BOZEMAN — An emergency brain or spinal injury in Montana has almost always meant an emergency flight to hospitals in places like Salt Lake, Denver or Seattle.
Months of work by Bozeman Health, and three new surgeons, has changed that reality, and a Gallatin Valley three-year-old is living proof the months-long work was worth it.
See more of Milo's story here:
Melissa Mancey’s three-year-old son, Milo, was injured by a swing. It was serious and a trip to the hospital left the family focusing on an emergency flight to Salt Lake City.
“Milo was getting an IV so he could prepare to be on the plane for a little while,” she said.
Mancey says the doctor came in along with her sister, who works at Bozeman Health.
“But then kind of the energy in the room shifted a little bit, and the doctor came in and said, 'you know I think we want to do this here. This is really important that we get this done as quickly as possible,'” Mancey said.
That doctor is a neurosurgeon, recently established at Bozeman Health. Mancey’s sister, Kaitlin Drake, spent the past six months working to help establish the neurosurgery department at the hospital.
While she says adult patients were the focus, kids did factor into the planning.
“But in every conversation, every other Monday for six months. What if we have a child who has an emergent or urgent need? What are we going to do? And every single time the message was the same: If there’s a child who needs life-saving surgery, we have the ability, capability, the equipment that we need to do that work here,” Drake said.
Little did she know it would be her nephew to test that.
Mancey says Milo had the emergency surgery and then did follow-up care in Salt Lake City. She says having the emergency work done in the Gallatin Valley made traveling for follow-up care easier for her entire family.
“I think knowing before we left the valley that we had... like we had a very good outcome made it feel so much easier to leave and not have to worry about what are we going to come home to,” she said.
Bozeman Health saw the need for this program. Hospital CEO Dr. Kathryn Bertany says the trauma unit has seen double the patients in the past five years, and most of those patients that had to be flown to other facilities were head traumas.
“We knew we needed to bring neurosurgery locally because those were the patients that were being transferred either other places in the state or out of state,” Bertany said.
Bertany notes that when it comes to brain and spinal injuries, time is critical.
“With a head injury sometimes, time is brain and will make a difference in the outcome, and that can be by minutes or hours. If we have to transfer a patient out of state, they have to make it from our hospital to the airport then be on fixed-wing out of state,” she said.
Dr. James Kalyvas has spent the past 25 years in some of the country’s finest hospitals working as a neurosurgeon. He says his work in Bozeman has already shown its importance.
“Access, particularly in neurosurgery, is important because time matters. Time matters in the setting of brain injury and spinal cord injury and so we’re seeing that already. I mean, we have cases where lives have been saved because unnecessary transfers weren’t needed and definitive care was provided right here at home," he said.
Kalyvas saved Milo’s life, and that constantly reaffirms Bozeman Health’s efforts over the past six months to set up the program. His aunt says all the work paid off in that one day.
“Yes, we’re bringing on this great new service line that’s high tech and really critical. I might need that myself someday or somebody that I love so I was horrified at the experience that we had to go through. But it was it really helped ground me and why I do this work and how important it is," Drake said.
Milo is doing well. Mancey says he continues to be a typical three-year old.
“We are still really trying to keep two feet on the floor like his doctors told to, and it’s proving to be impossible to do that because he is a normal three-year-old kid. You would never know that he had brain surgery less than three months ago," she said.
The Mancey family is grateful for the work put in by Bozeman Health to establish this program.
“And to be able to say he went from injury to surgery in four hours in this valley is remarkable," Mancey said.
