Scott with his daughter, Shannon. While Scott was at Cincinnati's University Hospital, Shannon wrote a note in crayon asking her friends to "help
save people with brain damage." She taped it to a box at school and collected more than $70. The money is being donated to the Mayfield Neuroscience Foundation.

Scott has no recollection of the concrete wall.

His wife, Sondra, knows only what she was told. And that, she says, is something of a fish story, with the wall growing with every telling … from eight feet, to 10 feet, to 14 feet.

What’s most important is that Scott survived the wall’s collapse, partly because he was in terrific shape, partly because he received state-of-the-art, 24-hour care at Cincinnati’s University Hospital, and partly, his family believes, because of the prayers of family members and friends.

Scott, a construction worker, was working a demolition job on the University of Cincinnati campus on July 26 when the wall collapsed.

“From what I’ve been told, we were doing demolition on a 14-foot wall,” Scott explains. “The wall was made of cinder block, with a terra cotta facing. It was a double wall with a 12-inch void between the walls, and we were tearing it down in 6-foot sections. Unbeknownst to me, material and debris were collecting in the void between the two walls. The debris applied pressure to the front wall, forcing it to collapse. A couple of people saw it and yelled. I took off running but I fell, and the wall fell on me. But I have no memory of the specific incident. I don’t have nightmares. Doctors told me that’s a good thing. So I sleep sound.”

Scott was taken by ambulance to University Hospital, where he spent the next two weeks. For Sondra, it seemed like a lifetime. Scott, who was in a coma, suffered multiple injuries, including trauma to the front and left side of his head.

“I broke 14 bones in that accident, and believe it or not, they all set themselves perfectly,” Scott says. “I broke five of my ribs, and I know I broke a scapula and the lower part of my spine. As much as I was not blessed to have the accident, I was very blessed with the outcome.”

Indeed, doctors prepared Sondra for the worst.

“I will never forget one of the nurses, whose name was Denise,” Sondra says. “She treated me as much as she treated Scott. She picked me up when they had news I didn’t want to hear. She wouldn’t let me give up hope. And there wasn’t a lot of that one night. I had a doctor tell me he might not regain consciousness.”

Scott survived an initial period when his blood failed to clot. Then he endured, and survived, a bout of pneumonia.

“Scott was one of the most severely injured patients I have ever treated,” recalls Raj Narayan, MD, a neurosurgeon with the Mayfield Clinic and Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Cincinnati. “He was truly crushed. He had a serious head injury, his blood was not clotting, his lungs were hurt on both sides, he had blood in the chest, and he had 14 other fractures.

“We had to monitor the pressure in his head because of a blood clot in his brain. Dr. Karyn Butler and the trauma surgery team took care of his many other injuries, along with specialists in orthopedics, cardiothoracic surgery and plastic surgery.”

Scott’s survival can be attributed largely to the sophisticated treatment he received at University Hospital, which has the only adult Level I Trauma Center providing specialized care for 2.4 million Tristate residents. But Scott was also fortunate that he was, in his words, “in killer shape” prior to the accident. Had the accident occurred a year or even six months earlier, he might not have had the strength to pull through.

“I honestly think God was preparing him for the accident,” Sondra says. “I had joined the Y a few years ago. Scott had never had an interest in working out with me. But in January, without my doing or saying anything, he said, ‘I think I’m going to start working out.’”

Says Scott, who is in his 40s: “I would do 500 to 600 sit-ups on an exercise ball each night; I dead-lifted with dumbbells; and I took multi-vitamins and drank protein shakes. I had a rippled stomach and the whole nine yards. I had just gotten into the actual shape that I wanted to be in. I had a couple of doctors tell me it was good I was in shape.”

Two weeks after his accident, Scott was transferred from University Hospital in Cincinnati to LifeCare Hospitals of Dayton, a long-term acute care facility, where he remained for another four weeks. He then moved to Miami Valley Hospital, where he underwent inpatient rehabilitation.

Much of that period remains a fog, but Scott does vividly remember the slow process of “waking up,” a stretch of time marked by intervals of increasing clarity.

“What was really neat, when I was in recovery, was waking up in the morning and realizing that something was different,” Scott says. “I had two or three mornings when I’d wake up and the extra part of my memory that was missing before would be there. And it was like being introduced to a good friend. It was so cool. That made it, to me, almost worth going through to be able to enjoy that again. It was something that you took for granted.”

Scott remembers one morning in particular. “While I was in therapy at Miami Valley, I would get up every morning and look at the schedule and figure out how to get through that day. Several days I’d have four to six classes and I’d have to figure out when to be ready and what to wear. One morning I woke up and I knew everything that I had to do. It was there. I knew it in my head and then I thought, this isn’t me compared to the way it was before. I have this extra brainpower and it works great. Before that, I might have had to write something down. That morning I woke up and I was fine-tuned, the way I had been.”

Today, Dr. Narayan says, “It is fantastic to see how well Scott has done. His recovery makes the strain of everything we do worthwhile.”

Scott, his recovery continuing, participates in an out-patient rehabilitation program a few days a week at Miami Valley Hospital. He continues to struggle with pain in his shoulders, and he wears a custom-made brace because of nerve damage in his right hand. But mentally, he says, “I’m pretty much about all there. I still do have a little short-term memory loss, but it’s really not noticeable. You have to talk to me quite a while to catch it. Other than that, my vision’s good, I can walk, and my balance is fine. I don’t have many marks on my face at all. My dentist was pretty impressed. He told me, ‘I read your report and I was expecting to write up an order form for everything you’d need.’ ”

Scott, who is able to do chores around the house, is now pondering his employment future. “I’m going to carefully plot my destiny,” he says. “I’m in the middle of my life. I still have 20 years of work left in me. I’m going to plot it out and do something worthwhile with my life. I’ve been given a second chance, and I don’t what to ruin it.”

Meanwhile, he and Sondra have celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary. “To have gone off to P.F. Chang’s and a movie for our anniversary less than three months after the accident just shows how blessed we’ve been,” Sondra says.

Adds Scott: “I appreciate everything that the doctors and nurses and therapists have done for me. I’d like to tell them thanks.”

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