Houston 18-year-old survives rare and potentially fatal condition
HOUSTON - A student from UT Austin was home enjoying the holidays, when the unthinkable happened. He suffered a rare condition that came close to claiming his life.
Francis King, 18, has come a long way the past six weeks. It all started on December 23.
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"So I went outside to feed my dog, and then the moment I stepped outside, my head started throbbing on the right side, but it was like right behind my eye, but also a lot of pain," explains Francis.
Francis knew he needed help and immediately dialed 911, then passed out from the pain.
"EMS came and just thought it was a migraine and they were about to leave, but my sister talked to them. She was like, stay until my parents come home. I'm very impressed because she's very young, she's a freshman in high school. She told them, no you're staying," says Francis.
His parents got home and feared it was more serious than a migraine. They raced him to the emergency room.
"On the CT scan and they noticed this really big thing in my brain," states Francis.
Life Flight rushed Francis from north Houston to Children's Memorial Hermann in the Texas Medical Center. There, a team was prepped and ready to perform emergency surgery.
"He had a very big hemorrhage of the right side of his brain. That was about the size of an apple. They called their consulting neurosurgeon and they were told that he had a minimal chance of survival and he should be Life Flighted to Memorial Hermann. And so when we got him, he was in a coma. We immediately put a breathing tube in him, and as quickly as possible, got him off to our operating room," explains Dr. Manish Shah with UT Health & Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital.
Less than ten minutes later, they were operating on Francis, in a huge effort to spare his life. Doctors didn't know if he would make it, but they were ready to put their skills to the test.
"We realized that we had to take out much of the apple-sized hemorrhage, and we realized that there was about a plum-sized malformation of vessels that had caused the hemorrhage, and so we knew that this was going to be a multiple stage operation from the beginning," says Dr. Shah.
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This is an unusual medical problem for anyone, but especially an 18-year-old.
"It's pretty rare, it's probably like less than 1% of the population. What caused this to happen is something he was born with called an arteriovenous malformation, and it's called a bag of worms when we look at it on any kind of imaging study, but it's a tangle of vessels that malformed," says Dr. Shah.
That malformation caused Francis to fight for his life, spending several weeks in the hospital. Doctors were amazed that he came out of a coma with his typical sense of humor.
"He woke up and he was talking and he's a very funny guy, very smart, he's an engineering student, and he wasn't really that worried about us taking care of him. What he was really worried about was COVID. So every time I saw him, he was trying to negotiate me giving him a COVID vaccine. This was before I'd even gotten my second dose, so it was only healthcare workers at the time. He's a funny guy," laughs Dr. Shah.
He's a smart guy, too. Brilliant is an even better description. Francis falls in the small 1-percentage of students to get a perfect score on the ACT and graduated as the Salutatorian of his high school class. He's recuperating well, already playing the violin and piano again. He's thankful now, even though he slept through the holidays in a hospital bed.
"I definitely appreciate the little things more now. It also really made me appreciate the people around me more. It's like when I saw how much people care about me, I realized how grateful I should be to be living," reflects Francis.
Dr. Shah tells us that Francis has a spectacular prognosis.