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A 13-year-old boy from Missouri is making an incredible recovery after falling 240 feet into a ravine while skateboarding.
Dakota “Cody” Trenkle, Jr. was skateboarding on July 27 when he went missing near Goose Creek Lake. For three days, family, friends, and volunteers slowly combed the nearby woods and couldn't find any evidence of where Trenkle might be.
Finally, on July 30, Trenkle's brother found his skateboard. It was given to the local K-9 unit, and one of the dogs followed the scent down a 240 ft ravine where Trenkle lay in a foot of stream water, barely alive.
Trenkle suffered a severe brain bleed from the fall, and he also had pneumonia and other wounds from lying in the hot sun and being submerged in water for roughly 72 hours. He was immediately airlifted to St. Louis and placed in the pediatric ICU, where doctors kept him sedated and on a ventilator for a week.
Trenkle's mother, Stephanie Neely, didn't leave his bedside, praying her son would recover. After 11 days in a medically induced coma, Trenkle slowly started to wake up and even made the ASL sign to his mother of 'I love you.'
“I cried,” said Neely, from his bedside at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. “I started bawling. That was the sign I really needed. I could finally take a deep breath and finally got some sleep that night because, in my mom heart, I knew he was going to be okay."
Neely also shared with the local news that Trenkle has been a fighter since birth, being born premature.
"He fought for his life then, and now, almost 14 years later, he’s doing it again. Just proving to all of us just truly how strong he is, how resilient, and how stubborn he is, which is honestly what saved his life. He wasn’t going to give up. And he’s like, ‘I’m not just gonna lay here and die.’ For him to finally come out of it two weeks after he went missing is huge. He’s still proving to everyone, ‘I’m fighting, I’m still here, I can survive.'"
The doctors have alluded that the recovery will be long for Trenkle.
"We’re on the right path now, and I just want everyone to keep their thoughts and prayers with him," Neely said. "He’s a miracle."