According to his family, Xavier Cunningham, 10, is alive and well right now because of a miracle that took place by the grace of God.
This past weekend, Xavier was climbing up a treehouse with some friends when he was attacked by a group of yellow jackets. The insects were so aggressive that they caused the young boy to lose his balance and fall off the ladder, landing face-first on a meat skewer.
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Xavier was rushed to the hospital, where surgeons removed the skewer from his head.
“He could’ve bled to death in that field, covered in yellow jackets,” Shannon Miller, Xavier’s dad, said.
“He was more upset about the yellow jackets than he was about the metal piece sticking out of his face,” Miller added.
The skewer didn’t just graze the boy’s face — it nearly went all the way through his head. Yet, miraculously, the foot-long skewer did not cause any substantial damage, though it easily could have.
“It missed his brain. It missed his brain stem. It missed the nerves, everything that`s valuable in your head. It missed everything,” Xavier’s dad said.
GIven the impact, and clean cut of the skewer, Xavier’s accident is nothing short of a miracle, according to his family.
After Xavier was rushed to the University of Kansas Hospital on Sunday, the surgeons worked to remove the skewer without touching his brain, or the nerves surrounding it. While the surgeons worked physically, the Millers worked spiritually, praying throughout the critical operation.
“I said, ‘Lord I don’t care. I know you have a plan,'” Miller said.
Hours after going under, the surgeons informed the Millers that Xavier was going to be fine. It was a miracle.
“All I can remember is laughing and crying and cheering. Just the support of my friends and family, it was powerful,” Xavier’s dad said.
Those hours tested his faith, but Miller said that he kept God’s plan and His will in his mind the entire time.
“Only God could have directed things to happen in a way that would save him like this,” he added. “It really was a miracle.”
Dr. Koji Ebersole, the endovascular neurosurgery director at KU Hospital, said that he was “amazed that he was alive, let alone, awake and talking.”
In a video posted to YouTube, Ebersole explains just how unbelievable it was that Xavier survived.
“This is passing 6 inches through the face, just underneath the skull, all the way to the back of the neck,” Ebersole notes in the video, detailing the gravity of the accident.
He added that the skewer had only missed two blood vessels by a millimeter, which if the skewer had been any closer would have made the accident “unsurvivable.”
Ebersole added how miraculous it was that Xavier was fine, saying, “But it went right next to it and right next to the vertebral artery. That trajectory is essentially one in a million. I just can’t believe that.”
His doctors couldn’t believe it, but his parents knew it was a miracle coming straight from God.
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A description on the Millers’ GoFundMe page states that the boys had originally tried to get rid of the BBQ skewer.
“They discovered a BBQ meat skewer laying in the grass and picked it up so no one would step on it. As the afternoon [progressed], they stuck fork end of the skewer into the ground,” it reads.
Only a day after the accident, Xavier was back to his normal, silly, 10-year-old boy self, playing Xbox from his hospital bed, waiting to go home.
Xavier’s family set up the GoFundMe in order to raise funds to pay for the unexpected hospital bills. To contribute, click here.
(H/T: WDAF-TV)