Brain Dead Child Responsive Following Motorcycle Crash Leaving Him On Life Support

A 12-year-old boy in Northern Ireland, considered brain dead following a motorcycle accident, has now regained consciousness in what his mother has called a "miracle recovery."

According to a report by Shauna Corr of Belfast Live and Daily Mirror, doctors had advised Cheryl Reid to pull her son Taylor's life support three times fearing that he would never recover. But that changed when he began showing signs of life after being unresponsive for almost a year.

"When I got to the hospital, they said he had a two percent chance of survival and wasn’t going to make it through the night," she told the publication. "The second day we definitely thought he was away as his body started to swell."

Taylor Reid was knocked off his bike in May 2016 on a trail near his home in Belfast. The crash sent his helmet flying off his head and left him virtually lifeless and unable to breathe on his own. He was 10 years old at the time of the accident and was an experienced, prize-winning biker since the age of five.

Cheryl Reid explained that had her son not been wearing a neck brace at the time that things could have been a lot worse.

"He had multiple fractures in his skull and every part of his head was injured," she told Corr. "They told me his brain had completely died and there was nothing they could do."

Cheryl said she spent the next three weeks in intensive care at The Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children and an additional nine months on its Paul ward. She added that during her pregnancy, Cheryl and her husband David never left her son’s bedside while he remained unconscious.

The mother credits her son’s recovery in part to his rehabilitation sessions with a private doctor every week for two hours a day for a year in the Belfast facility.

"At the start there was no response whatsoever, but now when I bring him every Tuesday, his eyes are wide open and he’s smiling - all the things they told me he would never be able to do again," Cheryl said. "Doctor Goshi (at the Craniaa Neuro Rehab Center) has just literally retrained his whole brain - he’s a miracle worker."

Typically, brain death is initiated by a neurologic injury including traumatic brain injury, which prevents signals from being sent to the brain, like the ability to control motor skills such as breathing, according to Live Science. In this case, doctors perform a series of tests to determine if the patient can breathe on their own.