Penny, 48, is alive today because of general surgeon, Jack Wagoner, MD.
In August, 2005, while working at a local glass company, Penny was involved in a freak accident. A cracked sheet of glass fell on her, clipping the right side of her face. She was cut from her right ear to her collar bone.

 “I literally felt my ear flop forward, touching my face,” she says.  Her jugular vein was severed.

“I fell to the ground, grabbed a rag that was nearby and pressed it very hard on my ear. I pressed so hard for so long that the paramedics had to literally pry my hands away,” she recalls.

Penny, of Genoa, was rushed to Kishwaukee Community Hospital. Dr. Wagoner was the surgeon on call.

“There was so much activity around me that I knew it was serious. I asked Dr. Wagoner if I was going to die. He looked me full in the face and I said “I expect a full recovery. I asked him three times and each time he said the same thing looking directly at me.”

Dr. Wagoner said Penny had a very large, gaping laceration from the front of her ear down to her sternal notch. She was taken straight to the operating room where he discovered a very extensive wound that had severed all of the superficial blood vessels and muscle on the right side of her neck.

“The internal jugular vein on the right was destroyed, but miraculously her carotid artery and a very important nerve that runs with it (the vagus nerve) had been spared,” Dr. Wagoner said, “People can survive just fine with only one jugular vein. But if the jugular vein had been cut a little higher up, then it would have retracted into the skull, and we would not have been able to control the bleeding.”

He sutured off the jugular vein to control the bleeding and further explored the wound.  The laceration went down to the transverse process of the spine on the right side, in which there are numerous small nerves that had been destroyed.

“He told me he could see the vertebrae in my neck and a lot of nerve endings. He was concerned about nerve damage,” Penny said.

The laceration had cut right in front of her ear, including the cartilage of the ear, down to the auditory canal of the inner ear. “It was a complex repair of the wound and the ear,” Dr. Wagoner said.

To evaluate her trachea and insure there were no injuries to it, he also did a bronchoscopy looking into her trachea, which turned out to be okay. Penny did remarkably well after surgery and her wounds healed nicely. “She ultimately had a paralysis of one of her vocal chords caused by the glass cutting one of the nerves exiting the spine, but her voice returned to good status as well,” he said.

“Certainly our extensive trauma training as well as the support staff in the Emergency Department and operating room allowed us to have a great outcome with this potentially mortal wound,” Dr. Wagoner said.

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