22-year-old Brock Meister from Plymouth, Indiana, at the age of 16, successfully dealt with terrible brain cancer.
And 8 years later, he got into an accident, during which his skull was completely separated from the spine.
Such consequences are called internal decapitation.
People very rarely survive after such injuries, but Brock coped with this blow of fate.
“God made me go through incredible things. He seems to be testing me,”the guy says.
“Some people are probably blessed,” says neurosurgeon Kashif Sheikh. “When Brock was a child, he survived a malignant brain tumor, and after only a few years he fully recovered from another fatal injury. It's really incredible."
Brock had an accident on January 12, 2018, after having lunch with friends, and then the company decided to go to the lake. But their car hit a section of the road covered with ice and skidded and then almost overturned. Fortunately, the driver took control and pulled over to the side of the road.
But during a skid, the seat belt did not keep Brock in the chair and his head, by inertia, broke through the car window. Later, the guy recalls that his head was covered in blood and his neck was very painful. And when the car stopped, he even tried to get to his feet and say something, but his tongue did not obey.
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"I didn't yet understand what kind of injury I actually got."
Meister was taken to South Bend Memorial Hospital, where doctors took X-rays of his head and neck and could not believe it with their eyes.
Brock's neck after surgery.
The images showed that he sustained an atlantooccipital trauma, essentially a complete separation of the skull from the spine, or internal decapitation, as indicated in the medical records.
Reportedly, the number of survivors of such an injury is small, since in addition to the physical separation of the skull and spine, during such injuries, blood vessels that supply the brain and spinal cord are usually damaged.
Brock Meister was only the second patient in the history of this hospital to survive a similar injury. Both Meister's mother and all his friends and acquaintances call the incident a real miracle.
At 2 a.m., the hospital called from the house of the neurosurgeon Kashif Sheikh, who, by another unusual accident, turned out to be the same doctor who had once treated 16-year-old Brock for brain cancer - a grade III germinoma tumor.
“I had to double check the pictures to make sure I was seeing exactly what I was seeing. Because patients die with much less trauma,”says Sheikh, who on the same night with a team of other surgeons operated on Meister and attached his skull to the spine using special screws and rods.
After the operation, Meister successfully recovered and was discharged from the hospital in February. But he wore a special neck holder for several months and only recently was he allowed to take it off.
Brock says that now he just wants to live a normal life and quickly forget about all the troubles.
