Word: skulled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...light. The team paid tribute to Adenhart when they clinched their division championship last week. But the team was also aware of another, quieter triumph, perhaps a miracle. Indeed, Jon Wilhite, the fourth person in Adenhart's car, shouldn't be alive. The violent collision ripped his skull from his spine, resulting in what doctors call internal decapitation. It is almost always fatal. When Wilhite arrived at the hospital after the savage accident, X-rays and a CAT scan showed that his head was held in place only by muscles and skin. But gentle work by paramedics gave a gifted...
...spinal cord is very sensitive and any minimal pressure on it, twisting or stretching, and it stops working - usually permanently," says the surgeon. The skull sits on the top vertebra "just like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders; that is what C1 does," says Bhatia, referring to the anatomical designation of the vertebra. In Wilhite's case, all of the ligaments that hold the skull on top of C1 were "completely torn" and there were small fractures to C1 itself. "It is very unusual today to have three healthy young people die in a car crash," says Bhatia...
...Kiester attached a Frankenstein-like steel halo to Wilhite's head to keep his neck in alignment. Six days after the accident, Bhatia led a surgical team of 30 that spent five hours placing a titanium plate at the back of Wilhite's neck and connecting it to his skull and C3 vertebra with rods and screws. "Everything had to go perfectly," says Bhatia. Asked if the bones in the vertebra could have shattered when he was drilling the holes, the affable and precise Bhatia answers, "They don't shatter as long as you do it correctly." During the operation...
...addition to having his skull unanchored and spinal cord put in mortal danger, Wilhite also suffered a brain injury called "brain shearing." While a concussion damages the part of the brain that strikes the side of the skull, Bhatia says brain shearing occurs when a powerful blow whiplashes nerve endings across the entire brain. At a charity game at Cal State Fullerton in July, the Wilhite family thanked the paramedics and doctors for saving Jon and offered their condolences and prayers to the Adenhart, Pearson and Stewart families. At the time, Wilhite spoke haltingly, walked stiffly and heavily favored...
...celebrated Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and by far the oldest one ever found. Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-leader of the Middle Awash research team that discovered and studied the new fossils, says, "To understand the biology, the parts you really want are the skull and teeth, the pelvis, the limbs and the hands and the feet. And we have all of them...