Twenty-two days after Trevor James Pendleton’s birth, his mother found him cold and rigid in her bed with dried blood under his nose.

It was a Friday morning: February 13, 2009.

“I knew right then my son was gone, but I didn’t want to believe it,” said Cindy Pendleton, 23, of Sanderson.

She remembers screaming for help and performing CPR, and trying to suck the blood from her newborn’s nose.

The death was attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, which means doctors couldn’t explain medically why it occurred.

Brandy Sapp and Dr. Stanton Longenecker

Last year, Brandy Sapp suffered a freak accident. Unaware of the damage to her body, her situation went undiagnosed for months, leading to a widespread infection. The damage rendered her nearly paralyzed and almost claimed her life.

Enter Dr. Stanton Longenecker, a Jacksonville orthopedic surgeon with an engineering background. A new hip prosthesis he helped develop has recently given Brandy back her life.

“Her case was the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Longenecker. “It’s highly unusual for a 30-year-old woman to break a hip and just as unusual for the situation to drag out like it did. Life dealt this young woman a really bad hand of cards. It was my job to reshuffle the deck.”

Brandy is the first to receive the newly designed titanium short stem prosthesis and her prognosis is excellent. Her goal is to be walking on her own by the time her children start school Aug. 23.

“I’m more than pleased, I’m ecstatic,” Dr. Longenecker said of his patient’s remarkable progress. “At her age, she had the most to lose if it didn’t work and the most to gain if it did.”