92-year-old recovered from traffic accident that broke his neck

By Diane Cochran of Montana Lee Newspapers - 12/26/2008

In 40 years of driving 1,000 miles a week for work, Walter Graham never wrecked his car. It took a Sunday drive with his wife to do that.

And although he's fully recovered now, the crash broke the 92-year-old Billings man's neck in a way that probably should have killed, or at least paralyzed, him.

"This wreck was something else," said Graham's wife, Donna. "I really thought it had finished him." After church one fall day, the Grahams decided to go to Rapalje to have lunch with a friend. It was a good day for a drive — the weather was mild and the roads clear.

"We weren't going fast," Graham said. "We weren't in a hurry." Still, near Columbus, Graham lost control of the couple's almost-new Buick LaCrosse on a curve in the road, and the car rolled over into a ditch.

Graham's head hit the windshield, knocking him unconscious. Donna, who was unscathed, leapt out of the car and tried to summon help with her cell phone.

There was no phone service in the ditch, so she ran up a hill in high heels to make the call. Eventually, emergency personnel arrived and took Graham to the hospital.

"We never did make that luncheon," he said.

It turned out that Graham had broken a vertebra in his neck.

The head rotates on a small peg that protrudes from the second cervical vertebra, said Dr. Michael Morone, a neurosurgeon at Billings Clinic. The force of the car crash sheered that peg off Graham's vertebra and put his spinal cord at risk.

"With that fracture, were he to move his head, he could injure his spinal cord," Morone said.

In fact, when Graham regained consciousness after the accident, he turned his head from side to side and complained that it hurt.

At the hospital, Morone had several options to treat Graham's injury. Surgery or a stabilizing halo are common remedies for a fractured cervical vertebra, but both carried serious risks for a patient of Graham's age.

"Patients with these types of fractures over age 75 are kind of rare," Morone said. "There's not a lot of experience with most medical conditions with patients in their 90s." Morone opted to fit Graham with a cervical collar, a noninvasive treatment that carried no risk of infection or side effects from anesthesia, as surgery does, and would not affect Graham's balance — and put him at risk of falling — the way a halo would.

Graham wore the collar for four months, and he hated every minute of it. It was hard to sleep with it on, and its restrictiveness made him feel claustrophobic.

"We both didn't think we'd make it," Donna said.

But 15 months after the accident, the peg on Graham's vertebra has partially reattached and he is able to turn his head without pain.

Plus, he's back behind the wheel. Graham logged 40,000 miles on the road during four decades as a salesman for Firestone, and he's not done driving yet.

He recently renewed his driver's license and was delighted to learn that it won't expire for another eight years.

"That means I can drive around Billings, Montana, until I'm 100," he said.

Contact Diane Cochran at dcochran@billingsgazette.com or 657-1287.