This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Even amid the fluorescent lights and constant whirring, a mother finds a way to smile as she shares a memory. It was last fall, her son's first game since returning from a two-year Mormon mission. The 6-foot-6 lineman paced the sidelines, upset with the officiating, nervous, and totally enthralled as he watched his 10-year-old brother play for a little league championship.
"Yep," the mother recalled thinking, "you still love football."
And as she recounted the story aloud one day last week, her son's eyes opened wide.
"You said the word," a friend in the room said. "Football."
Brady Holt lay there, unmoving, saying nothing, his blue eyes fixed on the ceiling of a hospital room.
"We believe he can hear us," his mother said.
Getting a sign
It has been a month now since Christy Holt's world changed forever.
On May 14, Brady, her eldest son, was driving from his family home near Riverton to the campus of Utah State University. Somewhere near Willard, investigators surmise, the freshman defensive lineman must have dozed off, drifting off the freeway and crashing into wooden spools at a construction site. He overcorrected. His Ford Explorer rolled and Brady, who was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the car.
Later, a trooper took Brady's cellphone, pressed the button and asked Siri to call Mom. At first, Christy Holt thought it was a sick joke.
Brady was taken to Ogden Regional Hospital. He had multiple broken vertebrae, a neck fracture and severe brain injuries. Doctors told his family that Brady had a 15-percent chance of survival and even then, Christy Holt said, "the prognostic outcome is they will be a vegetable."
As she sat in the hospital in the first days after the crash, the mother began to plan her son's funeral. His father pleaded with him, telling his son he needed to give them a sign.
"He opened his eyes," she said. "Whether or not that was our sign, we took it as one. At that point, we knew we needed to do whatever we can to fight for him."
Small signs of progress
Brady was a teenager when he got the sudden growth spurt that shot him up to 6-6. His brother, 10 years younger and suddenly standing only as tall as Brady's hip, started calling him "The Giant."
Now Brady's hulking frame barely fits into his hospital bed, where he is surrounded by tubes and gauges and given constant care.
After returning home from a Mormon mission in upstate New York last fall, Brady pushed himself hard to prepare to try out for the football team at Utah State and had earned a spot as a walk-on. At the start of the summer, Brady had been thrilled when his coaches told him they wanted to try him out at tight end.
"We were just excited about his future and the progress he made during spring ball," Utah State head coach Matt Wells said.
Wells and his players and coaches have been regular visitors in the month since the crash. On Monday, the coach and members of his staff filled the hospital room, telling their player they were there for a meeting and that he needed to pay attention.
"It's just hard to see your kid laying in a bed," Wells said. "And he is our kid. We all basically have our real children and 113 stepsons, and that's the way we look at him. Brady's one of us. He's an Aggie and he'll always be an Aggie. We just want him to wake up."
Now Brady has dropped about 30 pounds. He has been moved from Ogden to Intermountain Medical Center to be closer to his family's home. He can breathe on his own, but must be fed through a tube. He's undergone back surgery and bounced in and out of the ICU as he's dealt with bouts of pneumonia and meningitis. On good days, he does a few minutes of physical therapy.
Doctors and nurses have been able to put him in a back brace and get him sitting up. They have also put him on a tilt table — which his mother describes as looking like a "medieval torture machine" — and slowly increasing his body's incline, forcing him to use the muscles in legs if only for a short while.
"This is hard work, but he was never afraid of hard work," his mother said.
Brady's eyes open, but they do not track anything. Still, the family has heard stories of good outcomes from worse injuries, and they hold out hope that Brady's youth and strength will help him overcome the long odds he's facing.
All the while, they're on the watch for the smallest signs of progress.
One day last week, after asking for a thumbs up, Brady lifted his right thumb ever so slowly. A few days later, his mother tugged lightly at his beard looking for a similar response.
"Can you squeeze my hand?" Christy Holt asked over and over. "Can you squeeze my hand?"
Nothing.
"They say he will get better; we just don't know what 'better' will be," the mother said. "We don't know if it's better, he can feed himself; better that he can actually be a functioning adult. We're kind of at that point where just don't know … and nobody can tell us."
"A heart of gold"
Christy Holt speaks plainly about her son's situation, her voice unwavering.
"People ask, 'How do you do this?' " she said. "We don't do it alone."
In the weeks since the accident, the family has been flooded with support from friends and strangers, both near and far.
Friends and family wear shirts with "#BradyStrong" printed on them. Hundreds more follow along with Christy's daily updates online. Tens of thousands of dollars have been raised to help cover costs. And countless stories about Brady have been shared.
"We've learned so much about him in the last few weeks," Christy Holt said. "He really is a good kid."
A neighbor visiting the hospital last week smiled wide as she remembered the 6-6 teenager ambling down the street one Halloween dressed as a gingerbread man. Holt's girlfriend revealed how Brady would blow dry the bright orange beard he's been growing since coming home from his mission six months ago.
Christy Holt chuckled as she recalled how passionate her son was when he helped coach his younger brother's peewee football team, diving into the dog pile after his defense had recovered a fumble and lifting the little boy up in the air. She laughed harder still remembering how he let his little sisters put pink curlers in his long hair.
"He has a heart of gold," Claudia Carter, his grandmother said. "That's why none of us could figure out how he could play football. You have to be mean."
But Brady, she said, has his mother's tenderness.
At nights, when they are alone, Christy Holt sits close to her son and whispers to him. One night, she lifted her head from off his chest and saw tears streaming from his blue eyes.
She took it as one more sign.
"It's those little things that make you think he's still there, he's still there, and he's trying really hard to get back to us," she said. "We just have to keep having faith that it will happen."
Twitter: @aaronfalk —
GoFundMe for Brady Holt
To make a donation toward covering the cost of Holt's medical expenses, go to https://www.gofundme.com/245e3svg