Michigan teen survives car crash to graduate with her class

Published 1:00 pm Monday, June 6, 2016

MANCELONA, Mich. — For one Northern Michigan teen, graduation almost didn’t happen.

She almost didn’t walk with her friends carrying a long-stemmed white rose — her class flower — past the gymnasium bleachers where her family sat; almost didn’t hear the cheers as she made her way across the stage with a slight limp, hair shorn beneath her cap, to collect her diploma.

McKenzie Tracey, the high school senior her classmates called their “miracle,” nearly died in a March 16 car crash. She underwent nearly three months of hospitalization and rehabilitation for a severe head injury to join classmates at their commencement ceremony Friday night, defying doctors’ expectations.

The limp, a slight droop to one side of her face and a handful of scars are the only visible signs of her ordeal, a voice barely above a whisper — the result of permanently damaged vocal cords — the only audible signs.

“She’s come so far from the times I saw her in the hospital,” Mancelona High School Principal Larry Rager said. “I’m surprised, but you just never know what might happen when someone wakes up after an accident like this. She’s a tough girl. I expect her to be fully recovered, given the way she is now. It’s a real testament to modern medicine and her personality.”

Tracey, 19, was a dual-enrolled nursing student at Northwestern Michigan College and a nursing assistant at a local medical care facility at the time of the crash. She was bringing lunch to her fiancé at a nearby golf and ski resort when her car hurtled over an embankment.

“I remember going around a curve and losing control of the car,” said Tracey, whose doctors had to remove a portion of her right frontal lobe and repair a broken femur with a rod. “I tried to steer so I wouldn’t hit a tree. I remember bracing myself for it but I don’t remember hitting it. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital. I was just grateful to be alive.”

Doctors weren’t sure at first if Tracey would make it through surgery or would recover after, Emma Dunevant, Tracey’s mother, said.

“The neurologist asked if I was prepared for that and I said, ‘No, but I’m not ready to lose her now,’” Dunevant said.

Now Tracey is anxious to resume her life, though she has to guard against infection and accidents for the next several months and may need further therapy after extensive neurological testing.

She expects to go back to work as a nursing assistant later this month and hopes to go back to school in the fall.

She’s also planning a courthouse wedding before the formal one in October 2017.

That doesn’t surprise those who know the kind-hearted, driven teen.

“Since she started high school, she has been highly motivated,” Tracey’s grandmother, Debra Merrifield, said. “She has an aunt and uncle who are both just like her. You have to put cement blocks on their feet to stop them.”

“She’s a sassy, spunky girl,” said Tracey’s cousin, Deidre Smith. “It cracked me up. She came [into my job] after the accident and talked about her (life), her boyfriend. Not a thing had changed.”

That’s not quite true, Dunevant said. Tracey talks more, speaks faster and often repeats herself. She’s more impulsive than she used to be. And she’s afraid to drive.

But that doesn’t change who she is or how friends and her close family feel about her.

“You won’t find anyone here who has an unkind thing to say about Kenzie — not a teacher, not a friend,” Rager said. “She does nice things for people, she does nice things for her family.”

“I love her to death,” said Maddie Hoose, 11, Tracey’s sister. “She’s a living miracle.”

Drahos writes for the Traverse City, Michigan Record-Eagle.