Brain Injury

Madison DiGioia loves to fly. She is 15, strong and trim, and her face lights up when she talks about how she loves to go airborne, to be tossed 15 feet in the air, nearly three times her height, to kick out, twist around twice, and land in the arms of her fellow cheerleaders. But she was grounded recently. On Jan. 3, at cheerleading practice at Washington Township High School, Madison took flight, did her kick and double twist, but was caught too low. The back of her head hit the bent knee of one of the girls catching her. Madison missed five weeks of school, and her concussion took more than two months to heal.

Ten years ago on April 5, Lauren Bilski was on the edge of her 12th-row seat next to her dad watching her beloved Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins play, when a hockey puck hurtled off the ice, slammed her in the mouth, fractured her jaw and knocked out three teeth. Her father, Joe, remembers hearing the sickening thud of the impact, and turning to see his shocked daughter holding her face. Lauren, who was 10 at the time, remembers the blood drenching her favorite Penguins jersey which had been signed by all the team's players.

Sarah Burke , a 29-year-old X Games star from British Columbia, died Thursday, nine days after crashing during a training run in Park City, Utah. Tests revealed that the pioneering freestyler, who helped get superpipe accepted into the Olympics, had suffered "irreversible damage to her brain due to lack of oxygen and blood after cardiac arrest," according to her publicist. Superpipe skiing will make its debut in the 2014 Sochi Games. A four-time Winter X Games champion, Burke crashed on the same halfpipe where snowboarder Kevin Pearce suffered a traumatic brain injury during a training accident on Dec. 31, 2009.

A NORTHEAST Philadelphia man left out some vital information when he called 9-1-1 at 6 a.m. yesterday to report that his mother was experiencing chest pains. As paramedics were taking the 78-year-old woman out of the Kirkwood Road home on a stretcher, he mentioned that his pop was lounging in a recliner. Dead. For awhile now. "When the rescue guys are taking mom out, he says, 'Can you take my dad with you?' " said a source in Northeast Detectives. The 84-year-old father, who hasn't been identified, apparently spent Christmas in the recliner, but likely died on Christmas Eve. "He was dead for a couple days," the source said.

PHOENIX - It will be a special Christmas for the family of a University of Arizona student who was nearly taken off life support before waking from a coma. Sam Schmid, 21, was walking and speaking Friday at a Phoenix hospital. Dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, he was able to use a walker and talk in brief sentences. "Right now, I'm feeling all right.. . . Except for the rehabilitation, I'm feeling pretty good," Schmid said. Doctors at Barrow Neurological Institute say Schmid has a long recovery ahead of him to regain full speech, balance, and memory abilities.

Mike Patterson has awakened in an ambulance, unsure of what happened to put him there. He has gone through the tests and talked to the doctors and weighed his options. He has heard the words arteriovenous malformation and the acronym AVM and absorbed the fact that something he'd never heard of was going to influence his life from now on. So only Patterson can make the choices he has to make. Surgery or another option? Now or later? Play football again or play it safe?

Doug Markgraf was riding into Philadelphia when a hit-and-run driver left him for dead at 55th Street and Lancaster Avenue. After 14 days in a coma, he awoke with a few broken bones, a brain injury, and an incredible, intense, single desire. "If I can ever ride a bike again," he said to himself, "I'm going to ride as far as I can. " It took five years - the first year recovering from his accident, the next four finishing school at Drexel University and getting a job - but this summer, Markgraf, 25, who grew up in Ambler, did what he had promised himself.

Researchers have suspected for a while that people who sustain a single traumatic brain injury are more likely to develop Alzheimer's-like symptoms later in life. Now a University of Pennsylvania scientist has helped bolster that theory with some hard evidence: irregular protein deposits in samples of human brain. The brains came from 39 people who had had a moderate or severe traumatic brain injury at some point but died from another cause, anywhere from one to 47 years later.