Twin Cities woman survives traumatic brain injury after being hit by a car in what doctors call a “miracle”

By Susan-Elizabeth Littlefield

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    EDINA, Minnesota (WCCO) — For Sarah and Greg Stevenson, it’s just a few hundred feet from their home at a condo complex for seniors in Edina, Minnesota, to the gym. It’s a trip they make regularly, but one day, everything changed.

“She just said, I’m going to run over the Y. I’ll use weight machines. I’ll come back and you get ready,” Greg Stevenson said. “Sarah is very gregarious. She’s never met somebody that isn’t a friend. So I got ready and changed clothes and got ready for biking and waited and waited and waited, and she didn’t come. I wasn’t concerned, because I typically figured she just met five new friends at the Y.”

But instead of enjoying herself, his wife of 43 years was in anguish, being rushed to Hennepin Healthcare after being hit by a car.

“I mean, she had some very severe skull fractures and spine fracture, as well as being somewhat hemodynamically unstable, so there’s a lot of things that have to go right for them to even arrive safely,” Walter Galicich, a neurosurgeon at Hennepin Healthcare, said. “It has to be a tremendous amount of force to cause skull fractures that she had, so to certainly be struck and then go over a car and land on the table, and it’s a lot of force, and some of the most dense bones in the skull were fractured.”

An immediate scan showed her brain was swelling fast. A normal scan should have dark spaces that have fluid, but Sarah Stevenson’s showed it was fully swollen.

She didn’t have an ID on her, so it was several hours before Greg Stevenson got the call.

“When they said a traumatic brain injury, I knew it was serious,” he said. “I’m a veterinary pathologist, although I’m not a real doctor, I know a lot about neuropathology. So it was, it was pretty devastating news.”

Greg Stevenson quickly realized his outgoing wife, a proud mother and grandmother, may never speak again. Sarah Stevenson was in grave condition.

“That was Sarah’s big problem is that her brain was starting to swell, and her brain was acting much more like a very young person. [She] had some really malignant swelling after the trauma that progressed over several days,” Galicich said.

Sarah Stevenson’s family held vigil, praying they’d be given some amazing grace. But she lay in a coma, completely nonresponsive.

“Our problem was she hadn’t woken up, and we were at two and a half weeks, and they were recommending prognostically, if she hadn’t woken up and she wasn’t doing these following her commands, that they recommended we take her off the ventilator and just say goodbye,” Greg Stevenson said. “We had reconciled ourselves to her death and and my children had planned her funeral. I asked them to so that we weren’t faced with that afterwards. And we thought that she would be with the Lord, and she’d be in a better place, and it would be over.”

As they closed in on the toughest decision they’d ever made, one of her surgeons walked in.

“He went up to her and grabbed her hand and shook it really hard, and then he yelled in her ear, ‘Sarah.’ And she opens her eyes, and she turns and looks at him, and he looked at me, he says, ‘Has she been doing this?’ And I said, ‘No,’ He looked over at me and he literally started kind of dancing in his in his clogs,” Greg Stevenson said. “He goes, ‘This is amazing. This is almost like a miracle… I’ve been doing this for a lot of years.’ And he says, ‘I just could have never thought this could happen.’ And then he looked at me, says, ‘Greg, this changes everything.'”

Seven months of procedures and therapy later, Sarah Stevenson is thriving.

“I feel like it’s a miracle that I lived,” she said. “But I know if I would have died, I would have gone to be with Jesus. I’m thankful I lived and I get to live longer, but I’m just very grateful.”

Galicich says he knows the family is calling it a miracle.

“I’m happy to hear, and I concur. It’s really wonderful to see that outcome, and it represents a lot of hard work on her part as well,” he said.

Sarah Stevenson is committed to keep working hard. She’s making a comeback and so is her memory.

“And when people say, ‘You’re a miracle,’ I say, ‘We have a miracle God, miracle-working God, and He has done a miracle through the medical team at this hospital. But I’m not the miracle — God is the miracle and the people that did it.'”

Sarah Stevenson keeps making leaps and bounds — she easily passed the test to get her license back.

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