Severe Traumatic Brain Injury
College student. Ejected from a car at 70 mph. Coma. Immediate and delayed HBOT.
Works for a bank in New Orleans; promoted three times.
Chad Rovira was featured in a channel 26 abc NOLA Unsung Hero video honoring Dr. Harch and his years of devotion to Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment.
Chad’s treatment of acute TBI with HBOT was entered the the prestigious text K.K. Jain’s The Textbook Of Hyperbaric Medicine, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Editions, and in Dr. Harch’s book, The Oxygen Revolution. Chad was a 18 year old college freshman who was sniffing an organic solvent called ethyl chloride, aka “Head Cleaner”, with friends as they were driving on Interstate 10 at 2:30 in the morning. Due to a dare and sudden jerk of the car as Chad was climbing out one of the windows when he was catapulted onto the pavement at 70 mph. Gathered up by his friends he was brought three miles down the highway to our emergency department, apneic, with a Glasgow Coma Scale of 6. When I arrived for my ED shift at 7a.m., he was on the ventilator and unresponsive to pain. As I walked past him, I stopped and remarked to the nurses that in five years I would be able to treat him acutely and emergently with HBOT. That musing turned out to be wildly optimistic, but seemed reasonable at the time.
Read the full story of Chad’s recovery here:
