(News 4 Jax) – Nathan Dowie fires off one text message after another. It’s still easier to communicate that way. His voice is still raspy and his tone still soft and hollow, reminders that Dowie’s journey back through a maze of surgeries isn’t quite yet finished.
But he’s close. He’s grateful. And he’s smiling. Dowie is always smiling, something that isn’t easy to do after the events of the past 12 and a half months for the former Hilliard Middle-Senior High School quarterback.
There was the traumatic brain injury during a football game last August. Seizures in the locker room afterward. Emergency brain surgery hours later. Another emergency surgery weeks after that to reopen his trachea, the pipe that serves as the pathway between the voice box and the lungs. CONTINUE