Starlight Issue 4 | July 2016

July 2016 Cole McDonald and his father Doug McDonald, MD PATIENT SPOTLIGHT: COLE MCDONALD Every Minute Counts One day in January, Cole McDonald, age 16, was taking his first spin on the longboard skateboard he’d gotten for Christmas. Two days later, he woke up in the pediatric intensive care unit at McLane Children’s Hospital with 39 staples down one side of his head and no memory of what happened. But Cole’s father remembers it all very vividly. An interventional radiologist at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Doug McDonald, MD was resting up after an on-call shift when he got a phone call that his son was on his way to the emergency room at McLane Children’s. Assuming the best, Dr. McDonald thought Cole had sustained a minor injury and would be fine. “As a parent, you get calls all the time about your child having a bump, or bruise or even a broken bone,” Dr. McDonald says. “But then I talked to one of Cole’s friends who had been with him, and I knew he was in bad shape. It was probably the worst day of my life.” Cole was unconscious and vomiting, with blood draining from his ears. He had a fractured skull and needed an emergency craniotomy to remove an epidural hematoma, a rapidly growing collection of blood under the skull that pushes on the brain. If the pressure is relieved quickly, the effects are minimal. If not, the pressure can cause permanent damage to the brain or can even be fatal. McLane Children’s is a verified Level II pediatric trauma center, and is the only pediatric-specific emergency and trauma center in the region. Only a fifteen minute drive from Belton brought Cole to the door of the hospital where there were staff waiting for him. “Every minute counts “I DIDN’T REALLY KNOW WHAT I COULD AND COULDN’T DO AT FIRST.” — Cole McDonald with that kind of injury,” Dr. McDonald says. “If McLane Children’s wasn’t here or if we had tried to get him to Austin or Dallas, we probably would have lost him.” Cole spent a week in the pediatric intensive care unit, followed by several weeks of physical and occupational therapy. “I didn’t really know what I could and couldn’t do at first,” Cole says. “I had extreme vertigo and was A N E W S L E T T E R B Y T H E S C O T T & W H I T E H E A LT H C A R E F O U N DAT I O N F O R F R I E N D S A N D S U P P O R T E R S O F M C L A N E C H I L D R E N ’ S