A Maryland teen survived a freak accident when he fell and got a 6-inch screw embedded in his skill. The accident required careful neurosurgery at John Hopkins Hospital.
Darius Foreman underwent a successful surgery and was able to go home last Thursday which was also his 13th birthday.
“They were so nice at the hospital,” Joy Ellingsworth, his mother told the media. “They threw him a party and decorated the room while he was asleep.”
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Foreman, who is in seventh grade, was visiting his aunt, building a treehouse on January 20, when he fell from a branch. As he hit the ground a 5-foot long board with a construction screw in it fell on his head. The screw pierced his skull and his brain.
The boy said that at first, he didn’t know what had happened. “I thought something was stuck in my hair,” he said.
His cousins went to find their mother and she found Foreman wandering around the yard with the board still attached to his head. She then made him lay down until an ambulance arrived. The aunt’s next call was to the teen’s mother.
“It was instant dread,” she said of the moment she got the call.
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The paramedics had to cut off some of the board in order to get the boy safely into the ambulance. They took him to Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury, Maryland. There, doctors x-rayed his brain and sent him on to John Hopkins in Baltimore.
Foreman was not able to fit into a standard helicopter because the board was still too long so the hospital got in touch with the Maryland State Police who have a larger one.
Once at John Hopkins Dr. Shenandoah Robinson, a neurosurgeon, was able to remove the rest of the board. Then Foreman was sent to surgery for an operation that took approximately two hours.
“The danger was where it was located,” said Dr. Alan R. Cohen, chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Hopkins.
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The danger was in the fact that the freak accident left the screw in a major vein and the surgery could have led to major bleeding and even death.
Cohen said the screws location was “like a ticking time bomb.”
“We went slowly and carefully, and we managed to get the thing out,” he said.
A small blood clot had formed and the surgeons were able to remove that as well.