Katie Buchholz always knew that she wanted to be a dancer.

“I had been taking classes since I was 4,” Buchholz said. “By eighth grade, I told my parents that this is what I wanted to do with my life.”

After graduating from college with a degree in dance, Buchholz set off from her Texas hometown to pursue her dream in Los Angeles. She spent several years working at a professional dance studio, teaching dance classes for children. She also danced on an international tour with a well-known children’s entertainer. Buchholz was well on her way to the career of her dreams.

But on the night of July 3, 2024, one single moment changed everything.

A Life-Altering Incident

While driving home from an outing with friends, Buchholz sustained life-threatening injuries in a devastating, head-on car crash.  She was rushed by an emergency services team to Cedars-Sinai.

“Katie came to us as a polytrauma, meaning she had multiple serious injuries, and required immediate intervention,” said Yassar Hashim, MD, associate medical director of Trauma at Cedars-Sinai, who was the trauma surgeon on duty the night Buchholz arrived at the medical center. “She had to be intubated right away to secure her airway, and she received a massive blood transfusion to replace what she had lost due to her injuries from the accident.”  

Buchholz had major trauma to both legs, including a broken femur in her right leg and vascular and nerve injury in her left. She broke multiple ribs and her left wrist and had a traumatic brain injury from the impact of the crash.

As a Level I trauma center, Cedars-Sinai is equipped to handle complex injuries like Buchholz’s.

“It’s all about teamwork,” Hashim said. “Each individual, from the trauma surgeons to the Emergency Department physicians, our residents, nurses and more, has a specific role. We follow our protocols and are trained to support these critically injured patients in an environment where every second counts.”

Coordinated Care

As the attending trauma surgeon, Hashim had the role not only to save Buchholz’s life, but to also help coordinate the multidisciplinary care she would need to manage her various injuries.

“There were a lot of teams involved,” Hashim said. “Katie required care from my colleagues in orthopedics, vascular, plastic and reconstructive surgery, Surgical ICU, and more.”

One of the many doctors she would encounter was Mitchel Seruya, MD, director of the Peripheral Nerve and Microsurgery Fellowship and professor of Surgery in the Jim and Eleanor Randall Department of Surgery. Seruya was called upon to repair the severe nerve injury in her left leg.

“The nerve that was severed is an important one because it feeds sensation in the bottom of the foot,” Seruya said. “Especially because she’s a dancer, she needs the feedback of that sensation to be able to feel where her foot is in space. If we couldn’t repair it, the hope of getting back to a career in dance would have been out.”

By harvesting a graft from the nerve that feeds her outer calf and sewing under a microscope with a suture thread that is finer than a doll hair, Seruya was able to reconstruct the injured nerve. The fix is not immediate, though, as electricity goes through the graft at the rate of about an inch per month. As time goes on, sensation will return as it continues to improve.

Little by Little

After being discharged from Cedars-Sinai, Buchholz went home to Texas for several months to stay with her parents.

“I still needed so much help at the beginning,” Buchholz said.

She worked diligently with physical, occupational and speech therapists to improve her strength and coordination. Through her determination and positive attitude, she saw progress. By July 2025, just one year after her accident, she was able to move back to Los Angeles to restart her life and career, even if it looks a little different than what she initially imagined.

“I know this is a long journey, but I live by the mantra of ‘little by little,’” Buchholz said. “Whether it’s being able to blow my own nose, relearning how to walk, or being able to lift heavier weights, I celebrate every incremental step as a win.”

Even while she waits for the nerve regrowth to get full sensation back to her foot, she continues her therapies and has returned to teaching at a local children’s dance studio. She believes her passion influences her healing.

“I was a dancer; I am a dancer,” Buchholz said. “I have progressed so much physically and mentally because I am determined to get back eventually.”

Her physicians praise this positive outlook.

“It is priceless to have patients with this kind of glass-half-full attitude,” Seruya said. “Their mindset helps heal them.”   

Inspiring Others

Buchholz is sharing her story at Cedars-Sinai’s upcoming Trauma Survivors Reunion on Monday, June 8. For the first time, Cedars-Sinai is bringing together trauma survivors, physicians, nurses, social workers, emergency services professionals and other medical staff to celebrate the strength of their patients who overcame life-altering injuries.

At the reunion, she will be able to reconnect with Hashim, the trauma surgeon who helped save her life.

“Because of my brain injury, I have no memories from immediately before or after my accident,” Buchholz said. “I may not recognize the people who were there that night, but I’m excited to meet them and say, ‘Thank you.’”

Hashim is looking forward to the event as well.

“We receive critically injured patients and see them in their most vulnerable state, often with no one else but us to advocate for them,” Hashim said. “I am excited to see Katie again and see how far she has come. These kinds of things are what make my job so rewarding. She went from struggling for her life to speaking at our event. It’s remarkable.”

