The DeKalb County teenager who was seriously injured in a snowboarding accident last month went home Thursday, just one week after he was transferred from Grady Memorial Hospital's intensive care unit to the Shepherd Center to begin his rehabilitation.
Thomas Sowell, a 15-year-old sophomore at Lakeside High School, suffered a serious brain injury during a Jan. 30 fall while snowboarding with his Boy Scout troop at Cataloochee Ski Resort in North Carolina.
Flanked by his parents, doctors and the Cataloochee Ski Patrol members who rescued him from the slopes, Sowell walked out of the Shepherd Center under his own power late Thursday morning.
Sowell said he’s feeling “a lot better,” and added that he hopes to return to school in the next couple of weeks.
Asked if he remembers the fall on the Cataloochee slopes, he said, “the closest thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. I don’t remember the accident. I remember the day before.”
Sowell’s father, Jim Sowell, said that his son had initially lost memory of everything for 36 hours before his accident. “Now, he’s down to just a few hours before," said Jim Sowell, head of Georgia Tech's astronomy department.
"Thomas fell under the category of a severe brain injury," said Dr. Sanjay Dhall, chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital. "Very often, unfortunately, patients with a severe brain injury are permanently disabled. Some of them require around-the-clock care."
But Sowell, Dhall said, "shocked all of us and made all of us really happy in how quickly he’s bounced back. Describing Thomas is easy – he’s phenomenal."
Echoing Dhall's assessment, Dr. Darryl Kaelin, medical director of the brain injury program at the Shepherd Center, said Sowell has "been with us just a week and in that time he has made what I would call a remarkable improvement."
"This is a young man who suffered a very severe traumatic brain injury and by all estimations could be in a hospital for weeks or months trying to recover and potentially could have never gone back to school or lived an independent life," Kaelin said.
“We expected this day to come in about two years,” said Sowell's mother, Virginia Sowell.
She said the family is “extremely thankful” for the care and treatment her son received by the Ski Patrol, the hospital in North Carolina, Grady and the Shepherd Center.
“But one other piece of the puzzle is that Thomas has thousands and thousands of people praying for him, and I believe that that is a big part of his healing,” she said, adding that her son had received e-mails and Facebook messages from as far away as Japan and Israel.
“When we were first told how severe his injuries were, I was on the floor, crying, vomiting, ready to pass out. I have never been at such a low low,” she said. “And on Feb. 8, when Dr. Dhall came in and started asking him questions, and we realized, ‘he’s answering,’ that’s about the highest high I’ve ever been on in my life."
“There are a lot of patients here [at the Shepherd Center] who aren’t as fortunate, and you realize just how close we came, within millimeters, within a split second, that we’re not remodeling the house for a wheelchair,” his dad said. “We hope Thomas’s story is one of hope, for so many patients to know that a miraculous recovery can still occur.”
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