Last September, I didn’t know if one of my best friends was going to die or live.

My older brother, Aidan Ferrante, came home in tears, panicked with blood on his clothes. I asked him what happened, and that was when I heard our family friend, Jordan Puccinelli, had his life on the line. 

Ferrante had told me they were driving with another friend, who was possibly under the influence, but it was never confirmed. They were all having a good time driving around, when Puccinelli had to go to the bathroom. Rather than stopping the driver suggested he open the door while the car was still moving and relieve himself. The next thing they know, the car swerved, and Jordan had fallen out of the car and landed on his head. 

“I never thought I would experience my best friend going through something like that, watching him fall out was like it was in slow motion, but it happened so fast at the same time, the first thing I knew I needed to do was get to Jordan and help him. My mind was blank of everything else, I just knew I needed to get to Jordan,” Ferrante said.

Ferrante went after Puccinelli as he went straight into a seizure, bleeding out of his head everywhere. Aidan was working with EMT staff to be a firefighter at the time, so he knew how to help out. He controlled the seizure and did everything that he learned in EMT training to keep our friend alive. Firefighters and ambulances showed up and rushed Puccinelli to the hospital.

“I thought my best friend was going to die right in front of me, I can’t get the image of him out of my head, there’s nothing I see in the hospital when I am working that compares to what I saw with Jordan,” said Ferrante.

The night all of this happened, we went to see Puccinelli after his first surgery. It was honestly one of the most traumatic things I experienced. Seeing someone so close to me in extreme conditions like that was so heartbreaking. It was also eye-opening for me to realize what mistakes not to make, but also how real friends should be. We were there for him the whole time, didn’t ever bail when he needed us the most, and that is how it should be. 

“I was put into an induced coma, and they performed brain surgery on me. I was doing good for, give or take, a week, and then I suddenly dropped down and was doing horribly. I almost died there, and they had to put me through another surgery for my brain,” Puccinelli said. 

It has been 8 months since Jordan’s accident.

“He is doing great, absolutely great. We don’t even notice that something happened to him,” Marla Puccinelli, Jordan’s mother, said.

Even though you can’t physically tell that anything happened to him, some things have changed. 

“He’s a little bit different. He’s more outgoing now, and he talks a lot. He didn’t talk a lot before the accident; he was more reserved, but now he is so outgoing,” Dan Puccinelli, Jordan’s father, said.

Ferrante never left Jordan’s side, either. He was at his house every day, playing card games and doing anything to make Jordan happy again. 

“I wanted Jordan only to progress. You could tell he was upset being home; he didn’t laugh, and it was hard for him not to leave the house. It made me realize that even if he couldn’t do any of these things today, I would always be there for him. He’s my best friend, and I would never leave his side,” Ferrante said.

When Jordan was recovering from the surgeries, he was home for a very long time. He was unable to do anything or even have more than 2 people over at a time. He was stuck at home, but it was for the better because he recovered a lot faster.

“I got negative. It was because I couldn’t go out and do the things I love to do. After all, I’m more of an outside person, and I couldn’t do any of that with being locked at home,” said Puccinelli. 

For someone like Jordan, being stuck inside was hard for him to adjust to because all he wanted to do was go outside and  hang out with friends, but instead, he was home healing. 

Now Jordan is cleared for everything, and he finally gets to do all of the activities he loves: driving his truck, going to the lake, and playing pickleball. Anything he had done before, he gets to do now.

We are all forever thankful that our best friend survived something that not many people get a full recovery like he did. The average recovery time is three to years, but he progressed a lot faster than expected,was 100 percent recovered within a year.