Freezing Skulls & Saving Lives

Reported November, 2010

OGDEN, UT (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Five months ago, Kyle Johnson was riding his skateboard down his street. He says he's done it 200 times, but this time, he crashed, and he wasn't wearing his helmet. Doctors had to act fast to save Kyle's life. They took off most of his skull.

"This is quite literally, the place where my life changed," Kyle Johnson told Ivanhoe.

25-year-old Kyle Johnson doesn't remember much else from June 2nd. He crashed his long board and cracked his skull in more than twenty places. His brain started to swell.

"His pressure over the next eight hours climbed to nearly 60 millimeters of mercury and that is six times normal." Dr. Blake Welling, a neurosurgeon at Mckay-Dee Hospital said.

Neurosurgeons at McKay Dee Hospital in Ogden, Utah performed a bilateral decompressive craniotomy to relieve the pressure.

"We essentially removed the entire side of his skull on both sides to allow the brain to expand," Dr. Welling explained. "This was a radical operation to save a young man's life."

Kyle's ACT scan showed he was left with only a narrow stripe of skull from forehead to spine intact. In between the surgery, Kyle's skull was in a medical freezer!

"When the doctor told me that he carved away 80-percent of my skull, it's a weird thing and then alone, what he did with it? Putting it in a freezer??" Johnson said. "I've always been one to believe that freezers were more or less for frozen vegetables, not your skull!"

Dr. Welling says the most remarkable part about Kyle's case is his quick recovery. His future looks bright, and Kyle says it probably won't include a long board. Kyle has headaches, some memory loss, and may face another operation to drain fluid from around his brain, but Dr. Welling says Kyle is already 95-percent back to normal.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Blake G. Welling, MD
Neurosurgeon, McKay-Dee Hospital
Ogden, UT 84403
(801) 387-6520

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