High School Athlete Suffers Life-Changing Injury in Horrifying Snowboarding Accident
On February 25, 15-year-old high school athlete Blake Mendenhall was paralyzed in a horrifying snowboarding accident while out with friends at Lake Tahoe’s Northstar California Resort. Mendenhall’s aunt, Zoe Warnock, told SFGate that her nephew went snowboarding at Northstar nearly every weekend. Despite his experience, an unforeseen accident befell Mendenhall on his most recent trip.
"I caught an edge and I tried to avoid a tree and boom, right into the tree,” Blake explained to KTVU. “I stopped. I couldn't feel my legs," he said.
Blake suffered a cataclysmic injury to his spinal cord and had to be airlifted to nearby Reno Renown Medical Center, the same place Jeremy Renner was treated after his near-fatal snowplow accident.
“His doctor has been doing spine surgeries for 20 years, and he told us that this is the worst case he has ever seen,” Blake’s stepmother, Sharelle Mendenhall, told People. “There were fractures from the T4 all the way down. His spinal cord was completely separated between T7 and T8. His full spine is displaced.”
After hours of neurosurgery, doctors determined Blake would no longer have use of his legs. He awoke to his family by his bedside, who had to break the life-changing news to him.
“He is the hardest working person I know,” Sharelle said. “This kid gets up at 5 a.m. and rides his bike to the gym to work out before he goes to school,” she explained of his life before the injury. “He made the football team as a freshman. He was the kicker, and he didn't miss one field goal. He also was on the soccer team. And he just recently found out he made the high school golf team.”
Though it’s far from what he had planned for his first year of high school, Blake is handling his circumstances with a positive outlook. "There's always a light at the end of the path,” he told CBS News. “You won't see it at first. But you'll realize that it was all worth it in the end," he said. "Every day, believe that it will get better, and it will.”
Blake’s family says he still has a long way to go before he can leave the hospital. “He has multiple broken ribs, so he has a lot of blood and drainage and breathing stuff that they're trying to work with him on,” Sharelle told People.
But Blake is keeping an upbeat attitude, determined not to let himself be discouraged in the face of adversity. "Even if something goes wrong and you get hurt, what I realized is how much pain and what I've been through, never give up, never back down," he told KTVU.
Blake's family has set up a GoFundMe to help with medical expenses and ongoing care which Blake will require after he leaves the hospital. As of Monday, it had raised nearly $160,000 of a $500,000 goal.