It has been 4 years since Tom's accident. Boy, has our life changed! But Tom has made such wonderful progress! He will be going into 5th grade this year. He still gets extra help with his reading and spelling. He is still working at a 4th grade level for those two subjects. His math skills are still his strongest subject.

He still is at a low level social skills but he is getting better. He isn't a normal 10 year old boy, no sports, no rough housing. Not that we are complaining, we'll take him any way we possibly can!

His biggest problem now is obsessing over things! It is very difficult to get him off track, but if we don't we are spending our life savings buying him EVERYTHING he thinks he needs! LOL Outta love him!

Original Post:

On October 25, 2000 our life changed in a matter of seconds. My husband, my daughter (10) my son (7) and I were on our way home from our children's open house. It was a night of excitement, because this was a new school for us and children could not wait to introduce us to their teachers and to show off their classrooms, and their work. We went to our son's classroom first and he very shyly introduced us to his teacher and very excitedly showed us his room.

We then went to our daughter's room, finished our treasure hunt and watched a video of the kids at school. Our son went to the turtles in the classroom and was amazed by them. My husband turned to check on him and our son looked back at him with the look " I'm 7 and these are turtles, isn't that cool?" A look my husband will never forget.

As we left the school the kids were doing something that they have always done. They were racing each other to different things. "I'll race you to the driveway!", "I'll race you to that tree!" They were being kids and enjoying a warm late authum night with their mom and dad. Because it was open house, we had to park a distance from the school.

We were almost to our van when we got to a busier street, our daughter looked both ways and then crossed. I turned to my husband and said "Why did she do that? She knows she is to wait for us!" He replied with "Don't worry they cross the street everyday on their way home from school." I replied with. "Well. at least Tommy is waiting for us!" Then it happened! He (Tommy) turned and looked at my husband and I, stood up and walked out into the street. Unfortunately, there was a SUV right there! The man had no time to stop, and all we could be was scream and run. Tommy flew 20 feet in the air and landed on his back in the street. What we saw when we made it to his side, is something that will never leave my mind, (as I am typing, I see it all very clearly). Our son was not breathing when we got there, and that was something I was not ready for. There was no way I was going to say goodbye to my son right then! He was too important to our family to loss him right there. I got down and grabbed his hand and told him, "Tommy, don't you leave me!!" He opened his eyes and gave a very gargled breath! Our daughter unfortuately had witnesses all of this with us. I had to keep telling her that he was going to be okay, but I also said this to convince myself.

Tommy had ruptured his stomach, (his Wendy's dinner was undigested and floating around), his spleen was bruised (he didn't lose it), his kidney was bruised, he had a hole in his heart, but all of this was undected, until we got to the hospital. The main concern was the brain injury, there was a very large break on the left side of his head, and a large amount of brain matter on the street.

Tommy was prounounced brain dead at the site. He underwent two major surgeries at the same time. The neoro. surgery and trama surgery went very well, but they still didn't expect him to live. They found a blood clot on the right side of his brain the next morning. More surgery!

Tommy was in a coma for 5 days, out of the hopital in a total of 14 days and in rehab for another 2 weeks! This boy is a true miracle! We see it on the doctors faces every time they see him, he shouldn't even be alive, let alone doing the things he is doing.

He had to learn to walk, eat and talk again. He talked on Thanksgiving morning, his first words were, Mom, I love you.

He has started back to school 3 days a week for 2 hours and still has speech and OT for two days. It has been a very fast process, but we still have a long way to go and we know he will not be the same Tommy we had before. This has been the hardest on our other 2 children, because he does get frustrated and strikes out at them for no reason. But, seeing her brother get better has helped our daughter deal with the memories of that night.

Our son has told us that he spoke to God while he was asleep and that there were angels there with him. I truly do believe in miracles now!

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