The 2-year-old who refused to die.
There are no documented cases of survival like this one in all of the medical literature. When Oliver Staub’s head internally detached from his upper spine – the result of a horrific car accident – doctors told his parents he would not live. What happened next can’t be explained, but it does serve as a reminder that, with the right care, anything is possible.
Two-year-old Oliver loved to play with his older brothers – twins Sebastian and Julian.
And he still does.
The Staub family was on vacation in Mexico when their minivan was struck.
“The car hit us exactly in the center of the left side,” Oliver’s father Stefan Staub said. “It was an armored car, like a money transporter.”
All three boys were in car seats – Oliver was in the third row.
“I can remember the impact was super, super strong. I had a broken rib,” Stefan Staub said.
Miraculously, the twins had some scratches but were okay.
“I broke my arm in three (places),” Laura Staub said.
And she had severe head wounds from the window glass. But it was Oliver who suffered the worst injury
“There were people. I was screaming, “Help, help, help! He’s not breathing! He’s not breathing!'”
What the Staubs would soon learn was the bones in Oliver’s neck were broken and dislocated, his spinal cord cut in half. In other words, internally his head was no longer connected to the rest of his body.
“And I could feel on his neck there was something, you could feel bones not in the right position,” Stefan Staub said.
“He was declared dead at the accident. He didn’t have a heartbeat. Twenty minutes he was gone. It took 20 minutes to bring him back,” Laura Staub said.
Oliver was airlifted to a hospital in Mexico City and placed on a ventilator.
“They told us he’s brain dead. You have to donate his organs,” Laura Staub said.
But Oliver kept fighting. And so did his parents. Laura and Stefan searched for a doctor who could help their son.
Dr. Mohamad Bydon is the chair of neurological surgery at UChicago Medicine.
“They had gone all over the nation, all over the world,” he said. But only one doctor agreed.
“What I said to them was, ‘I don’t know if it’s going to work, but we can try,'” he said.
Dr. Bydon and his team at UChicago Medicine first decompressed the injury space, which was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, and reconstructed the lining of the spinal cord, called the dura, which had been destroyed in the accident.
“And then we stabilized the head. We put a plate in the base of the head and we placed screws in the spine and we connected those together with rods to reconnect his head and his spine so it’s not just muscle and skin holding them together,” he said.
A few days later, Oliver’s spinal cord was gently placed back into its proper anatomical position and the surrounding bones were reconstructed.
“Those surgeries are difficult in an adult,” Bydon said. “They are even more difficult in a 2-year-old because they can’t tolerate much blood loss.”
The days following the procedures were harrowing.
“At one point his heart stopped,” Bydon said.
Oliver suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. His care team never gave up on him. Then strange things started to happen.
Are those reflexes? No, that’s his body saying ‘I feel pain’
Bladder and bowel sensation followed. He even started to breathe over his ventilator – meaning his lungs were trying to work on their own.
“His therapists were like, ‘How is that possible? He’s supposed to be paralyzed from the neck down?'” Laura Staub said.
“This is not something that’s been reported in our literature for an injury of this prolonged length,” Bydon said.
“No one can understand what is going on,” Laura Staub said. “The medical team we have here say, ‘This is something we have never seen. We were not expecting any of this.'”
Oliver continues to amaze those around him.
“Last week he removed his own trach tube with the hand, so now we have to be very careful,” Laura Staub said. “For us that he is happy is the most important thing.”
And he’s happiest when he’s with his brothers.
“I don’t want to count him out and I don’t want to say what he can and can’t do, because he’s proven us wrong at every step,” Bydon said. “And so the sky is the limit for Oliver.”
“We told him if you decide to stay, we will move mountains for you, and we keep doing that every day,” Laura Staub said.
The Staub family has received financial support from people all around the world, including a soccer star in Germany, where the family lived before the accident.
Oliver and his family plan to return to Chicago in March to take part in a stem cell clinical trial. WGN’s Medical Watch team will be sure to bring you an update.
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