Thirty minutes had passed before Michael Penyacsek regained
consciousness. He didn’t know where he was, who the people were
surrounding him and what was causing a steady, rhythmic
pulsing.
Thirty minutes had passed before Michael Penyacsek regained consciousness.
He didn’t know where he was, who the people were surrounding him and what was causing a steady, rhythmic pulsing.
The last thing Penyacsek remembered was driving down Highway 152, returning home from school after getting gas for his pickup truck.
While making his way along the two-lane road, a merging motorist swerved in front of him. Penyacsek pulled the steering wheel hard left, narrowly avoiding a wreck.
The maneuver was a brief success.
His truck, situated in the left lane, was met head-on by a semi.
After being extracted from a heap of twisted metal, Penyacsek was air-vacced to a hospital in Modesto.
When he awoke in the helicopter, strapped down to a stretcher, Penyacsek struggled to get free.
“I was freaking out,” he said. “Then they put me out. They gave me a sedative or something. I don’t know.”
What the young man didn’t realize was that he had a seven-inch laceration on his head, a cracked skull, a broken toe, three broken ribs, a severely broken ankle, a broken scapula and a collapsed lung that was quickly filling with blood.
One person who did sense something was wrong was Penyacsek’s mother, Maryanne.
“I was on my computer in my room and I heard the fire truck leaving the station,” she said. “And something just went through my head, ‘Oh, this isn’t good.’ ”
Maryanne started receiving phone calls minutes later, and realized things were far worse than she imagined.
Penyacsek had to undergo three surgeries to repair his skull and ankle. He also had tubes plugged into his chest to pump out the blood that was saturating his left lung.
Arriving at the hospital just before he went into surgery, Penyacsek’s family had spent the last few hours desperately searching for answers about where he had been taken to.
“I was very scared,” Maryanne said. “Plus, we didn’t know where to go.”
Penyacsek spent the next week in the Intensive Care Unit before being transported to a hospital in San Jose, where he spent another week.
Doctors were unsure if he would ever make a full recovery.
“When I was in the hospital, they didn’t even know if I would be able to walk normal because my ankle was broken so bad,” Penyacsek said. “But I started getting out of my bed at the hospital within a week and a half. The doctors didn’t know how I was out of bed.”
A wrestler since age six, Penyacsek’s life before the accident turned out to be his saving grace.
“The doctors told him flat out,” Maryanne said, “if he wasn’t in shape before (the accident) from wrestling, he never would have survived.
“They called him their miracle.”
With the help of his mother, grandfather, two brothers and two sisters, Penyacsek started the long road to recovery while taking his junior year off from school.
Last August, eight months after the accident, Penyacsek felt ready to resume his active lifestyle.
Maryanne wasn’t so sure.
A first-rate oboe player, Penyacsek had just returned from Europe after touring with the San Jose Youth Symphony, and was suffering from fainting spells. An avid outdoorsman in addition to his other hobbies, Doctors informed the family that Penyacsek’s body, while still not fully healed, was having a negative reaction to inactivity.
Maryanne was wary of having him back on the wrestling mat, though, which is when Gilroy High coach Armando Gonzalez stepped in. Gonzalez had coached Penyacsek since grade school, and thought the best conditioning and rehabilitation Penyacsek could receive was with the wrestling team.
“I told her, ‘I have two years to strengthen him, rehabilitate him and eliminate his [disabilities],” Gonzalez said. “She thought about it, looked at me and said, ‘That’s the best reason I’ve heard.’ ”
Now repeating his junior year at GHS, the 160-pound Penyacsek is wrestling full time and has accumulated a 16-9 record this season. He took fifth at a tournament at San Ramon Valley High School, and was given the Most Outstanding Wrestler award at the Overfelt Invitational in January after pinning each of his opponents.
“It felt really good just to be able to walk in the wrestling room again,” Penyacsek said of his first summer practice. “I hadn’t been there a long time. I started working out gradually to build myself back up. It took me two months just to even get through a whole practice.”
Now it’s taking opponents everything they have to fend off Penyacsek.
“After you’ve been so close to death like that – it’s extremely scary – but it also gives you a different outlook,” said Maryanne, who attends meets but refuses to watch her son’s mactches due to anxiety. “Before it was all about winning … and now, the other wrestlers (at competitions), I’m not saying they don’t enjoy what they do, but they’re very serious.
“After Michael wrestles, a big smile comes across his face.”
