A LITTLE FIGHTER
NYC ski-crash kid's amazing comeback
When Kevin Guthrie’s 11-year-old son stuck his tongue out at him, the Manhattan dad was thrilled.
“It was a matter of seconds, and then he sort of pushed his tongue out behind his lips, and then I remember feeling this feeling of cheering, like, ‘Yeah, way to go! Stick out your tongue out!’ ” Guthrie told The Post.
Guthrie’s son, Jack, had been horribly injured in a skiing accident only a month earlier, suffering a traumatic brain injury that left him in cardiac arrest, then in a medically induced coma, breathing through a hole in his throat and subsisting on a feeding tube.
His recovery since then has been nothing short of miraculous.
“I think if you met him . . . you wouldn’t have a sense of what he’s been through,” Kevin Guthrie said of his son, who recovered at NYU Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation in Murray Hill and turned 12 Friday.
The family’s world changed overnight on March 5, when Jack was skiing, hit a patch of ice and slammed into a tree while out on the slopes at Stratton Mountain in Vermont with friends.
His mom, Sari, an architect who works as a ski instructor on weekends, was up on the mountain with her 16-year-old daughter, Claire, when she received the phone call every parent dreads.
She and Kevin, the founder of the academic library JSTOR, soon learned of the gravity of their son’s injuries: Jack was going to need to be flown to the hospital by helicopter. The boy went into cardiac arrest for four minutes on the way.
He had suffered a serious brain injury, a fractured skull, a broken jaw, lacerations behind the ear and contusions all along his body.
Sari said she and her husband had “the same surreal sinking feeling” when their eldest son, Jeffers, was diagnosed with childhood leukemia at age 6 a decade ago. Jeffers was in treatment for nearly three years before defeating the dread disease.
Kevin said that after Jack’s MRI around the middle of the month, “The neurosurgeon told us, ‘I don’t really know if he’ll get better.’ ”
After 10 days, doctors in the pediatric ICU at Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital stabilized him enough to repair his broken jaw, do the tracheostomy and insert a stomach tube.
About three weeks later, Jack was transferred to Rusk, which was much closer to the family’s primary home on the Upper East Side.
Jack soon had a crew of experts working with him: a physical therapist, a music therapist, a speech therapist, a pediatrician and an on-site teacher.
The boy had taken piano lessons before his accident, and during one music-therapy session, his teacher put a keyboard on his lap.
Jack placed his left hand on the keyboard and started playing the chorus of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” It was another sign of hope. Eventually, Jack was shooting hoops while standing up, or singing while on the treadmill.
And while he’s not yet ready to break out the skis again, he’s returning to the Vermont mountain where he was injured on his family’s annual trek there for Christmas Day.
“We’re just going to take our cues from him. If he decides he wants to give it a try, we’ll support that,’’ his dad said.
“We’ll just put a helmet on and go very, very slow.”