successfully reattach his head to his spine in what some have been calling a miracle procedure.
According to BBC News, 16-month-old Jaxon Taylor and his family were involved in a head-on collision in New South Wales. The impact broke his C1 and C2 vertebrae, causing his head to be separated from his neck. Doctors used a part of his rib to graft the vertebrae together as part of an operation that the New York Daily News said took roughly six hours to perform.
His mother, Rylea Taylor, explained that she was driving with Jaxon and his nine-year-old sister Shane in the car and going about 70 mph when they crashed head-on with another vehicle in September. Rylea was unharmed thanks to the car’s airbags, and Shane emerged with serious but not life threatening abdominal injuries. Jaxon was not so fortunate, however.
“The second I pulled him out, I knew that his neck was broken,” Rylea told the Daily News. He was airlifted to a Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, where spinal surgeon Dr. Geoff Askin discovered that the boy suffered an internal decapitation (an injury in which his head was forcibly removed from the neck). Luckily, his spinal cord was not damaged.
A rare recovery, but not the only one of its kind
Dr. Askin and his colleagues were able to reattach Jaxon’s vertebrae using wire and a bone graft fashioned from his ribs. While the toddler will have to wear a medical halo as his neck heals over the next two months, the medical team anticipates that he will make a complete recovery.
Rylea called it “a miracle”, and Dr. Askin told the Daily News that most children “wouldn’t survive that injury in the first place, and if they did and they were resuscitated then they may never move or breathe again.” The spinal surgeon also told Australian media that Jaxon’s injury was the worst of its kind he had ever seen, so it’s just that much more amazing that he is expected to be sent home from the hospital within the next few days.
While rare, internal decapitations such as the one suffered by Jaxon are not unprecedented. Back in 2011, a 20-year-old woman from River Oaks, Texas suffered similar injuries when the vehicle she was riding in went airborne and crashed into a culver six days before Christmas. The woman, Amber McKinney, had her head separated from her spine and was not expect to survive.
McKinney spent two weeks in a coma, and then had to relearn how to walk, talk and used the left side of her body, according to local media reports. Just over one month after the accident, she was able to walk without assistance and regained the use of her left arm.
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Feature Image: BBC/YouTube
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