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Shannon Reilly was doing a back flip on a trampoline during a soccer party at a gymnasium when she realized she’d made a terrible mistake.
As she landed on her head, the 14-year-old heard her neck pop."When I went to get up, my arms wouldn’t move," she said.During the ambulance ride, Shannon started to regain feeling in her arms and was able to move her legs. In the emergency room of Cook Children’s Medical Center, she talked to her parents as they waited for her X-ray results.It was only when someone rushed into the room and taped Shannon’s head to the table that Sandra and Tom Reilly realized something was seriously wrong."We just didn’t know how bad," Sandra Reilly said.The X-rays revealed broken bones in Shannon’s neck that were pressing against the spinal cord. The ligaments, joints and a disc were injured. One of four main arteries that feeds the brain was kinked."Had she moved anymore, she would have compressed the spinal cord to the point that she would have functional loss," said Dr. Richard Roberts, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Cook Children’s Medical Center.In other words, she would be paralyzed from the neck down. Ninety-nine out of 100 patients with this type of injury are paralyzed, the family was later told. Shannon was the exception. From the moment she landed on the trampoline, great care had been taken to keep her neck stable.Her father said it wasn’t so much that Shannon had a miracle recovery as it was she had a miraculous escape."God wrapped his hands around her spinal cord while those bones went flying everywhere," he said.'Staying strong’Surgery was Shannon’s only option, but the operation had its own risks."The risks of being paralyzed, having a stroke or dying were all very real," Tom Reilly said.If she moved even a few millimeters during surgery, her spinal cord could be injured or the kinked artery could push a clot into her brain, causing a stroke.Before the surgery, Shannon’s parents tried to prepare her, but she would have nothing to do with it."I was focusing on staying strong," she said. "I didn’t want to think about bad things I couldn’t do anything about."The seven-hour surgery was performed in two stages."First she was on her stomach and an opening was made in the back her neck so we could get the bones and joints in her neck to line up," Roberts said. "Once they were in a good position, we put titanium screws and rods into the back of the neck to hold it in place."Shannon left the operating room with a titanium plate, 10 screws and two rods holding her neck together.Although the surgery went well, the family faced a 72-hour wait to see how badly damaged the spinal cord was.Forty-eight hours after surgery, Shannon was out of her bed and walking. A week after she was injured in May, she left the hospital.'I appreciate everything’Back at home in Keller, the eighth-grader at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic School faced some limitations, but not many.The kink in her artery had resolved itself but she would need to take a daily aspirin.Soccer, her greatest passion, was out of the question, forever."It was a heart-breaking thing for her," her mother said.But rather than dwell on the disappointment, Shannon took on a new role as assistant soccer coach for her school’s team. She also found a new passion: acting and singing.Roberts said Shannon is incredibly lucky."She was very fortunate to have come through this relatively unscathed," he said. "It could have been the utmost in life altering issues."Today there’s little evidence of what Shannon went through. The neck brace she wore for three months is gone. The scar down her neck is fading and hidden by her long hair. But Shannon said the accident has changed her."I appreciate everything I didn’t think about before," she said. "I’m very thankful."JAN JARVIS, 817-390-7664
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