“I’m thankful for the blessings that are happening in the mix of something devastating,” Jase McDowell’s mom Amanda tells PEOPLE
Jase McDowell walked off the field near the end of his soccer game on March 26, saying he had the worst headache of his life.
The high school freshman from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covered his right eye with his hand and started vomiting. As the 15-year-old lay down on the sidelines, people thought he might have a migraine, or possibly a concussion — a few spectators thought he got hit in the head with a ball. As athletic trainers examined him, his father, Rob McDowell called 911.
On the way to Grand Strand Medical Center, Jase was slurring his speech and having seizures as he slipped in and out of consciousness. At the hospital he was diagnosed with a ruptured arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a tangle of blood vessels that connects arteries and veins in the brain, according to Mayo Clinic. The rupture caused bleeding in his brain.
Jase was rushed into emergency surgery to try to stop the bleeding. About one in 100,000 people a year are diagnosed with AVM’s, which usually aren’t detected before rupture. Left untreated, they can cause brain damage, stroke or death.
“The surgeon said, ‘I can’t promise you your son’s going to make it, but we at least have to try,’” says his mother, Amanda McDowell, a 46-year-old registered nurse.
The two-hour surgery was successful and Jase was transported to the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, where a neuroendovascular surgeon performed an embolism to block blood flow to the AVM in hopes of shrinking it.
“I essentially went into the arteries inside his brain and filled the arteries supplying the AVM with basically medical-grade superglue,” says Dr. Jonathan Lena, a neurosurgeon at MUSC. “The goal is to reduce as much blood flow to that AVM as possible, and shut down that AVM. That’s what we were able to accomplish. … There’s no more blood going to that AVM right now.”
While it’s possible that a hit to the head by a soccer ball could have caused Jase’s bleeding, it might have been coincidental, according to Lena.
“Based on how his AVM looked, that thing was a ticking time bomb,” Lena says. “It was bound to rupture or bleed at some point. I’d be surprised if it was the…