KIRBYVILLE, Texas — A Kirbyville Junior High School football player is out of the hospital after suffering a concussion during a football game Thursday night.
Makinzey Ames says she's feeling better, and she's starting to recall the moments after she was knocked unconscious.
"When it first happened there was a tingling in my neck," Ames told 12News.
Ames, a linebacker and quarterback for the Kirbyville Wildcats Junior High football team, says that she was in and out of consciousness and doesn't remember too much of what happened.
She was hit in the game and lost feeling in her neck. It happened during the fourth quarter of the Wildcats game against Warren. Ames was sent to CHRISTUS St. Elizabeth via a life flight helicopter.
"Thank you all for the prayers for my family and daughter," Makinzey's mom Katie Ames told 12News Friday morning. "Thanking the Lord above for answered prayers and that my baby girl is going to be okay!"
The seventh grader has been playing football for two years, and she says that incidents like this come with the sport.
"Football is a contact sport and stuff like this is going to happen," Ames said.
She prefers defense and jokingly admits that it's because some of the boys on the team are "scared to get hit."
Makinzey's mom Katie Ames knows that her daughter is a gifted athlete, and she loves "every minute" of playing football. But she says what happened on the field Thursday night was one of the most terrifying moments of her life.
"It's scary to think that they can be hurt so badly in football. I mean it just scares me to death. I don't know if she will be playing anymore after this," Katie Ames said.
This is not the first injury at Kirbyville CISD during the 2019 football season.
In September, a high school football player was seriously injured during a game against Lumberton.
That player was in ICU for several days after suffering a neck and spinal cord injury.
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