St. Louis Park senior severs pancreas in last game of his football season
ST. LOUIS PARK, Minn. – A St. Louis Park high school senior's football run came to a close in a painful and scary way.
Back on Oct. 29, an Armstrong High School's players cleat severed Deon Sewharack's pancreas during a routine tackle.
"When I was tackling him, we were both going down, and his heal like kicked up into my stomach as we were falling," said Sewharack.
While the injury sounds immediately devastating, it was all internal and no skin was broken.
"I thought I just had the wind knocked out of me," he said.
Sewharack took a brief break from that game, and then kept playing, finishing the game with his team.
However, later that night, he felt nauseous and the pain didn't go away with medicine, so Sewharack went to HCMC.
"If we would've waited longer, it just kept getting worse because I was like internally bleeding, too," he said.
Sewharack's emergency surgery saved his life, but it will be a long recovery. He was hospitalized at HCMC for a week before heading home, where he will need to recover for eight more weeks before returning to school for his senior year. His teammates have been by his side the whole time.
"It's like my family," said Sewharack. "They're really like my brothers. Like they all checked in on me, all made sure I was good. They were there for me."
Sewharack had an invisible, yet severe injury, which taught him the lifelong lesson of always listening to your body.
"You just got to get things checked out. Like if you're not feeling good after a game and you know you got an injury, just go get it checked out because it could be something big," said Sewharack.
Sewharack has around $200,000 in medical bills after his surgery and week-long hospital stay. The family does have a GoFundMe to help them pay for it.