Tabitha and her mother, Kim, were horseback riding around a local farm when suddenly Tabitha's horse bolted. Kim lost sight of her daughter, only to discover her face down, unconscious, with bleeding ears. At the hospital, Tabitha was diagnosed with a fractured skull and a swollen, bleeding brain. She was in a coma. Her husband, Jacob, and their four sons were horrified.
"When you can’t talk to her and she can’t talk to you or, she’s unconscious — it was a scary moment," Jacob told CBN.
Neurosurgeon Dr. Arun Jacob, who treated Tabitha, noted her brain was swelling too fast. If they didn't remove a part of her skull, she would die. She survived the surgery, but the doctor warned that she could be mentally or physically impaired.
"My biggest fear in the whole thing was that she just wouldn’t recognize me or our boys. I wasn’t worried really about her, she was in a wheelchair or anything like that, I just wanted her to know who we were," Jacob said.
Tabitha appeared to be recovering in ways her doctors did not expect. She was taken off a ventilator and even spoke for the first time since the accident.
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“She looked over at her husband, and she said, ‘Don’t ever let them do that to me again,'" Kim recalled.
Not only was Tabitha awake and speaking, she still had her sense of humor. Doctors would come in to ask Tabitha if she recognized friends and family, and she always did.
"I was like, 'If y’all ask me one more time who somebody is, I think I’m going to come off the bed! I know who everybody is!'” Tabitha recalled.
Within nine days she was able to go home, nearly recovered. She could walk, climb stairs, and hold full conversations.
"It’s really gratifying for people like us, when we see things like that, because it’s not happening every day," Dr. Jacob said. "I think she had a miraculous recovery.”
This story first appeared on LittleThings in August 2017.
