By Scott Jenkins
sjenkins@salisburypost.com
SALISBURY — A 14-year-old Salisbury boy is expected to return home this weekend after emergency surgery Wednesday to repair a fractured skull and stop bleeding around his brain, his mother said Friday evening.
Jordan Stoyanov fell and hit his head on a concrete wall while playing basketball at the YMCA on Jake Alexander Boulevard. His mother, Angel Stoyanov, was taking a class at the other end of the facility when her older son, Noah, came to get her.
“Apparently, he went to make a shot and … he fell into the block wall to the right of the goal,” she said. He was woozy and vomited when the paramedics came. “We thought maybe he just had a concussion.”
But a CT scan at Rowan Regional Medical Center revealed Jordan had a fractured skull. He also had a ruptured artery and was bleeding around the brain. Jordan was taken to Carolinas Medical Center-NorthEast in Concord, where another CT scan revealed the bleeding around his brain had doubled since the first scan in Salisbury, his mother said.
And a doctor there told Jordan’s family that if he didn’t have surgery, he would die.
The accident happened around 12:45 p.m.
Jordan was taken into emergency surgery at 4:30 p.m. Ninety minutes later, the surgery was over. Sometime after that, Jordan was jokingly asking nurses in recovery for their phone numbers.
“He’s been so brave. This kid is the bravest person I ever met,” Angel Stoyanov said of her son, who never lost consciousness during the ordeal. “I would’ve been so scared, and he never acted scared. He just did awesome.”
Friday night, Jordan, who will attend Carson High School as a freshman this fall, was doing well in spite of “45 stitches and a massive headache,” his mother said. He was also looking forward to getting back onto the court, but that won’t happen soon, his mother says.
“Of course, there’ll be no sports for awhile,” Angel Stoyanov said. “He wants to play basketball again, and he wants to play on a team again. But I’m thinking, can we get a helmet?”
Tim and Angel Stoyanov were looking forward to bringing their son home today or Sunday. And they were giving thanks, his mother said, for the surgeon’s skill and for what she called the miracle of his recovery.
“There was a lot of praying on Wednesday, a lot of praying,” she said. “So our prayers were definitely answered.”
Angel Stoyanov said she doesn’t understand why there wasn’t more padding on the walls around the basketball court, which is in a newer gym at the YMCA. It might have meant her son suffered only a concussion, she said. Even without it, the severity of Jordan’s injury shocks her.
“I never in a million years thought that he could hit that wall that hard,” he said. “It was the scariest day of my life.”
Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248.