Costa Mesa High senior will walk at graduation after being hospitalized for nearly 2 months from motorcycle crash

When Costa Mesa High School senior Miguel Elias was 18, he became hospitalized for nearly two months, all the while thinking, “I won’t be able to graduate. I’m not going to graduate.”

Last November, he collided with two cars while riding his motorcycle on the way home from working at a Costa Mesa tire shop. The incident left him in a Santa Ana hospital with internal bleeding. His femur had snapped in half, his knee cap shattered, face shifted, lungs collapsed.

But despite his numerous surgeries and weeks of physical therapy, Elias, now 19, was able to make it back to Mesa in plenty of time for prom, final exams and — what he wanted most — Thursday’s graduation.

His older sister, Yesenia Elias, 27, calls his return a miracle, especially considering that right before the accident, he told her he didn’t want to continue going to school. He just wanted to work and see where he would go next.

“I probably wouldn’t have even graduated if it hadn’t been for the accident,” Elias said. “I knew I needed to keep going to school because I couldn’t run around the tire shop anymore. I needed to change.”

He suffered no permanent damage from the collisions, though his left leg can’t bend as easily as it used to.

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Costa Mesa High School student Miguel Elias was hospitalized for nearly two months after his motorcycle collided with two cars last November.

(Scott Smeltzer / Daily Pilot)

Elias has been working and earning his own money since he was 16, first as a busboy at a Japanese restaurant. He then later moved on to carrying, replacing and fixing tires.

But when he was younger, his sister said he wanted something a little different.

“Growing up, he always told us he wanted to be a businessman and he even did a school project where he said that’s what he wanted to be,” Yesenia said. “Then when he started working, he thought, ‘I’m making money. I’m pulling through.’ But that can’t be all your life.”

To Elias, working meant having his own cash to pay for things, including his motorcycle.

On the night of Elias’ accident last winter, the teen remembers finishing his shift at the tire shop, then pulling out of the parking lot on his bike. That’s it.

The next thing he can recall is waking up two weeks later, looking at the hospital ceiling above him. He had been sedated and in a coma.

“His face, his body, everything was just swollen,” said Yesenia, who had recently gotten a new job at the time of the accident. She moved around her work schedule to be with her brother at the hospital nearly every day. “I don’t even know how to describe how heartbreaking it was.”

With his lungs collapsed, his nose broken and his mouth wired shut, for weeks the teen used a feeding tube in his abdominal area to eat and a trach tube — inserted into an opening in his neck — to breathe.

While in the hospital, he underwent several procedures. One was implanting titanium plates into his face to bring back its structure; another involved inserting a rod into his left leg to keep his snapped femur in place.

After he transferred to a rehabilitation center in Tustin, he spent three weeks there completing speech and physical therapy. He came home in January to take online classes that Mesa counselor Jeff Gall helped him enroll in. The courses helped make up the work he missed while away from school.

“My mission was to finish all my online classes before the start of second semester,” Elias said.

He completed everything in less than a month.

Elias came back to school in time for second semester in February, first in a wheelchair, then a walker. Later he used a cane and then, once again, on his own two feet.

Gall, who has known Elias since his freshman year, said that once graduating became important to Elias it became important for Mesa staff and faculty to help get him there.

“Everyone from the admin to teachers, career specialists and college specialists accommodated,” Gall said.

Teachers let him out of class early to avoid the crowds during passing time. Friends carried his notebooks.

“We put everything in place for him … but it was his internal drive that helped him,” Gall said.

While Gall said he’s excited to see Elias walk in Mesa’s graduation Thursday, Elias said he’s just happy to walk in general.

“All throughout the hospital, I worried about not graduating,” he said. “Before that, I didn’t even want to go to school. But then I noticed I needed to change, besides just working my whole life.”

In the fall, Elias will attend Golden West College in Huntington Beach to study something he first considered long ago — business.

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Alex Chan, [email protected]

Twitter: @AlexandraChan10

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