While playing behind his home in Missouri, 10-year-old Xavier Cunningham panicked when a swarm of yellow jackets started attacking him. He fell from his treehouse face-first, right into a metal rotisserie skewer he and his friends had staked into the ground so they wouldn’t step on it. The skewer pierced through the boy’s face, all the way to the back of his head and when he got to the hospital, doctors were amazed.
Somehow, that skewer made it through Xavier’s head, but missed his eyes, brain, and major blood vessels. Dr. Koji Ebersole with the University of Kansas Hospital assessed the path of the rod and assembled a team of about 100 people to create a plan to remove it. “I was amazed that he was alive, let alone awake and talking,” Ebersole admits, calling the trajectory of the skewer “essentially one in a million.”
The medical team was able to remove the metal rod without causing any more damage and Xavier is expected to get to go home from the hospital next week. “He’s back to his same ol’ self,” Xavier’s dad, Shannon Miller, says. “It’s nothing short of a miracle.”
Source: NBC News