After one in a million fall, Waverly boy makes one in a million recovery

WAVERLY, Minn. — They are things virtually anyone who takes care of kids encounters: Bumps, bruises and falls.

But a seemingly run-of-the mill fall changed a Waverly family forever and stunned the staff at Children's Minnesota.

An hour west of the cities, you'll find a Waverly farm and the tough family who lives there.

"If he didn't have his helmet on, sometimes I think I don't know that anyone would even know that, what he's been through in the last four months," Emily Youngren said.

It all started when their rough and tumble youngest son Henrick tumbled off a couch at day care. The staff quickly called his mom.

"I honestly didn't think anything of it. You see them, they fall all the time," Emily Youngren said.

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But this time was different. The 1-year-old kept dozing off and his arms were involuntarily flailing. A local paramedic suggested they rush him straight to Children's. Dr. Kyle Halvorson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, happened to be working.

"Almost immediately after he got here, he was stabilized, we saw the scan, directly upstairs for that operation," Halvorson said.

A white, jagged area in the scan showed his brain had bled and moved.

"His whole brain is shifted," Halvorson said.

 
Halvorson and the trauma team quickly rushed Henrick into a surgery the trauma center does fewer than five times a year — a hemi craniotomy. They cut out part of his skull so his brain could swell.

"It's one of those things seeing the imaging and hearing the story is, wow, this is crazy, this is a one in a million chance that a child would fall backwards like that, hit his head and have this kind of a profound injury," Halvorson said.

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An injury that needed that lifesaving and life-altering procedure. Doctors told Henrick's parents he may never walk, speak or eat on his own.

"I don't think yet we could even process it or truly gauge how serious it was," Emily Youngren said. "For 15 days probably he didn't move the left side of his body."

"At one point I had a dream that he would squeeze my hand so I would walk in the room every day and grab it," Derek Youngren said.

And then one day, it happened.

"I felt the warmth from his body come through this arm, pass his hand all the way to his fingertips and then he squeezed my finger," Derek Youngren said. "And I can't explain it any other way than that was the lord coming down."

He had to relearn to roll over, sit up and walk, but he did it.

"It's kind of been described to us as a one in a million fall, just the way he fell, but also a one in a million recovery," Emily Youngren said. "Some of the doctors who saw him those first few days couldn't even believe it was the same kid when we saw them on the way out ... He's shocked everyone."

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"It's crazy that this happened for him, but we are very happy with how he's doing. The sky's the limit, his future is super bright," Halvorson said. "I think it's just a good reminder that, pay attention and to really focus on how a child is doing even if it seems like just a simple, little bonk on the head."

And there will likely be a few more bonks on the head for these brothers. But now Henrick has a new, hard plastic skull, so he is tougher than ever.

"Even on those hard days where it's chaos and he is all over the place and it's exhausting, this is exactly what we prayed for in those days, this is what we begged for," Emily Youngren said.

Halvorson says major credit goes to the babysitter, the paramedic who sent him straight to Children's and the entire trauma team.

Henrick's new plastic skull is so tough he's been cleared to play football or wrestle one day. His mother hopes he's more of a mathlete.