Tolkkinen: Badly injured in a hockey accident, rural teen shows that sometimes, hope pays off

ALEXANDRIA, MINN. - Jackson Drum remembers the three doctors looming over his bed in a Canadian hospital.

They had heard that the rural Minnesota teen, badly injured in a hockey accident in Vancouver, was not accepting that he was paralyzed.

Doctors wanted him to understand just how badly he was injured. Scans showed a complete injury of the C1-C2 vertebrae, the ones near the brain stem that connect the head to the spine. It was worse than the injury that paralyzed Minnesota hockey player Jack Jablonski in 2011. It was the kind of injury that left actor Christopher Reeve quadriplegic in 1995 and unable to breathe on his own.

Injuries like Jackson’s are often fatal, and while patients can recover some function, very few do. Doctors said Jackson would most likely be on breathing and feeding tubes the rest of his life, depending on others to take care of his most basic needs.

Able only to mouth words or speak through a valve on his ventilator, Jackson told them they were wrong.

If anyone bumped or touched his arm, he could feel the pressure, but not how cold or warm their hands were. The doctors replied that it was likely central cord syndrome, where patients can still feel burning or tingling from blocked nerves.

Jackson remained confident about his future. He told his parents someone was going to make a movie about him someday. His parents went along with it. They knew his injury was critical, but they hoped that technology could help him. At a minimum, they hoped he could breathe on his own.

“My grandparents thought I was crazy,” Jackson said.

You can’t blame the grandparents or the doctors. Denial is so common for newly paralyzed people that the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation encourages straightforward conversations so that the patient moves toward acceptance. It is healthier emotionally so that the injured person can prepare to live in their new reality. Recovery is rare, especially when the injury is so high on the spinal cord.

But in this case, the patient was right.

Now 18, Jackson is not only breathing on his own, but feeding himself, transferring himself from his wheelchair to his bed, and has started sweating, a crucial step toward being able to regulate his own body temperature. During therapy sessions, aided by a walker and a physical therapist, he is moving one foot on his own and the therapist moving the other, one painful step at a time, his face revealing the tenacity that landed him in a competitive high school hockey program in the first place. You can watch his progress on Instagram, at ericalynndrum or 97sjourney.jacksondrum.

He’s also back in school in Minnesota, on track to graduate with the rest of the Alexandria Area High School senior class in the spring. And he intends to walk across the stage to get his diploma. He’s dividing his time between school and trips to the Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute in Golden Valley.

He was full of adrenaline from scoring a goal earlier, skating backward when another skater grabbed his shoulder. Jackson tripped, lost control, and slammed into the boards. After that, he kept blacking out. His coach hurried over, and a nurse and a firefighter rushed to help. They stabilized his spine. He woke up on a stretcher, unable to breathe, and they provided him with oxygen.

Jackson’s family lives outside Parkers Prairie in west-central Minnesota. They flew to him in Canada, and after he was stabilized, tried to find rehab care for him in Minnesota. But after reviewing his X-rays, no hospital or rehab facility would work with him, Erica said. Like the doctors in Canada, they thought he was destined to remain on a ventilator, she said.

“I was super frustrated at first,” she said. “I’m from Minnesota. We’re supposed to have super good health care.”

Eventually she found the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, which she learned had a good track record of weaning people off ventilators. The Shepherd Center agreed to take him, and he was there from February until the beginning of October. For eight hours a day, with an hour off for lunch, he worked. It was grueling. Many points were full of anxiety as he stayed off the vent longer and longer, struggling to breathe on his own.

Meanwhile, his Alexandria-area friends rallied around him, some even traveling to Atlanta to see him. Many of them share his deep Christian faith and prayed for him, including one pastor who publicly asked God to heal his body and help him walk again. I was there at the time, torn between pity for the pastor who perhaps didn’t understand the seriousness of the injury, and being impressed at his optimism.

The Drums say Jackson’s injury was upgraded from an A on the American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale, the most serious type of spinal cord injury that almost never sees improvement, to a D, the best score below normal.

“They don’t know how I was able to heal,” he said.