Boy Survives After Meat Skewer Goes Right Through His Head

A 10-year-old boy is alive after falling from a tree house and being impaled in the head by a meat skewer that just about missed two critical blood vessels that supply the brain, a trajectory that a doctor described as being "one in a million."

The boy, Xavier Cunningham, of Harrisonville, Missouri, fell from the tree house on Saturday after being attacked by a group of yellow jackets, according to The Kansas City Star. Xavier's mother, Gabrielle Miller, said her son had a friend over and the two had been checking in every so often, according to an interview provided by the hospital. It had been a while since they had checked in so Miller was getting ready to go downstairs when she heard screaming.

Miller said her son entered the house and she saw the skewer sticking out of his face.

On the way to the emergency room, Miller says her son looked at her and said, "I'm dying mom." When she reassured him that he would be OK, he responded, "I can feel it." Xavier was eventually taken to the University of Kansas hospital in Kansas City, Kansas where doctors were able to successfully remove the skewer.

Dr. Koji Ebersole, the director of endovascular surgery at the University of Kansas Health System, said the x-ray of the skewer lodged in the boy's head "certainly caught his attention."

"I was amazed that he was alive, let alone, awake and talking," Ebersole said in a video recorded by the hospital post-surgery. "This is passing six inches, through the face, just underneath the skull, all the way to the back of the neck."

Ebersole said that when Xavier got to KU, it was late at night and the number of different teams that would be needed to make sure the removal was safe "was just not a realistic undertaking to try to mobilize in the middle of the night."

Doctors discussed whether they should try to pull the skewer out at midnight but "it just did not seem like a wise thing to do," Ebersole said.

"It probably took a 100 different people with multiple different teams and their supporting staff to make it be safe," he said.

Ebersole said the skewer had to have missed critical structures like the brain itself, the eye and the spinal cord since Cunningham was awake and talking. He said doctors were most worried about two critical blood vessels in the brain; the carotid artery and the vertebral artery. The skewer was immediately adjacent to the two arteries, Ebersole explained.

"So we were very worried about significant vessel injury," Ebersole said in the video. "If this was a millimeter closer, it probably would have been unsurvivable injury if it poked right through the carotid."

Xavier himself proved to be "remarkably brave," according to Ebersole, who added that the plan would not have worked if Xavier was not as calm and as brave as he was.

And the doctors seemed to have Xavier's full confidence, according to his mother.

"They were covering every possibility of what could go wrong so that they were prepared for it so that he would be safe and then he even told them, you know, he goes 'I trust you,'" Miller said.

When hospital staff was getting ready to take him to the operating room, Xavier wanted to listen to his favorite song, "Reckless Love," and he began singing it even though he could barely move his mouth.

Doctors were worried about the damage the skewer might do when being pulled out of the boy's head because of its sharp pointed tip. Ebersole said doctors were also worried about how hard it would be to pull the skewer out and had made a number of preparations if it proved to be stuck.

The video recorded by the hospital shows the skewer being pulled out in its entirety.

Ebersole remarked at how lucky Xavier was and how unbelievable it was that the skewer could pass so deep without hitting anything critical.

"That's one in a million," he said.

Photo of Xavier Cunningham by Shannon Miller (via KUMC)

Information for this article was provided by KUMC