May 13, 2008

6-year-old saves father's life

Burlingame native fractured neck in bicycle accident

By Kristina Peterson / Daily News Staff Writer

Burlingame native Reinold Jones had long been a daredevil with good luck.

Over years of skateboarding, Jones had never broken a bone. Once he rammed into a truck on his motorized bike, bounced off and kept going.

But this spring in Tonga, Jones' luck ran out on a Sunday outing with his daughter when he fell off his bicycle, fracturing his neck and breaking his jaw, nose, cheekbones and an eye socket.

The 40-year-old man credits his survival to his 6-year-old daughter, Maggie, who got him to the hospital when no ambulance arrived.

Back on the Peninsula for surgery at Stanford Hospital, Jones said this week that he doubts he would have lived had Maggie not been with him.

"My daughter really went beyond," he said. "She saved my life."

The accident occurred around 11 a.m. on Easter Sunday, when the pair set out for a ride past a Tongan graveyard on a waterside trail. Jones had just oiled and tuned up his bicycle, a single-speed mountain bike.

The two had only gone about 100 yards when Jones hopped a curb, and his shock absorbers fell off, sending him toppling facedown to the ground below.

"I couldn't move," Jones said. "The concrete was burning my face." The impact had split his face through his chin, lip and sinus cavity; his jaw and nose were broken and his neck was fractured.

Jones thought he had only minutes left to live.

"I said, 'Maggie, hold my hand. Always remember your daddy told you you're a winner,'" Jones said.
Then he told her to try and find an ambulance.

A few onlookers had come out of their houses and Maggie asked one of them to call an ambulance, Jones said. Then they waited.

Jones was bleeding heavily and told his daughter they needed to get to a hospital soon. So Maggie stood by the side of the road and flagged down a red Toyota pick-up truck.

"We drove to the hospital going 100 miles an hour," Jones said. But when they got there, it became apparent he would again have to wait for a doctor who could treat him.

Maggie called her mother, dialing her number from memory, and then started sobbing and calling out to doctors, Jones said.

Eventually everyone in the waiting room began entreating a doctor to see him.

"They were all saying 'faka ofa' - which means 'for the love,'" Jones said. Finally, around 7 p.m. doctors took him into the operating room where they pumped six units of blood into him, wired his jaw, stitched together his forehead and lip, and put him in a cervical collar.

Jones knew he wanted to get additional medical treatment in the United States. But before boarding a plane he had to wait six days until he could drink liquids and wait for his just-renewed passport to arrive.

Peace Corps volunteer Bethany Jacobs helped Jones chase down the delivery driver who brought Jones' passport on the same plane he soon left on. When Jones arrived in the Bay Area, he drove straight to Stanford's emergency room where doctors immediately operated on him.

"They had to break my jaw again because it was healing wrong," he said.

Dr. Samuel Most, chief of facial plastic surgery at Stanford Hospital, said it was unusual to operate on a patient several days after such a traumatic incident.

"He had a neck fracture and significant facial injuries initially triaged in Tonga, but they didn't have the proper facilities to diagnose what was going on," Most said.
Jones was lucky - an aneurysm undiscovered in Tonga did not lead to a stroke.

"With his spine injury, he could have been paralyzed," Most said.

Doctors are predicting a full recovery for Jones, who hopes to rejoin his family in Tonga within the next year.

While Jones and his wife traditionally have been strict with Maggie and their 1-year-old son, Drew, recently they have become more lenient.

"Normally I don't spoil her," he said. "But my wife now - she's buying her anything she asks for."



E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.