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READ MORE: I survived being 'internally decapitated' after a drunk driver hit me An Illinois woman has revealed how a horrific sports accident left her on the verge of being 'internally decapitated' and made her life miserable. Megan King was just 16 in 2005 when she leapt in the air to catch a soccer ball during gym class and fell to the ground, damaging her right ankle and spine and tearing the muscle off both shoulder blades. The teenager spent more than a year on crutches.
Instead of her symptoms subsiding, more appeared. King's joints weakened and her muscles began to tear, and her shoulder blades ached in unbearable pain. Over the years, she underwent 22 surgeries on her shoulders and shoulder blades alone, with doctors mystified as to why her body couldn't heal.
It took 10 years for King to be diagnosed in 2015 with hypermobile Ehler's-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), a genetic disorder that stops collagen — a key joint tissue — from forming properly and leads to joint instability. A year later, King's neck became dislocated and she was fitted with a Halo brace, a brutal contraption that screws directly into the skull to keep the neck from moving. During the process to remove the device, her skull nearly became detached from her spine, an almost always deadly condition called internal decapitation or Atlanto-occipital dislocation (AOD).
King, now 35, said: 'I flew my chair back to keep gravity from decapitating me. My neurosurgeon had to hold my skull in place with his hands. I couldn't stand.
My right side was shaking...
Emily Joshu Sterne.
