Today in 2018, the closest of close calls for Brock Meister of Plymouth, Indiana: he survived a rarely survivable medical injury known as “internal decapitation.”
Meister had just finished up dinner with friends and was headed to his grandparents’ house.
It was a 10 minute drive, there wasn’t hardly any time for anything bad to happen.
But the truck hit black ice, which caused the rear of the truck to hit a ditch, which caused the whole truck to slide onto its side.
Meister was wearing his seatbelt at the time, but the impact sent his head through the window anyway.
Not surprisingly, he told his friend, who’d been driving, that his neck hurt.
The friend, Ryan Topper, had just taken CPR class and knew that you don’t move someone in that situation, so he left Meister in place and called for an ambulance.
And thank goodness for that: Meister’s neck hurt because his skull had become separated from the rest of his spinal column!?!
Medically that’s known as internal decapitation: Meister’s doctor said at the time that humans just don’t survive that.
But then Brock Meister had plenty of experience with survival.
He needed CPR when he was born because he wasn’t breathing when he came out.
Then, as a teen, he survived brain cancer, endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
And now this?!?
That doctor, Kashif Shaikh, had been part of the team that treated Meister’s brain tumor.
This time, he put his patient’s bones back in place with metal rods and screws.
Meister had to spend months in a neck brace and do physical therapy five days a week, but once again, he survived.
Dr. Shaikh said of his patient’s ability to beat the odds, “We also just have to think that some people are blessed.”
If so, here was a patient shared those blessings.
Later that same year, Brock Meister was out at the lake with family when their jet ski basically exploded, and the explosion threw his brother Collin into the water.
Big brother helped younger bro to safety; thankfully Collin only had minor injuries.
A nice change of pace for the Meister brothers.
For National Soundcheck Day, meet the Soundcube.
This 1969 installation from artist Bernhard Leitner was a big cube-shaped space with loudspeakers in every direction.
And the sounds move from speaker to speaker, or place to place: Leitner said you wouldn’t just hear them through your ears, you’d feel them throughout your body.
Brock Meister’s life was saved by his best friend — six months later, Brock was able to save his own brother’s life (Business Insider)
Bernhard Leitner’s Soundcube, 1969 – The Art of Seeing Sound And Hearing With Your Whole Body (Flashbak)
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Image from WNDU-TV
