Headstrong

Emily Pannenbacker isn’t like most high school seniors. 

Go ahead, chuckle aloud as she modestly talks about being a typical 17-year-old; one who enjoys hanging with friends, watching movies and playing soccer for the West Islip Lady Lions. Ask everyone else that knows her. They’ll digress, and turn to words like inspirational, courageous and optimistic to describe her.

You see there’s a story behind Emily. One that’s both beautiful and gruesome; filled with risk and reward. All dating back to a typical night last September. 

Emily was at a friend’s house. She had recently made the varsity soccer team as a junior, a spot she’d been yearning for since her days in middle school and summers with local travel squads. 

That’s when she suddenly started to experience a pounding in the back of her head.

It wasn’t a normal headache. 

“I wasn’t sure if I should leave or suffer it out because I never really got a headache that bad,” Emily recalls. “Then all of a sudden it went from bad to worse. I lost my communication skills. I lost my equilibrium. I lost everything in the matter of five minutes. So I quickly called my mom to pick me up.”

She spent the rest of the night lying down, hoping it would go away. But the next morning things still weren’t right. An emergency trip to the hospital and CAT scan led to a diagnosis she nor her parents, Carolyn and Bruce, were ready for: Arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Emily’s brain was bleeding.

“It’s not genetic, it’s not hereditary," Emily explains. "You just figure out you're born with it when it decides to hemorrhage."

AVM is considered a very rare disease and affects only about 300,000 Americans (according to the AVM Survivors Network).

“They talked about how if I get through the night alive, then we’ll battle it day by day," Emily says. "My brain was too swollen to do major surgery that night, so I stayed in intensive care for three weeks there.”

So much for the soccer season, movie nights and weekends spent with friends.   Forget junior year and multiple-choice exams, she had life-altering decisions to ponder: go through radiation (which she said takes up to five years to treat), take chances with surgery, or live with it.    

“Me being so young and only 16, why have to worry that it can rupture again?” she thought. 

With full support from her family, she decided to go through with the surgery in December.

“She had the very best neurosurgeons and hospital care and they guided us for months until her brain was ‘cooled off’ enough to accept surgery,” Carolyn Pannenbacker says of her daughter's care at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset.

It was a successful 10-hour procedure, which the doctors said would be followed by 6-12 months of rehab.

“They told me I’d need to re-learn the alphabet, how to spell, to read, write, to walk, talk, everything,“ Emily says. “They told me I can consider my sports career done.”

But remember that whole bit about Emily being unique? Let’s just say she defied the odds, again. 

“After my surgery, they had me up, had me walking,” she says. “Honestly, the doctor said he was amazed how I could move my left side. I wasn’t handicapped or paralyzed by any means. He said he’s never seen anything like it.”

Emily did need full assistance for a few months post-surgery and her speech was slurred, her mother recalls.

“Emily continues to have challenges especially with motor skills as her hemorrhage and AVM surgery was on the left side of her brain," she says. "She makes improvements every day and is determined to not let this limit her."

And as far as the doctor’s decree of an athletic career cut short? 

Well, Emily picked up where she left off last year as a member of the .

“This year she’s doing great,” head coach Nick Greico said. “She’s been on the field, working hard. She’s definitely inspired the kids. We always speak about living in the moment.”

So what was it that carried Emily through this complicated process? Luck? Fate? That’s not the way she sees it.

“I consider myself very blessed," she says. "Throughout this whole time, my family has had my back 100 percent; my soccer team would visit me at the hospital and bring me cards. So much support from so many people.” 

Her mother, needless to say, has been one of her biggest fans. 

 “She was really great throughout the whole thing," Carolyn Pannenbacker says of Emily. "There are really no words to describe how brave she was and how positive she was. She was determined to get back to who she was. “

Back to being her typical self.