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