Molly Hoffman: The dream is to be a baseball player. It's been that dream since he could pick the ball up and throw the ball across our family room.
Ashley Jewell: Nick came to me on a Saturday morning right before one of our games. He came to me and said, "I got injured during warm up."
Nick Hoffman: We were doing a drill inside of our barn that has a batting cage with a pitching machine. The pitching machine was cranked up really high.
Ashley Jewell: He actually was supposed to be hitting the ball, but decided he wanted to bunt the ball.
Nick Hoffman: Not every ball is perfect when you're inside of a batting cage. There's cuts, and stuff, so the ball it'll tend to move, and I pulled back on a ball and it kinda came in on my hands. It ended up hitting my thumb.
Ashley Jewell: He was like, "I can move it. I can do this. I can do that." I was like, "Okay, well are you gonna pitch today? Is today your day?" He's like, "Today is my day." I said, "Okay, well we'll have to put you through some other things throwing wise to see how you can throw the ball, and see how it feels."
The next day Nick came in during his lunch period and he said, "You know, it's feeling good, but it's starting to hurt a little bit more." I said, "Okay." Well the way that it looked I said, "I think we need to get you checked out to make sure everything else is good. I mean you threw the ball well and, you were able to move it, but," I said, "I think we should go and get it checked it out." Just with all the evaluation and so I said, "Let's call Dr. James, see if we can get you in."
Molly Hoffman: Dr. James was great. He just took one look at the X-ray and said, "Listen, with Nick's baseball aspirations you need to go see a hand specialist and I think I can get you right next door to Dr. Berrottoni." That's exactly what we did. We literally came out, sat down again, and got called right back to Dr. Berrottoni.
Dr. Berrettoni: When Ashley recognized that Nick had an injury, she participates in a team, being that she's an athletic trainer, and she contacted the doctor on the sport's team, Dr. James. Then he initiated the referral to us because this involved a joint of the thumb.
Molly Hoffman: At that point, Dr. Berrettoni explained to us that the thumb had broken in multiple spots. We had a few options. Nick had a few options.
Nick Hoffman: I was either able to wait a couple of weeks to see if it healed, or I was able to get a pin in it for around two months.
Dr. Berrettoni: I recommended that he have surgery because Nick had a timetable. He wanted the least amount of time away from his sport, and if we had the bone pieces shift, if you think of a house foundation once it's broken, it shifts. Then Nick would have invested some time watching, and would start again at ground zero.
Molly Hoffman: Because we were taking the precautions to have it surgically pinned back together again, it would not interfere with his future.
Dr. Berrettoni: Nick's surgery was an outpatient surgery where he had some sedation through an IV administered by anesthesiology. I used numbing medicine to make his thumb numb. Then drilled a pin through his bone by a small puncture hole, so he didn't have to have an incision. That pin goes through the different bone pieces to hold them together.
Molly Hoffman: For a teenage boy who has aspirations to play major league baseball someday, to walk into an office with a broken thumb in his pitching hand, which he knows is his ticket, they did not once ever show any negative expression in any manner that said to him, "It's not gonna happen for you." They were very encouraging the whole way through.
Nick Hoffman: It just brought happiness. You'd be able to throw. You could look at your pitches. You felt everything. You were comfortable with all of your pitches. Once you get your first batter out, let's say you strike them out, it's just a crazy feeling. You're like, "Oh, I'm back. I can do something awesome."
Molly Hoffman: We did not have our own orthopedic specialist. We did not have our own hand reconstructive specialist. I would have just had to call his primary care physician and say, "Hey, who should I go to?" Having access that someone could, I don't want to say do it for me, but she really did. Having that association with sports medicine at the high school was significant in getting his hand fixed as quickly as possible.
Ashley Jewell: Knowing that I helped Nick get back out on the mount and doing what he loves to do as a pitcher, as a baseball player just was an awesome feeling.
Nick Hoffman: I don't think anything is holding me back. I just look for positives in everything. If a negative occurs I try to look past it.
Molly Hoffman: We feel blessed because he's been guided by numerous wonderful people. He's been protected by the doctors, and the nurses, and the therapists, and the sports medicine people, the athletic trainers. He's been helped all the way along the road. I think for him, the dream is to be a baseball player.
Nick Hoffman: I'm just thankful. It's something nice that not everybody can recognize until it happens to them because accidents happen all the time. You just don't know what you got to do to get over them, and look through, and move on to the future.
