WEST PALM BEACH — There were days when it seemed that Layla Logan would spend her final moments in bed at St. Mary’s Medical Center.
She barely survived last May 22 when an ATV crashed into a parked car at 55 mph near Lake Worth Beach. The accident left a 15-year-old girl with a traumatic brain injury.
Then one day last June, Logan woke up and couldn’t speak. Her injuries left her unable to speak, walk or eat. She said she had no recollection of her accident and no idea of her having lost a month of her life.
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Logan was flown to Atlanta and spent two months at the Shepherd Center, which helps restore life to people with brain injuries. Currently, she is back at Palm Beach Central High School and is on her college cheerleading team.
On May 17, as part of National Trauma Survivor Day, she returned to St. Mary’s Hospital to thank the team of doctors, nurses and paramedics who helped her recover.
“With my family by my side, I was able to walk through the hospital where I would not have been able to walk,” said Logan, now 16. He walks without any problems. “When the doctors said no more, I went back to school and passed the honors rolls not once, not twice, but three times.”
Trauma Survivor’s Day is an opportunity to thank hospital and rehab staff
Logan was one of dozens who attended Trauma Survivor’s Day events at both St. Mary’s and Delray Medical Center, home to Palm Beach County’s two Level 1 trauma centers. Both help heal people injured in shootings, crashes, and other incidents.
“The aim is not only to raise awareness of trauma, but to connect survivors with health care providers and others,” said the longtime director of the Trauma Center at St. Dr. Robert Borrego, who helped organize the event, said: Center, on the hospital campus along 45th Street.
“People can hear how these things happened and impacted the lives of not only those who were in them, but also their friends and families.”
Jupiter High School’s survival began with his own actions
Logan wasn’t the only one to survive and show his gratitude. She also had young children such as Memphis Hamman, a Lake Worth Beach area girl who suffered a spinal cord injury in the shipwreck that left her paralyzed, and Casey Bicknell, now in her 30s, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the accident. An accident at the now closed Palm Beach International Raceway in 2010.
There was also Hudson Dom, a student at Jupiter High School who had his leg hit by a boat propeller on January 21, 2021 and was uncertain whether he would survive. He did not act immediately to stop the bleeding.
Dom, who was 15 at the time, used a skill he learned in medical class a year ago to stop the bleeding using a rope as a tourniquet, saving his own life.
The incident on the Loxahatchee River near Pennock Point caused Dom to lose so much blood that doctors at St. Mary’s Hospital tried to amputate his leg, but Dom was unwilling to give up.
After 28 reconstructive surgeries and tibia regeneration, Dom was back to his love of boating and fishing in just eight months.
Dom, now 17, said, “I am so lucky to be here today. appreciate.”