A Kansas teen is feeling grateful to be alive this week, after a freak accident left him with a gruesome and life-threatening injury. According to CNN, 15-year-old Eli Gregg of Bourbon County was playing with his brothers near his home when they came upon a knife in the grass with a menacing 10-inch-long blade. Moments later, an accidental fall led the teen to come crashing toward the ground — and the next thing he knew, the blade was plunged directly into his face.
Gregg was rushed to the hospital, where he was treated by Dr. Koji Ebersole, who reportedly took one look at him and thought: "Here we go again."
Sound like a strange reaction? Maybe so, until you hear this: Despite how rare Gregg's injury was, it actually wasn't the first one of its kind to come across the neurosurgeon's OR in the last year.
The first happened in 2018, when a 10-year-old from Missouri named Xavier Cunningham fell from a treehouse ladder and landed face-first on a foot-long metal skewer.
Incredibly, he too survived his injuries, and Ebersole says it was actually Xavier's case that helped prepare the team for Gregg's.
"At the time of Xavier's case, nothing like that had been seen at our hospital amongst the personnel that were involved," Ebersole told CNN. "This is supposed to be once in a career."
But apparently, not so.
In Xavier's case, he was reportedly attacked by a swarm of wasps while climbing the treehouse ladder, which is what led him to fall. As for Gregg, Ebersole says the fall happened when Eli was trying to take away the knife from the younger kids to protect them.
In trying to get the knife, "there was a trip and a fall, and it was in the hand of another boy at the time, and … it fell into his face," Ebersole told the news station.
Gregg rushed into the house to alert his mother, who -- understandably -- was shocked by what she saw.
"When she looked at me, she just gasped," the boy told CNN. But he says he couldn't have been more grateful she was close by when he needed her most.
“I kind of heard my son screaming,” Gregg's mom, Jimmy Russell, told GWEB, “At first, I thought it was just normal, and then he came to the door … it was blood, and he had a piece of metal in his face."
"I love her, and I'm glad she was there for me," Gregg said. "It could have been the end of me."
One look at the X-ray images of Gregg's injuries, and it's easy to assume they would have been fatal.
The teen was transported to University of Kansas Health System on Friday morning, with the knife still embedded in his face.
The painstaking operation took incredible amounts of careful precision to pull off, and required Ebersole and his team to use catheters, tiny balloons, and other tools to remove the knife slowly and precisely — all while monitoring the teen's blood vessels as the knife made its exit.
Incredibly, though, it took just 10 seconds to remove the knife from the teenager's face, once doctors had everything in place.
Even more amazing was Gregg emerging from the incident without any injury to his brain.
"No injury to vision. No injury to the movement of the eyes. No strokes. No brain bleeding," Ebersole shared. "Really, he's just got a small little cosmetic incision line, if you will, from the knife on his right cheek. You would never know that he went through all of this."
But for Gregg, this likely isn't something he — or any of his family — will soon forget. The teen is back at home, recuperating, and is well aware of just how lucky he is to have had such an excellent medical team on his side last week.
"I'm really happy that they were able to get it out and keep me alive," Gregg told CNN before leaving the hospital. "I finally get to see the rest of my family. I get to go home."
