The Riemenschneiders were reeling over their toddler's bloodied face and lacerated lip when they received another shock in the Children's Minnesota emergency room in St. Paul.
Two-year-old Kenzie had lost the top third of her ear from a severe dog bite, and a doctor wanted to try an ambitious hyperbaric oxygen therapy to save it.
"We were just adrenaline-driven at that point. I didn't want anything to do with any decisions," said the mother, Jaisa Riemenschneider, who recalled thinking, "Let's just trust the doctor and let's get going."
The quick decision proved smart. Surgery reattached the ear fragment after the Nov. 2 injury, and then 40 days of hyperbaric treatments at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis helped it grow healthy blood vessels and return to life.
"Seeing her ear turn gray, then black, and then slowly starting to see skin color come back?" her mother said. "You just never thought that a body part could change colors like that."
Doctors from both institutions are writing an academic paper to teach others about this promising expansion of hyperbaric medicine — a specialty that increases the lungs' distribution of oxygen to tissues by placing patients inside sealed, high-air-pressure chambers.
Surgery alone had little chance of success, but Children's Dr. Siva Chinnadurai believed hyperbaric therapy could improve the odds enough to try it on Kenzie. A similar approach a few weeks earlier had been successful in treating a 10-year-old's wound but, as far as Chinnadurai knew, that was the world's first attempt at combining an ear reattachment procedure with hyperbaric treatment.
"The likelihood of healing by just sewing something back on [to the ear] is historically close to zero," said Chinnadurai, the facial trauma surgery specialist who was on call at Children's when paramedics brought Kenzie in.