COMMUNITY
Miracle child Death — and near death — unite mama bears in time of need
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N THE SANDELL LIVING ROOM, 5-year-old Addi is a whirling dervish of activity, running around and playfully moving her arms up and down while shouting, “I have wings, I can fly!” The fact a kid Addi’s age has this kind of energy is hardly shocking. But flashback a little over a year ago, it’s a miracle she’s alive, much less walking. On Dec. 20, 2022, Katie Sandell, Addi’s mother, had an appointment near Banner Ocotillo in Chandler. While waiting, husband Jeff decided to walk across the street with three of the couple’s kids to look at Christmas lights. Addi, excited to tell her mother about new additions to her Christmas list, got away from the group and bounced in front of an oncoming car. The impact was violent. Addi was thrown 100 feet. Katie recalled the prognosis wasn’t good. “The doctors told us she wouldn’t likely survive and if she did, she’d be a quadriplegic and have to spend the rest of her life in a hospital bed,” Katie said. Lucky to be alive Internal decapitation — it’s a horrifying term all by itself, but even more so in the context of an injury to a girl who was 4 at the time. But that’s how doctors described one of Addi’s injuries to Katie and Jeff. According to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, such an injury occurs when the spine is separated from the base of the skull. Seventy percent of internal decapitations result in immediate death. “Addi’s C1 and C2 vertebrae were completely torn and fragmented,” Katie said. “The doctor had to go and cut out a portion of her rib and make a C1 and C2 vertebrae out of it and fuse it to her spine.” With a skeletal system still developing, Addi clung to life as those two vertebrae were just flexible enough to take such an impact and not break. “The doctors told us that those two vertebrae were spongy since she was so young,” Katie said. “Had she been her brother’s age, 8, they would have been more developed, and she would have been dead on arrival.” In a sign of good things to come, the surgery to repair Addi’s spine, which doctors expected to take anywhere from eight to 10 hours, only took four and half hours to complete.
BY JUSTIN GRIFFIN
A year after a devastating accident, Addi Sandell can walk despite suffering a neck injury that only has a 30% survival rate.
InMaricopa.com | February 2024
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