A young Staten Island man once on the verge of death after a fiery car crash that left him paralyzed and unable to speak has beaten long odds in what he called an absolute “miracle” recovery.
“God brought me out of that. I’m here today,” Anthony Mercado, 19, told The Post.
The Great Kills resident has hazy memories of the June 2022 accident that left him mangled and clinging for life on South Avenue on SI.
“I learned that cars are thousands of pounds of a weapon that can kill you at any moment,” Mercado said of the incident that required significant surgeries and rehabilitation.
Even one of his doctors, Dr. Jonathan Rasouli of Northwell Lenox Hill, “admittedly had doubts” about a positive outcome for Mercado due to his “devastating injuries.”
The last thing the teen recalled about that fateful night was leaving a senior class trip from Seaside Heights, NJ, before he was rescued out of his enflamed 2008 Cadillac CTS.
An ex-firefighter who previously responded to 9/11 happened to be at the right place and right time.
Mercado guesses he would have lived if not for the good Samaritan.
“He had scissors and he cut my seat belt out,” Mercado added. “He thought [the devastation] was something out of a movie.”
Mercado, then 17, was brought to Staten Island University Hospital in critical condition and in need of multiple life-saving interventions including a breathing tube and being put into a medically-induced coma.
While fortunate to have survived such a brutal wreck, he was just starting his years-long ordeal.
“The injuries he sustained were definitely life-threatening,” said Rasouli, Mercado’s surgeon who later treated him at Lenox Hill. He added that there was “pretty significant trauma” to his head.
“He had bruises on the brain, there was bleeding, he had a significant blood clot that was pressing on his brain, too.”
But Mercado wouldn’t allow these circumstances to get the best of him. He pushed himself to regain speech, starting off with little noises like “eh.”
The love and support of Mercado’s family, who kept him hopeful during his hospital stay, helped the young patient reach a breakthrough point in August 2022.
“I called for my mom, I said the word ‘mom,'” he recalled. “She started to cry. Little by little I started saying more and more words and could speak sentences by the end of that August.”
He said his family helped him learn to walk again, too.
“We didn’t use a wheelchair,” Mercado said. “I walked around with my right arm over my mom’s shoulder. She carried me and I walked little by little over and over and over until I got to walk by myself. That’s what we did.”
Rasouli, his physician, also recognized the healing power of those closest to him.
“I could see that his family, particularly his mom and his sister, had such a fight, such a drive to see him pull through this,” he said. “I knew if he had that familial support that he’d be just fine. He ultimately did fantastic.”
But there was still a long road to go.
In October 2022, Rasouli along with Dr. Netanel Ben-Shalom operated for four hours on Mercado to help restore muscles on each side of his skull that had been damaged.
Doctors opted for a decompressive craniectomy, which Rasouli said involved “removing virtually half of his skull to allow the brain to swell out and allow us to fix the fractures that were there.”
Mercado was left without substantial portions of his skull for about two months.
It put him “essentially on life support,” according to Rasouli. “He had a very tough recovery from the surgery and the trauma he sustained.”
“For the first six months, I was not really mentally there,” Mercado said of the debilitating process.
He’s also had 10 surgeries on his left arm with more planned — but Mercado has finally reached a point where he’s getting ready to resume a life with much more normalcy. He’s even spent the past year in the gym doing bicycle exercises to improve mobility as well.
“I consider myself finished with the healing process,” Mercado said.
Rasouli is amazed by his patient’s longtime tenacity.
“If you see him now, you would almost never know anything had happened,” he said.
As a longtime lover of cars, Mercado plans to not only get back into the driver’s seat come 2024 but also perhaps work on them for a living in the near future.
It’s also his goal to own the same car as his life-saving doctor does: a Porsche 911 Turbo S.
“I want to show that I came back from this and that I can be behind a wheel again,” Mercado said. “I can drive a car and I will have a nice car for myself. One day.”