Forrest County resident Shelby Hyatt doesn’t remember anything about March 13 of this year. She doesn’t know what she had for breakfast that morning or what errands she ran or the accident that put her in a coma for 22 days.
“Everybody tells me that I was a passenger in a vehicle that got hit on my side. There is a list of injuries,” Hyatt said.
Hyatt was airlifted from the scene with extensive injuries including two fractures to the skull, bleeds in her brain, broken neck, broken back, shattered pelvis, ruptured spleen and many other broken bones and lacerations.
According to her mother, Missy, Hyatt was a 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which is the lowest score. The GCS is the most common scoring system used by physicians to gauge the severity of damage after a traumatic brain injury.
“There was not just one injury that could have absolutely taken her life,” said Missy, who was on vacation at Disney World the day of the accident.
She received a call from a close friend of the family who also happened to work for the Forrest County Sheriff’s Office.
She said, “I could tell, as professional as he was being, that he was shaken. He just said, ‘You have to come home now. There’s been an accident.’ That was the call we received, and then I called my sister. She was the first one to the hospital, and I was able to communicate with my sister and the medical staff for the seven-and-a-half hours it took us to drive home.”
On the ride home, Missy was able to stay on speakerphone with Shelby’s physician, Duncan Donald, MD, which allowed her to make decisions about her daughter’s care. After surgery, Hyatt was moved to the Intensive Care Unit where she would remain in a coma for the next 22 days.
After Hyatt woke up and started working on her rehabilitation, she improved faster than anyone guessed. At five months into her recovery from extensive brain injuries, Hyatt can sit up on her own and talk, and she’s already started walking again with assistance.
“Although her injuries were grim, we never gave up on Shelby. Seeing her recover from such serious injuries, makes it all worthwhile.” said Donald, who serves as medical director for Trauma Services.
Recovery from traumatic brain injuries can take up to two years. Hyatt continues to improve and has set a new goal of becoming a speech and language pathologist someday.
“We didn’t know what we were going to get when she did wake up. But we got Shelby back,” Missy said.