Read more from Cedars-Sinai Stories and Insights: Stop the Bleed Courses at Cedars-Sinai

That is, until May 2020, when his active lifestyle took a sudden downhill turn.

Two months after Mulholland’s high school junior varsity lacrosse season came to an abrupt end due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a playful roughhousing wrestling match with friends at a park ended with a devastating injury.

“I blew out my entire knee and tore everything–my ACL, my LCL, my PCL–my IT band tore off of my femur, my kneecap dislocated, and my peroneal nerve also tore,” said Mulholland. “After that, everything from my knee down was paralyzed.”

Mulholland’s right leg was left with damage to his peroneal nerve–a branch of the sciatic nerve located in the lower leg. After undergoing reconstructive knee surgery, Mulholland developed foot drop, a condition characterized by the inability to lift up and roll out the foot.

“As soon as I met with an orthopaedic surgeon, I found out that my athletic career would be pretty short-lived and that it was going to be really hard to recover from a nerve or foot drop injury,” said Mulholland.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that over 120,000 people are affected by foot drop each year. However, the actual number may be higher, as some patients may go unreported or undiagnosed.

Ten months after his knee surgery, Mulholland could still not move his foot and was advised by medical experts to wait to see if his peroneal nerve would reawaken on its own.

“There was a lot of waiting and no great solution. I became antsy,” said Mulholland’s mother, Jennifer Mulholland. “Here’s a three-sport athlete with remarkable physical and mental abilities, that I just knew if I asked for help a solution was out there.”

After speaking with more than 15 specialists from throughout the U.S, the solution began to unfold after a conversation with orthopaedic surgeon Glenn Pfeffer, MD, director of the Foot and Ankle Surgery Program at Cedars-Sinai.

“Dr. Pfeffer is our angel doctor,” Jennifer Mulholland said. “He personally called us and said, ‘I've got your guy,’ and that it wasn’t him, but one of his colleagues, Dr. Seruya.”

Thirty minutes later, the Mulhollands were talking with Mitchel Seruya, MD, director of the Peripheral Nerve and Microsurgery Fellowship at Cedars-Sinai  Medical Center and a pediatric plastic surgeon with Guerin Children’s.

“Dr. Seruya’s approach was not just surgical; it was a lifeline,” recalled Jennifer Mulholland.

A Window of Time

Seruya, who is among the few surgeons in the U.S. who perform innovative electrical bypass techniques called nerve transfers, saw the potential for recovery, but he’d be working against time.  

“Unfortunately, so many patients are told to give nerve injuries time to heal, but what they don’t realize is there is an expiration date, or a time clock, working against you,” said Seruya. “Meaning that by 12 to 18 months, these nerve injuries become irreversible.”

Although it had been 11 months since getting injured, Mulholland was a candidate for a nerve transfer surgery, a procedure that involves rerouting healthy and expendable nerves to compensate for damaged ones, effectively restoring the electrical signals needed for proper muscle function.

“It's a way of borrowing electricity from one functional nerve to restore movement in another area affected by nerve damage,” said Seruya. “In Riley’s case, we rerouted the nerve from his big toe to the paralyzed muscles in the front of the leg.”  

During surgery, Seruya went into Mulholland's inner calf area, found his toe electricity, isolated it, used a nerve stimulator to test and make sure the toes were bending strongly, then divided the electricity to route it from his inner calf area out to the front of the leg.

Learning to Walk

Six months post-surgery, Mulholland could flex his foot to lift up and roll out his ankle, the first step on the road to his recovery.

The process of walking is now completely different for Mulholland. Now, when Mulholland’s brain tells his toe to move, his foot moves instead. That’s because the nerve that was once connected to his big toe is now connected to the muscles that move his foot and ankle.

“I never knew that walking was so important or how much brain power it actually takes to do a stride,” said Mulholland. “Thinking about having to walk with every stride, ‘left, right, left, right,’ it doesn’t really wrap around your mind unless you experience it.”

Mulholland ultimately returned to the lacrosse field to go on to help the team win two back-to-back state championships, was crowned as the second-leading scorer, and made the all-state team his senior year.

Today, Mulholland is the only starting freshman on San Diego State University’s lacrosse team. As for his education, Mulholland is now studying neuroscience because of his passion for the mind-body connection, which all started with that fateful knee injury.

“This was my comeback kid,” Jennifer Mulholland said. “What he was able to overcome, how he overcame with the help of Dr. Seruya, really giving him this fortitude and the possibility to regain motion, regain the ability to walk normally again and regain the ability to play on the field and to absolutely shine like the most incredible star.”

Learn more about the Brachial Plexus and Peripheral Nerve Surgery program at Cedars-Sinai.