Australian 'miracle baby' has spine reattached after being severed at neck
'A lot of children wouldn't survive that injury in the first place,' says MD who led surgical team
Surgeons in a Brisbane, Australia, hospital have managed to reattach the head of a toddler after it was severed internally from his spine.
Local media reported that Jaxon Taylor, a 16-month-old toddler, was travelling in the car with his mother and nine-year-old sister when they collided with another car at the speed of 110 km/h.
The force of the crash tore the toddler's head from his neck internally, according to local media.
"It is, it's, it is a miracle," said Jaxon's mother Rylea.
"The second I pulled him out I knew that he, I knew that his neck was broken," she added.
Jaxon was airlifted to a Brisbane hospital where a team of surgeons, headed by Dr. Geoff Askin, performed the six-hour surgery to reattach the head to the spine.
"A lot of children wouldn't survive that injury in the first place, and if they did and they were resuscitated, they may never move or breathe again," said Askin.
Doctors said Jaxon will have to wear a brace over his head for eight weeks to help the tissues and nerves connecting his head to his spine to heal.
Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children says its doctors perform a similar procedure about once a year.
"It is probably a severe spinal injury with no serious trauma to blood vessels or the spinal cord itself," Dr. Brett Belchetz, an emergency room physician in Toronto, said in an email. "Otherwise it would have been unsurvivable. Repairing such an injury is complex but routine. The miraculous element here is to have such a severe bony injury without associated other deadly vascular or spinal cord trauma."
In 2006, doctors at Vancouver General wrote a case report about treating a 46-year-old woman in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine.
With files from CBC News