10-year-old recovering from baseball practice injury
STERLING, Colo. --One throw went astray and a night of practice turned into a week of medical uncertainty when a 10-year-old Atwood, Colo. Boy was struck in the head by a baseball.
Axel Smart plays on a Sterling Baseball Organization team. It was a typical warm-up practice until a throw hit him in the head.
“They had a game 7 o’clock (Monday) and they were warming up for their game. And, the kid he was playing catch with threw the ball and it caught Axel kind of off guard and it hit him right in the head. It didn’t knock him unconscious, anything like that, but it hurt and you could tell he was hurt,” mom Stacy Smart said in a telephone interview.
She said he had a headache when he went to bed. He got up, had breakfast and played with his little brother. She went to Sterling to get some Tylenol. When she got home, he was sick.
"After he threw up, he got real tired and was like 'I think I'm going to lie down.' And he laid down and went right to sleep right away. I was constantly checking on him because that's just not like Axel. He's a very active boy."
He got sick again and she took him to the emergency room. A CAT scan resulted in a epidural hematoma diagnosis; bleeding between the skull and the dura. He was then scheduled for a flight to Children's Hospital. The bleeding needed to be drained, quickly, Smart said.
"We've got a helicopter on its way. He's got to go," she recalled the on-call doctor telling her.
She said she was expecting Axel would need to rest, take some time from baseball; not undergo emergency surgery. They arrived at Children's just as physicians were ready to take him into surgery. She took Axel to the emergency room in Sterling at about 12:30 p.m. the day after being struck by a baseball, and by 5 p.m. he was entering surgery at Children's Hospital in Denver.
She encourages any parent whose child sustains a head injury, regardless if it appears minor, to have it checked.
A gofundme has been established to assist the family : https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-axel-smarts-road-to-recovery?attribution_id=sl:f68663ca-9fe5-4e54-aaa4-55a3f6c08366&utm_campaign=man_sharesheet_dash&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=facebook
