Teen Athlete Moved to Rehabilitation Center

THOUSAND OAKS — The road to recovery led closer to home Wednesday for Dante Nunnery--now showing progress after emerging from a coma--as the Oxnard teen was transferred to a Camarillo rehabilitation center.

Wide-eyed and seemingly alert, the 16-year-old Rio Mesa High School sophomore left Columbia Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks and was taken by ambulance to the treatment center at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital.

It was the first time Dante had been out of the hospital since collapsing in the final minute of a junior varsity basketball game at Agoura High School a month ago.

On Wednesday, he was wearing his basketball sweats and his father, James C. Nunnery, was by his side.

“I’m with you, Dante,” said the elder Nunnery, 49, who along with other family members has kept a vigil by the boy’s bedside, speaking to him and exercising his arms and legs to keep those muscles alert. “You’re going home, or close to home.”

Dante cannot yet speak or write. If fact, he has no control over his limbs. But his eyes can track some movement, and he has even cracked wide smiles upon recognizing family members.

“He still has a long way to go,” said Nunnery, watching the ambulance pull away from the Thousand Oaks hospital. “But he has come a long way compared to a few weeks ago. He looks good. Very good.”

It was a different story a few weeks ago. Without warning, Dante collapsed in a heap on the gym floor at Agoura High. He stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated by paramedics. He was in a coma for nearly a month until his eyes fluttered open a few days ago.

James Nunnery was not there to see his son collapse. A carpenter, he had to work late that night, missing one of Dante’s basketball games for the first time all year.

But he has seen the incident on tape, and he could tell that Dante was laboring even before he fell to the floor.

“That wasn’t Dante,” he said of the gifted athlete, the second youngest of six boys in the Nunnery household. “He wasn’t even scoring. But they don’t know him like I know him. I know I would have taken him out of the game.”

In the days that followed, Nunnery said he searched his mind for what could have gone wrong. Doctors have said he suffered cardiac arrest and went into a coma because he was not getting enough blood and oxygen to his brain.

Nunnery said no one in his family has a history of heart trouble.

“We have no health problems,” he said. “We don’t even have a family physician, that’s how good our health is.”

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While the exact cause of the problem remains a mystery, Nunnery has turned his attention to nursing Dante back to health. The youngster will stay at St. John’s Pleasant Valley until well enough to be transferred to a rehabilitation center at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

“As far as his prognosis goes, it’s very difficult to tell when he’s going to come completely back to his old self again,” Los Robles spokeswoman Kris Carraway said. “But in four weeks, he has come very, very far.”

Nunnery has faith that his son will fully recover. The youth minister of an Oxnard congregation, he said it is the same faith that served as his anchor as he spent countless hours at his son’s bedside waiting for him to open his eyes.

“I never gave up hope,” he said. “I always believed he would pull through.”