By Drew C. Wilson
Havelock News, N.C.
HAVELOCK, N.C. — Abigail Marshall is simply a miracle child.
With a beaming smile on her face, the 4-year-old ran around the bay of Havelock’s West End Fire Station Monday to the astonishment of paramedics and police officers who still had memories of Abigail the way she looked on a frightful afternoon five months ago, motionless with blood coming from her head.
It was 2:18 p.m. on June 23 that a Havelock dispatcher received a call that a child had fallen backward through a screened window, dropping two stories onto a concrete patio below.
Remarkably, Abigail remembers it.
“I climbed up in the window sill and my butt just hit the crack,” Abigail said Monday. “We have a screen upstairs and then I hit it and then my whole body went falling out.”
Her mother, Claudia Marshall, remembers it, too.
“She climbed into the window sill from the bed, and the window was cracked,” she said. “Our windows slide left to right instead of up and down, and so when her bum hit the window, she just went on through and fell out on her head.
“She fell onto a concrete slab on the back side of the house face first. It actually hit her on the skull right in the forehead.”
Abigail was found in a pool of blood.
“It was absolutely horrible,” Claudia Marshall said. “She wasn’t breathing, so I shook her. There was white stuff in the blood and that freaked me out further.”
Havelock Police Sgt. Alex Swearer and Officers Phillip Kilgore and Kim Tutwiler were the first to arrive.
“The police officers that arrived let me stay there,” said Marshall. ”I was laying on the ground with her telling her that she had to keep fighting and keep breathing. When the ambulance people came, I had to leave, so that she could be taken care of.”
“In my opinion, her injuries were life-threatening,” Swearer recalled Monday.
Firefighter/EMT Jason Morand, Capt. Tom Dorn and Assistant Fire Chief Steve Coffey were the first medical personnel to arrive.
“It was an incredibly difficult call that they handled very well,” Coffey said of Swearer, Kilgore and Tutwiler.
They treated Abigail at the scene, and she was eventually flown by EastCare helicopter to Vidant Medical Center in Greenville.
“We did not anticipate a favorable outcome if she survived at all,” Coffey said.
The family drove to the Greenville hospital.
“We were asking about her, but because she did not have ID on her when she showed up, she was known as ‘the unknown issue.’ That was her name,” Claudia Marshall said. “We just wanted to know if she arrived alive and no one would really tell us, so it was really stressful. It probably only lasted 20 minutes, but it felt like two hours.”
A neurologist told the family that they had to remove part of Abigail’s cranium to allow for swelling.
“The middle of her eyebrow is missing all the way back to the middle of her skull,” Marshall said. “She had a broken femur, her cranium injury. She had a punctured lung, a fracture on her spine.”
Abigail was in a coma for five days and stayed at the hospital for three weeks. She now wears a helmet to protect the soft area of her head and will eventually have more re-constructive surgery.
“The neurologist said that there are probably enough parts left from when she fell to put back together, but if not, they are going to put the skull that she has and cut it in half and kind of patch it in,” her mother said.
Marshall said everyone from the police officers, the EMTs, the nurses and surgeons all played a role in Abigail’s recovery.
“Absolutely every one of them played an integral part in her healing,” she said. “They showed up for work that day and they worked their butt off to make sure that my baby is alive.
“Not too long ago, they had a program at church and they asked her ‘How do you know that God answers prayers?’ and she responded without any prompting, ‘because I’m still alive,’ and we feel that God has worked through every single person for her benefit.”
She said the hospital personnel even added a personal touch.
“They polished her fingernails and toenails for her while she was in a coma,” Marshall said.
On Monday afternoon, the Marshall family brought Abigail to the fire department to visit all those who helped save her.
“The surgeon said that had you not put that tube in her chest when you did, she would not have made it, so we are super grateful to you,” Marshall told the group.
After seeing Abigail, Coffey was moved.
“Glad you’re doing good girl,” he told the little girl.
Abigail was too busy playing to respond, which was answer enough for her rescuers.
“It just gives you goose bumps,” Coffey said. “It makes you really happy of the training and stuff that we went through to be able to have a part in saving her life, but it is a group effort. It’s us, the helicopter crew, the neurosurgeons, the orthopedic surgeons, the nursing staff. I would guess that there are 100-plus people involved in her care to get her to this point, so it’s not one group. It’s everybody that saved her life.”
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©2014 the Havelock News (Havelock, N.C.)