Fifty-year-old Pam Surano from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was attending Mass on August 30 when she noticed an incoming call from her daughter Mary Maloney. She turned off the alert, intent on the service and prayer. She figured she would call the 13-year-old back when she was finished. But Mary kept calling, and by the third time, Sureno knew something was wrong. She had been jumping on the trampoline in the backyard — alone — and had an accident.
Surano could tell something was off by the sound of her daughter’s voice.
“Mary’s voice was different,” she told Today. “She said she had an accident and ‘I can’t move my legs.’”
Mary was interested in gymnastics and was practicing flips when she fell.
"She’s very acrobatic, extremely athletic. She does every sport imaginable,” Surano explained.
The trampoline’s safety net kept Mary from falling on the ground, Surano told KDKA, but Mary landed on her head and neck during a flip and snapped her neck.
“To be honest, she was probably doing everything parents warn their kids not to do alone,” the mom told the news program.
Initially, Mary wrote it off as only a small twinge in her back and went inside to sit down. When the pain wouldn’t go away, she decided that a hot bath might release the pain, but it didn’t help at all.
“She had a harder time getting out of the bath,” the mom recalled to Today. “It increasingly felt worse.”
Mary went to lie down in her bed, only to slowly realize she couldn’t move.
She called for her father, who was in the house at the time and managed to get her into the car, rushing her to UPMC Passavant. The damage was serious: Mary couldn’t move the lower half of her body. She couldn’t feel anything, and she couldn’t even wiggle her toes.
“They put her in a wheelchair. She threw up all over herself and fell forward like she lost all ability to sit up,” Surano recalled. “From then, it was just a series of nightmares.”
A CT scan and MRI told doctors nothing.
“They were completely perplexed because it showed everything perfect and normal from the brain to the spinal cord,” Surano recalled. “There was not a contusion, not a blood bleed, not a fracture, nothing was wrong.”
Doctors used steroids and blood pressure medicine to treat Mary. Two days later, they ran the scans again.
“That’s when it showed the spinal stroke,” Surano said. “(In) the area that controls the legs and the feet.”
Mary ended up spending six days in the intensive care unit before being moved to a rehabilitation unit.
She is paralyzed from her mid-chest down, but doctors can’t tell if her condition is permanent.
“If you touch her thigh or her leg or her foot, she can feel you touching them,” Surano explained to Today. “That’s a big win and we’ll take it.”
It will take a long time for Mary to fully recover, but Surano said her daughter is keeping her spirits up and has a strong faith, which has been helping her.
“They also say that her positive attitude, incredible spirit, her hard work is powerful and all of that is going to lend itself to the healing process,” the mom said. “We’ve been overwhelmed with prayers that have turned the tide for us.
“Mary told me to make sure that people know she will walk again. It’s because of God,” Surano said. “She would not be where she is now if it weren’t for the prayers.”
Surano is sharing her story so other parents will be careful when letting their kids play on a trampoline.
In fact, the mom said that after Mary’s experience, she doesn’t “advocate anyone use the trampoline.”
“I almost wonder, and I’m certainly not a medical expert, if the trajectory of the body, it’s just not meant to do that,” she added.
At the very least, kids should never be on the trampoline alone and should always use it with at least one parent present.
“Make sure that they're not doing any sort of somersaults or flips or anything that increases the likelihood of them coming down wrong on their head or neck,” she said.
A GoFundMe page was also created to help pay for Mary’s hospital bills and has since raised $90,000.
“A broken heart YET filled with so much love,” Surano wrote in an update from September 7. “A few nights ago I was crumbled in a ball crying myself to sleep on the couch of the PICU. I wondered how we would face this everyday, not for ourselves, but for Mary.
“Tears streamed down her face and her eyes glazed over,” she continued. “I knew what her soul was speaking to her. It was an indescribable sadness. But your prayers are moving mountains. Your love, your faithful prayers and beautiful hearts are changing things.”
Her daughter might not be able to move her body “but her feet and legs now feel our hands touch her and tonight her feet are tingling! Your prayers, your love are the reasons,” she wrote. “[I] so strongly believes in the power of prayer. Continue to pray for Mary and the family.”
