Coro: Brown clears boat mishap

Isiah Brown did not know he could have a deeper appreciation of basketball than what was building inside him as he approached the end of a 608-day gap between his last Northwestern game and his first Grand Canyon game.

That changed in August, as quickly as a three-second turn of a boat propeller, whose blade sliced into the GCU guard's upper right leg, cut his thigh twice and grazed his stomach skin.

The ensuing few hours were scary and surreal but the damage is invisible to onlookers and negligible to Brown. The junior's scars lie below his GCU uniform and his basketball skills remain intact as he heads into his Lopes debut in Wednesday night's exhibition game against CSU San Bernardino at GCU Arena.

"I had a moment where I could've had to find something else to do and lost the thing that means the most in the world to me and I've done all my life," Brown said. "It's going to be emotional but I'm excited. God put a battery in my back, even more than I had before, to let me know this is what I should be doing. If I wasn't supposed to be doing this, He would've taken it away from me."

22835 Brown was only two weeks away from his return to GCU's campus when he and friends attended Seafair, a summer festival where they join thousands of other Lake Washington boaters annually in his hometown of Seattle.

Brown spends many summer afternoons on the lake and was soaking up that picturesque Aug. 4 day on a large inflatable platform. Out of sparkling water, he decided to swim back to his friend's boat to fetch another can. Unbeknownst to him, the lake patrol officers were calling for boats to re-anchor farther away from the I-90 bridge.

As Brown pulled himself onto the rear ledge of the boat, his friend was cutting the boat engine.

"I was in shock because I didn't feel anything," Brown said of the propeller ripping into his right leg. "It felt like I got kneed really hard but I wasn't really bleeding. My friends pulled me up but I don't think they realized what had happened."

His close friend and high school classmate Chloe Billingslea heard people shouting for her from two boats away. Billingslea, a Tulane senior, is a certified Certified Medical Technician who works part-time shifts in New Orleans when she is in school.

The two cuts she saw across Brown's thigh were freaking out friends but looked superficial to her trained eye. She loosened the bandage to allow for circulation, spotted another fortunate graze across an area near his appendix and noticed his ripped swim trunks.

"I pulled down his waistband a little bit and saw a gaping, fleshy wound," Billingslea said. "It was about the size of my palm. The skin had flapped down. You could see a layer of ligaments and the blood seeping through. As a biology person, it was really interesting but it was a very gory sight."

To Brown, it looked worse than it felt. The gash proved to be centimeters away from his femoral artery, the main blood supplier to his lower body.

"We're taught that you can bleed out in 20 seconds if you hit your femoral artery," Billingslea said.

She treated the wound with the boat's first aid kit and Brown was transported to a nearby hospital in east Seattle, where they used 30 to 40 stitches to close the thigh cuts. But the cut higher on his leg was too deep to treat there and he was transferred to a trauma center near downtown Seattle.

There, Brown felt like he was watching himself in a medical television drama. He was raced through the hospital halls on a gurney to a room in which several doctors converged on him like a full-court press.

"All the doctors looked at it with this weird version of perplexed," Brown said of 20 minutes of indecision. "Then, a surgeon (Dr. Jenny Yu) came in the clutch like Kobe (Bryant). She was one of the last people in the room and looked like we could've gone to high school together. All the doctors were filing out at this point and she said, 'Oh, yeah, I could do this.' "

After some "Stranger Things" conversation during a conscious 90-minute operation to close the wound with about 60 stitches, Brown was eating a Dick's Drive-In burger with the peace of mind that he would be playing basketball again in October.

It was a "Close Call." That will be the name of Brown's next music track, which he wrote and performed to chronicle the ordeal.

But with the help of GCU Director of Sports Medicine Geordie Hackett and Director of Sports Performance Gabe Bourland, Brown found his basketball form again. He said he does not feel any lingering effect from the accident as he embraces a major playing and leadership role with the Lopes after a transfer redshirt season.

"I feel blessed to be here, to be playing, to be walking around and running around, doing my thing, feeling like myself," Brown said. "That situation adds to my passion for basketball and my sense of urgency for the rest of the time I get to play it. I'm always going to feel like it could be gone and I didn't feel like that before. Every day has been like a blessing."

Follow Paul Coro on Twitter: @paulcoro.

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