Pat Hyland's 14-year-old son had been in a coma for 5 weeks when he heard the faintest puckering sound after bending down to give the unconscious boy a kiss.
He and his wife froze.
"My wife goes, 'He just kissed back,'" Hyland recalled in an interview with ABC News. "That's how I knew my boy was there. That gave us our first sign of hope."
Wife Refuses to Give Up on Husband in Coma After Crash - Then He Wakes Up Sharista Giles: Mom Wakes Up From Coma to Find She's Had Her BabyWeeks earlier, their son, Blake Hyland, had hit his head on concrete while trying a new gymnastics trick. While Blake was falling, Hyland was pulling into the parking lot to pick him up from practice. As he entered, a woman ran past, telling the receptionist to call 9-1-1.
"I realized I didn't see him," Hyland said. "I realized I saw somebody looking down into the pit, and I saw him laying down in there."
At the hospital, Baylor Scott and White Hillcrest Medical Center in Waco, Texas, doctors told the Hylands that Blake had hit his head with so much force, it was as if he fell off a 10-story building. They learned that Blake had suffered several strokes and a subdural hematoma and that they needed to temporarily remove part of his skull while his brain swelled.
Once they flew Blake down to Cook Children's Hospital in Dallas, doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of survival.
Ten days after the accident, doctors and hospital clergy sat down with Hyland and his wife, Cindy, and said they wished they had better news, but Blake had suffered a traumatic brain injury, damaging his temporal and frontal lobes. They said he would never be the same.
"I remember grabbing Cindy's hand in that room," Hyland said. "We said we really appreciate their diagnosis. They're professionals. But our God is greater than that. And that our son will walk out of this hospital one day. They said, 'We hope you prove us wrong.'"
They did.
The day after giving his father a kiss, Blake opened his eyes. Little by little, he learned to speak and move again. It's now been 15 months, and the Blake, now 16, is set to return to the 10th grade in Waco in the fall. He still has trouble with his short-term memory and he has some trouble getting around, but he says he wouldn't change what happened to him.
"For him to be cognitively back to where he is, it's a miracle," Hyland told ABC News.