Sixteen-month-old Jaxon Taylor is laughing, walking and playing again after just a few weeks after being internally decapitated.
In mid-September, Jaxon, his mother Rylea and nine-year-old sister Shayne were travelling on a highway to move into their new home in Queensland when a speeding car driven by a teen crashed into them.
“For a split second I saw dust and then the force hit,” Rylea wrote in a Change.org petition after the crash.
Shayne suffered a fractured vertebrae and had to undergo a three-and-a-half surgery to stop internal bleeding.
But when Rylea picked up her baby, she knew something was seriously wrong.
“The second I pulled him out, I knew that his neck was broken,” she told 7 News Australia.
His head had internally detached from the vertebrae of his spine.
Jaxon was airlifted to a Brisbane hospital where orthopedic surgeon Dr. Geoff Askin and his team performed a six-hour surgery on the baby.
A metal halo brace was attached to Jaxon’s skull and his vertebrae were reattached using a piece of wire, then grafted together with a piece of his rib.
Askin said it was one of the worst injuries he had ever seen and that most children would not have survived it.
“It is a miracle,” Rylea said.
Jaxon will have to wear his halo brace for two months, but is on the path to recovery.
- Bird flu risk to humans an ‘enormous concern,’ WHO says. Here’s what to know
- ‘She gets to be 10’: Ontario child’s heart donated to girl the same age
- Shoppers faces proposed class action over claims company is ‘abusive’ to pharmacists
- Most Canadian youth visit dentists, but lack of insurance a barrier
Comments