Andra (with Joey) says she
hopes her family’s story
will inspire others. “You
can’t underestimate what
the seed of faith will do for
somebody,” she says.“Joey reminds
me what’s
important in
life every day”
—Tyler Slaightday was weird,” says Andra. “And Morgan
knew there was a gun in the house.” Still,
no-one expected she might turn it on her
boys. Andra, at home in Oklahoma, got the
news in a hysterical phone call from her
mother. “I couldn’t even breathe,” she recalls.
“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘This is
the day everything is going to change.
Nothing is ever going to be the
same again.’ ”
When the family arrived at
the hospital, the news was
grim. “Nobody wanted to
operate,” says Andra. “They
said he was too far gone.” But
neurosurgeon Dr Joshua
Medow decided to take a
chance on surgery. After cutting a flap in
Joey’s skull to relieve the intense pressure
from his swollen brain, he removed all the
bullet fragments he could and put Joey into a
medically induced coma. Later that night,
Medow was emotional: “I was like, ‘Oh my
God, what have I just done? Did I give him a
fate worse than death?’ ” he says. “My wife
and my 1-year-old son were sleeping when I
got home, and all I wanted to do was pick up
my son and hold him.”But just 10 days later Joey miraculously
reached for a nurse’s hand, “and it was a flood
of emotion,” Medow says. “We gave him the
best possible chance.”
It’s one Joey immediately made the
most of. After spending two months in
hospital, he was transferred to a children’s
rehabilitation hospital in Oklahoma and then
to Timber Ridge, a paediatric
brain-rehab centre in Arkansas,
where he spent two gruelling
years in physical and speech
therapy. He had to relearn basic
speech—when he arrived, he
was at the level of an 18-month-
old, able to speak only three
words—and how to regain use of
his right arm and leg. His progress stunned
his caregivers. “He defies all predictions,”
says Becky Mitchum, Joey’s speech
pathologist at Timber Ridge. “Joey suffered
a catastrophic brain injury. You wouldn’t
expect him to have made the gains that he
did.” Now Joey is settling into a whole new
routine. Andra is enrolling him in the special-
education program at the local school and
signed him up for physical and speech
therapy sessions. His grandmother RandaA CLOSE
BOND
Joey (above, with his mother
and Jaxon, and below, playing
baseball in 2014) loved looking
after his younger brother.
“They were on the same
baseball team,” says Andra.
“They did everything
together.”^
54 l Who