Classmates lend voices in hopes of rallying stricken friend

Holly Tye struggles to talk about her son in the present tense and sometimes rephrases in midconversation:

“He was funny and athletic. He loved to get on the floor and wrestle with our dogs. He loved … He loves to play on the computer,” she corrected herself.

Tears welled in her eyes and then rolled down her cheeks.

“I try not to use the past tense, but I automatically use it because he doesn't do any of those things any more,” Tye sobbed softly.

Her 11-year-old son, Jeremy, has been in a semi-coma since March 17, when he collapsed on the playground of the Spring Valley Elementary School, in the Raytown school district, while running a lap in gym class.

For weeks his classmates, many of whom saw Jeremy fall and watched as an ambulance whisked him away, went in small groups to Children's Mercy Hospital to wish their friend well. They took cards, stuffed animals, and video and audio tapes of class lessons, recess, skits and songs they sang just for him.

Wednesday after school, Leah Ramey, Natalie Howard, Houston Frisbey and Haley Bass visited with their classmate. They huddled around Jeremy's hospital bed and began chatting and giggling about the field trip they would make the next day. The girls sang a silly song and made funny faces.

Jeremy lay on the bed, his arm limp around the teddy bear he cuddled as a toddler. His eyes stared straight ahead. He did not speak. He did not move.

But his family believes the children's voices are getting through to him.

The day Jeremy arrived unconscious at Children's Mercy Hospital, doctors told his parents that a congenitally tangled blood vessel had burst in his head. Blood rushed into his brain, bruising it. A clot that had formed took several hours of surgery to remove.

“Doctors said that if he didn't have the surgery he would die,” Tye said.

“All we can do now is hope. But I can't imagine him like this always.”

Jeremy, who teachers say is very bright — gifted even — already has made some progress. At first, Tye said, “the doctors wouldn't even give us a 50-percent chance that he would make it.”

On Thursday he went home.

About noon on Friday, his parents brought him in his wheelchair to the school to join the fifth grade's ceremonial serenade through the halls, commemorating the end of school and the move up to middle school.

Classmates, each wearing a button with Jeremy's face, swarmed his chair. They all seemed to talk at him at once, and took turns snapping photos posed with Jeremy in the center. Jeremy's yearbook, covered and filled with students' signatures, rested on his lap. His right hand, propped on top, held it there.

When the fifth-graders began singing, younger children drifted to their classroom doors to listen. Pushed in his wheelchair by schoolmates, Jeremy — motionless — led the parade.

“I have just been so impressed with what these students have done, all the cards and letters and this,” said John Tye, Jeremy's dad. “And it's the teacher, she's guided the whole thing. All the teachers here have been great. … Some of the younger children I don't think understand that his recovery could take years. ”

Jeremy remains in a semi-coma, his eyes open. But his mom and dad say that even before he left the hospital visitors said they saw a sparkle there.

The first time Jeremy's mom thought she noticed him react to an external stimulus was two days after his surgery.

Jeremy's fifth-grade teacher, Cindy Hodson, brought a videotape of Jeremy leading his class in a patriot speech during an after-school assembly the day before his collapse.

Monitors measured Jeremy's intracranial pressure. His brain was so swollen that doctors had left a piece of his skull loose until the swelling diminished.

“We were watching the monitors and watching the tape,” his mom recalled. “The tape was playing, and Jeremy's pressure levels went down. All of us in the room looked at one another and thought, ‘What a coincidence.' The next day we played the tape, and it happened again, and then again.”

His parents now tape family events for Jeremy, and before school ended, his classmates took time each week to record get-well messages and poems. Cards, drawings and photos covered the walls of Jeremy's hospital room from ceiling to floor.

His friends also raised about $1,000 through a car wash and skate party to help Jeremy's parents prepare for his home care.

Making tapes for Jeremy and visiting him, students said, taught them a lot about friendship and compassion.

“It takes a lot of guts to talk to him, because he is just there,” said Martez Williams, 10. “But I talked to him. I had a lot of courage. I told him what has been going on in our class.”

Students believe, too, that they are helping Jeremy. For some, visiting him is part of their own healing.

Kari Hamby said seeing Jeremy “is very sad.” She was standing next to him the day he fell. Talking about him still makes her cry. “I think we are helping him,” Kari said.

Experts in consciousness disorders say that while coma-arousal therapy is controversial and unproven, some believe environmental stimuli such as video and audio tapes can aid in recovery.

John Grant, a neurosurgeon at Children's Mercy, said he doesn't know whether the therapy works or not, but he has heard tales of people who have been through a coma and say it helped them. Even if outside stimuli doesn't help the patient, Grant said, he believes it helps the family.

Jeremy's condition was caused by what is medically referred to as an arteriovenous malformation, a condition seen two to four times a year by doctors at Children's Mercy, Grant said.

Grant said it sometimes can cause headaches or seizures. In Jeremy's case, he said, there would have been no way to detect it.

“When Jeremy came in to us he was within a lick split of being brain dead with no sign of brain function,” Grant said.

The tangled blood vessels still remain in Jeremy's head.

He said that in children, “If you survive, you improve.”

Jeremy, Grant said, is improving slowly.

“All we can do is sit back and wait,” he said. “It may take some time — many months to a year for him to reach his plateau. I don't know what his plateau is. But, when I look at his brain it looks good. So I would not write off his improving just yet.”

In the meantime, Jeremy's mother has quit her job to be home and care for him.

She, her husband and their older son, John Christopher Tye, soon will move from their Raytown home into a house without stairs to accommodate Jeremy's wheelchair.

She thinks that maybe with Jeremy home, she will sleep better. She clings to other people's accounts of recovery.

“Nurses at the hospital told me a story about a boy who was unresponsive and was sent home with his family to recover,” Tye recalled. “They said the family was watching a Chiefs game one afternoon. They were all yelling and cheering when all of a sudden they noticed the boy was cheering, too. That story gives me hope.”

To reach Mará Rose Williams, education reporter, call (816) 234-7801 or send e-mail to

mdwilliams@kcstar.com