But nobody knew Ronica’s neck was broken until Daisy Mountain delivered her to the John C. Lincoln Deer Valley Hospital Emergency Department, where medical images revealed fractures in both her C2 and C3 neck bones. C2 also was dislocated. That means her fragile spinal cord was unprotected and extremely vulnerable.
Ronica’s X-ray reveals Dr. Gianni Vishteh’s surgical remedy and the “halo” that was attached to her skull to immobilize her neck.
“She had what is called an ‘unstable hangman’s fracture,’ the kind of injury criminals would sustain when executed by hanging,” explained Ronica’s neurosurgeon, Gianni Vishteh, MD, chairman of John C. Lincoln’s Section of Neurosurgery. “She easily could have been paralyzed.”
Ronica was whisked from Deer Valley to John C. Lincoln’s Level I Trauma Center at the North Mountain Hospital, where she met Dr. Vishteh and the rest of the trauma team.
“They were all so amazing,” Ronica said. “I was blessed with the best of the best. I just cannot say enough good things about the people who took care of me at John C. Lincoln. Dr. Vishteh also took care of another lady at my church. We call him our rock star. He’s that good.”
Ronica had a lot of positive things going for her when she reached the Trauma Center, Dr. Vishteh explained. “She had good strength in her arms and in her unbroken leg. She could wiggle her toes. Those were good signs and made it more imperative to immediately immobilize her to prevent further damage.”
Ronica was surgically attached to a “halo,” a device that immobilizes the neck via a head ring and pins that are bolted into the skull. The ring, in turn, is attached to a vest via four posts. Then Dr. Vishteh went to work on the delicate, intricate two-stage surgery that pieced Ronica back together.
“First we approached the injury from the front to realign the vertebrae in her neck, remove the disc between C2 and C3, to perform a fusion with allograft bone and fixate with a plate,” Dr. Vishteh recalled. “In the second stage, we tackled the injury from the back of the neck, which meant Ronica had to be flipped.”
