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Cummings football coach back from coma

Great story from my friend Stephen Schramm at the Burlington Times-News about Cummings head football coach Steve Johnson's return from a near-death experience. An excerpt:

A member of the Altamahaw-Ossipee Volunteer Fire Department happened to be in the neighborhood and heard the call on his scanner. Within minutes, he was at the Johnsons' passing information to the ambulance that was rushing to the scene.

"That day, when I was going down the driveway (in the ambulance), I wasn't sure I was coming back," Johnson said.

Once at Alamance Regional Medical Center, doctors had a tough time figuring out what the problem was. Johnson was put into a drug-induced coma and placed on a ventilator for nearly four days while a team of specialists searched for a solution.

They discovered a chemical imbalance that caused the attack and hit on a way to remedy it.

"When you take out the thyroid, your body chemistry changes," Steve Johnson said. "There's a 1 percent chance that this can happen. That 1 percent fell on me. ... It was just a fluke thing that happened after surgery. Something in the body went haywire."