Bob,
The old forum which crashed a few months ago had a spine injury, and disorder forum. On the injury site there were some with an injury as your son's.
I do not know much of the injury your son suffered but went through a recent near fatal flesh eating infection of my daughter. First, if this is a good large hospital with top specialist, you have to trust them a lot. But, keep in hindsight a long list of questions, don't give them bank power to do as they wish. Ask for second opinion, ask for pro and con of procedures. The doctors should and will explain the proceddure in front of you; they have to give informaed consent of the complications and alternatives.....not just wheel him off with a signiture.
It does sound like if he is stable for know, and you do not mention paryalisis that he may mend uneventfully. While a break can be extremly serious they are generally treated agressivly and not a wait and see situation. Stability is sougth swiftly the worse the break.
As I said I do not have personal experiance, just from reading other post, the car accidents that I was involved with during my investagations as a police officer and the ol' TV critical care shows. Only two young men had permanant injury, the several others thank Heaven were able to recover.
A big HUGE thing that helped was the large source of support here, in prayers and wishes. Hundreds prayed for my daughter as she fought for her life and I had such distrust for the doctors. I was faced with deciding to take time to life flight her to another medical center or have immedicate surgery. She took a spiral down so fast with the infection spreading up her arm we had immedicate surgery.
I later found out during the same week an accountance had a friend lifeflighted to the larger center, they tried hyberberic chamber to regenerate or help the flesh. Instead the bacteria, aggressive feed on the procedure and the man lost his leg.
In my case, God's hand worked a miracle and direction and prayers helped us through as it can you. The friends here gave me tons of information, other alternatives, supportive shoulders. Even people that had infections from staff and open wounds were an extremly valuable source.
I never could have made it without the gang on Brain Talk.
My prayers are going up for your family, I will see if I can sort some of the information as others will contribute too.
But if you can keep us updated and know we are here when you can't.
Dianne
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...&dopt=Abstract
: Spinal Cord. 2005 Feb;43(2):109-16. Related Articles, Links
Spinal cord injuries due to diving accidents.
Aito S, D'Andrea M, Werhagen L.
Spinal Unit, Careggi Hospital, Firenze, Italy.
STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective study and data analysis. OBJECTIVE: To investigate and analyse the main features of spinal cord injuries due to diving accidents accepted in our Centre from June 1978 to December 2002. SETTING: Regional Spinal Unit of Florence, Italy. INTRODUCTION: Diving accidents mostly occur in a young and healthy population and most of the patients develop tetraplegia with a severe lifelong disability. From 1978 to 2002, 65 patients with spinal injuries due to diving accidents were admitted to the Regional Spinal Unit of Florence. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted by analysing data stored in our local computerized database. We considered the vertebral injury, ASIA-ISCOS neurological classification on admission and discharge, gender, age at the time of injury, month of injury, treatment of vertebral lesion, length of stay in the Spinal Unit, neurological outcome, and complications. Data were analysed statistically by using the Fisher's exact test and logistic regression. RESULTS: In all, 62/65 patients were males (95%). Mean age at injury time: 22 years. On admission, 35/65 were neurologically complete ASIA A (54%), while 16 were classified ASIA B, 7 ASIA C and 7 ASIA D, according to the ASIA-ISCOS neurological standard of classification. C6 was the most common neurological motor level (40%) and C5 the most common vertebral injury level. In all, 36/65 (55%) patients underwent surgical treatment. Mean hospitalization time was 5 months. No neurological deterioration was recorded. In all, 20/65 (31%) patients improved neurologically and 16/20 (80%) of those had received surgical treatment. In all, 15/65 (23%) patients had complications and one patient died during the hospitalization period. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION: Patients whose vertebral lesions were surgically treated had a better neurological outcome than conservatively treated ones. Teardrop fractures showed worse neurological outcome as compared with burst fractures. Neurological improvement was more present in initially incomplete lesions. Treatment with high dose methylprednisolone during the first 8 h after trauma seemed to influence the neurological outcome positively. Age was also an important factor in influencing the neurological outcome.
PMID: 15558081 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE
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