Positivity: Car-crash survivor goes home a walking miracle
From Kalamazoo, Michigan, a remarkable story of recovery:
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Jonathan Pettigrew and his mother, Sue, watched with pleasure Monday afternoon as the Borgess Medical Center nurse removed the intravenous access line from the young man’s arm.
Once it was out, the 19-year-old Galesburg man was finally free of the tubes and lines that have been used to keep him alive since he was critically injured in one-car crash last year on G Avenue near 38th Street.
Not long after he got the IV line taken out, Pettigrew put on his coat, said goodbye to medical-care workers who have become his friends and left for home.
He has been at either Borgess or Borgess-Pipp Health Center in Plainwell undergoing treatments and rehabilitation since his car ran off the side of the road about 4:20 a.m. on Oct. 1 and struck a tree.
“I didn’t know if I’d be able to walk. They told me I might only be able to blink my eyes,” said Pettigrew before leaving the hospital. “I’ve had my down moments, but I didn’t quit,”
Doctors and nurses and members of his family are calling Pettigrew, a graduate of Galesburg High School, a walking miracle.
“One of the first things someone told me after the accident is that my son’s head was no longer attached to his spine,” said his mother. “He was very, very sick. He spent 47 days in the neuro-intensive-care unit.”
Pettigrew was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. He had been coming back from a party and bonfire at a friend’s house. His family said he had an undiagnosed heart condition that contributed to the accident. Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s deputies said they are still investigating the accident.
After being brought back to life, Pettigrew was rushed to the emergency room at Borgess. They didn’t know it at the time, but his spinal cord was not entirely severed, meaning that he had a fighting chance to move his arms and legs and walk again.
In subsequent weeks, he ended up undergoing a series of surgeries. Doctors had to fuse bones in his neck and spine and repair a seriously broken leg, a shattered jaw and broken sternum. They also had to perform open-heart surgery in order to fix a leaking mitral valve.
A former football player at Galesburg High School, Pettigrew had attended a party for Justin Mitchell, one of his former teammates, on the night of the accident. Mitchell, who was about to leave to attend college at Ferris State University, said he got a call soon after the accident.
He rushed to the hospital, only to see his friend hovering near death, his hospital bed surrounded by machines, his body bruised and bloated. “He was a wreck,” Mitchell said.
But Pettigrew, a student at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, began to slowly turn the corner. “From what he was like then and now, it is nothing short of amazing,” Mitchell said.
“Absolutely, he has made very good progress and has a very good prognosis,” said Dr. Igor Kaps, medical director of the rehabilitation unit at Borgess.
After he was released from intensive care, Pettigrew was sent to Pipp so he could be weaned from the machine that was helping him breathe.
Dale Pettigrew, Jonathan’s uncle, said family members have been at his nephew’s side since the accident. Someone stayed every night in the room with Jonathan.
Once he stabilized at Pipp and started to undergo rehabilitation, he returned to Borgess, where in recent weeks therapists have helped him to re-learn many every day skills, especially walking.
“He’s a whole different guy than when he got here,” said Eric Birko, a recreation therapist.
After helping Jonathan walk down the hospital hallway on Monday in preparation for his release from the hospital, Birko said, “This is why we do what we do. None of us will be millionaires in this job. This is our reward.”
