'Miracle' Woman Survives Internal Decapitation in Car Crash

FOX News ^ | May 13, 2007

[Kaslin]

DENVER, Colo. —  A Colorado woman is living miracle, doctors say, after a car crash separated her skull from her spine, literally decapitating her from the inside, according to a Denver news report.

, 30, hit her head on the dashboard of a vehicle she was riding in during a Jan. 25 car accident, suffering what is clinically known as , according to KMGH 7News.

Click here to read the full article.

"I remember the impact and then I had no control over my head," Malloy told 7News. "I wasn't focused so much on the pain. I just kept thinking, 'I have to stay alive.'"

Doctors drilled five screws into Malloy's neck and four more into her skull to attach a stabilizing halo to keep her head still. According to Malloy, she suffered a fractured skull, swelling of the brain stem, bleeding in the brain and nerve damage to her eyes.

Dr. Gary Ghiselli of the Denver Spine Center credits Malloy's strong will for her survival.

[Kaslin]

Wow

[aruanan]

A Colorado woman is living miracle, doctors say, after a car crash separated her skull from her spine, literally decapitating her from the inside, according to a Denver news report.

How do people come up with such moronic crap? Decapitation, literal decapitation, is when the head is severed from the body, not the skull becoming detached from the vertebral column. Having your head taken off by a guillotine or an ax or a tornado-blown stop sign is decapitation. What happened to this woman was disarticulation, not decapitation (though disarticulation can also be used to mean amputation).

[Shimmer128]

disarticulation (making notes)

[pandoraou812]

Prayers for Shannon Malloy and her recovery. ~P~

[robinf]

Moronic crap? At a time when an individual needs positive thoughts and prayers, you come up with the negative. I’m Shannon’s mom...believe me when I say it has always been referred to as an internal decapitation. If you have better information than the doctors who have been treating her, we would certainly welcome your medical expertise in treating Shannon!!! What you say makes sense, but in the scheme of things it is not important the words used - it’s your well wishes that matter!

[aruanan]

Moronic crap? At a time when an individual needs positive thoughts and prayers, you come up with the negative. I’m Shannon’s mom...believe me when I say it has always been referred to as an internal decapitation. If you have better information than the doctors who have been treating her, we would certainly welcome your medical expertise in treating Shannon!!! What you say makes sense, but in the scheme of things it is not important the words used - it’s your well wishes that matter!

Bend not thyself out of shape. Nothing in my post referred in any way to the individual undergoing the injury but to the one who came up with "internal decapitation". By any stretch of the imagination, the words cannot be used this way. If they are, it's simply yet another example of people desiring to be more clever than clear. Two things: 1. the name of an injury has nothing to do with the way it's treated, 2. my wishes have nothing to do with the quality of the treatment or the response to it.