Brain Injury Survivor Thanks Stony Brook Docs Who Saved Her Life

Around this time last year, Arielle Budnick and friends decided to go for a skateboard ride in Southampton. 

Budnick said she remembers going too fast down a hill – but doesn't remember taking a hard fall, without a helmet on. It was a fall that sent her via medical airlift to Stony Brook University Hospital with a life-threatening brain injury that carried what one doctor described as a "high risk of permanent and disabling brain damage."

She spent five days in a medically induced coma, while Dr. Frederick Gutman and Dr. Michael Egnor worked to save her life. They determined her brain was bleeding, bruised and swelling fast, and removed a part of her skull so that her brain wouldn't be further impacted by the effect of the swelling pushing against her skull. They stored the piece of her skull they had removed in sterile conditions in low temperatures so that it could be re-attached two months later.

Budnick said when she woke up, she thought it was 2010. She could only write in scribbles. She spent two weeks at Stony Brook, then was transfered to Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, where she spent three weeks recovering.

"I'm really grateful to be here today. Stony Brook made it possible that I was not taken by the accident," said Budnick, who lives in Queens and will soon graduate from New York City's Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts.

"She has healed beautifully and has made a remarkable and complete recovery," said Dr. Michael Egnor, one of the surgeons who helped Budnick after her accident.

In retrospect, Budnick said she realizes now that wearing a helmet could have prevented the injury.

Jane McCormack, the trauma program manager at SBUH who also works with the Suffolk County Safe Kids Coalition, said the organization has been pushing for more widespread helmet use for kids and teens.

"These are considered 'not cool.' ... We try to make helmets available to children. We try to tell kids helmets are cool," she said.

Looking back, Budnick – who plans to study at Hunter College next year on an art scholarship – called her recovery "amazing." As a token of her gratitude, she presented an original painting she made – a whimsical, cheerful one featuring two cartoon animals – to the doctors for them to hang in the halls of Stony Brook Long Island Children's Hospital.

"It's a mixed bag of emotions," she said. "It's terrible that it happened to me and was really hard on my family and friends, but I feel grateful. It's hard to even put it into words."