After plunging into a ravine and spending a month at the hospital, Missouri teen Cody Trenkle Jr. is finally home.
It was July when Trenkle, 13, biffed from his skateboard and fell 240 feet into a ravine in St. Francois County, according to KSDK-TV in St. Louis.
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“I can’t really remember what happened after I fell off,” Trenkle said. “All I really know is that I flew off the board. But it was the grass’s fault, man, it wasn’t my fault.”
Trenkle’s disappearance launched a search-and-rescue operation that lasted 80 hours as family, volunteers, and K-9s searched for the missing skateboarder.
They eventually found him in a ravine near Goose Creek Lake lying in a foot of water.
Dehydrated and afflicted with deep wounds, a brain bleed, and pneumonia, Trenkle was airlifted to the Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis.
When he awoke from his coma in August, two weeks later, he signed a message to his mother. “I love you,” he said, according to People.
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“That moment was pivotal to me,” said his mother, Stephanie Neely. “It’s made the last couple weeks of stress, heartache, hope, gratitude, sadness, and pain worth it because that small gesture meant my boy was coming back to me.”
While hospitalized, Trenkle longed for home.
“Man, I wanted to leave the second I woke up from the coma,” he said. “I was just determined to get home, so I just did whatever they needed me to do to get there.”
Meanwhile, his mother was by his side the entire time.
And before the hospital released him, just before Labor Day, he climbed the hospital rock wall four times.
“We already knew that he was a fighter and super strong before, and very resilient,” his mother told KSDK-TV.
“This incident in itself just proved that tenfold. For somebody to go through what he went through, and a month later be able to walk out of the hospital and have the mindset that he does, with very minimal effects from the accident, it’s truly inspiring.”
But Trenkle still has a long road of recovery ahead of him.
“Cody has been doing so well since coming home from the hospital,” his mother told People. “He does still have some struggles physically with balance, coordination and strength as well as some short-term memory loss.
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“He gets pretty frustrated with both, but we are taking the necessary steps to help him make a full turn around and get back to being 100% Cody,” she said.
Cody also made a deal with his mom that he would wear a helmet when he skateboards.
This article originally appeared on The Western Journal, and is reposted with permission.
