Pain in the neck rusin teenager's Christmas break

by Nathan Arneal
Published 1/28/26

Sometimes life takes a turn for the unexpected.

Merrit Smeal was looking forward to basketball season last November. Football season had just finished up. He missed three games after surgery for testicular torsion – we’ll take a brief pause while all the male readers wince – an unfortunate occurrence for an otherwise healthy 16-year-old who usually only went to the doctor for his annual sports physicals.

Merrit Smeal, center, poses with his NBC basketball teammages after his first game back on the bench. He spent Christmas break battling cancer found in his spinal cord.

On November 9 he woke up feeling like he had slept on his neck wrong. He popped some Tylenol and shook it off. Basketball practice was staring the next day and he was expecting to earn a spot in the varsity rotation.

The pain in his neck didn’t go away completely, but it didn’t stop him from participating in basketball practice.

Until Dec. 1.

“He was in pain,” Merrit’s mother Abby Smeal said, “but when he left for school, it didn’t seem unbearable.”

That changed with a call from Bennit Smeal, Merrit’s brother and a student manager for the basketball team. Coach Jon Baehr was sending Merrit home from practice.

“Jon stopped him at practice and said, ‘You don’t look like you’re doing OK,’” Abby Smeal said.

The shooting pain in his neck prevented him from turning his head.

“It tightened up my muscles around my upper back and neck,” Merrit said. “I couldn’t move my neck at all, otherwise it would hurt. It was in my elbows, too.”

When Merrit got home from practice, they immediately left for the emergency room. There medical personnel who saw him said the tightness and pain was just a muscle issue and he should go see his pediatrician.

The next day he went to his pediatrician, who said it was just muscle pain and he should go see an orthopedic doctor.

The next day he went to see an orthopedist, who said it was just muscle pain. They said he needed dry needling and four to six weeks of physical therapy before they would perform an MRI, a magnetic resonance imaging scan that sees inside the body.

The next afternoon, Dec. 4, Merrit was at school when his mom got a text from him:

“It hurts to even write. I need you to come get me.”

This time they went to a different emergency room hoping for a different result. The Smeals spent seven hours at Children’s Hospital in Omaha. They gave him a muscle relaxer. Still no MRI. Still no blood work.

Abby Smeal remember Merrit’s testicular torsion, when he said the pain was a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. That first week in December, Merrit said the pain hit 9 several times.

“I knew there was something going on because he has a very high pain tolerance,” Abby said. “That’s why I kept pushing.”

The pushing finally got an MRI scheduled on Dec. 11. Three hours after the scan, the Smeals got a call:

“We found something.”

There was a mass on Merrit’s spinal cord in his neck.

“Your mind naturally goes to all the negative,” Abby Smeal said. “That was really bad because we were trying to process what we just heard and try to figure out how we get through it. Knowing it was inside his spinal cord was really scary. When you hear it’s in the spinal cord, it seems very... final.”

Merrit’s first thoughts were not quite so big picture.

“I don’t think I really processed it until later,” he said. “I was still in school. Semester tests were coming up, so I was trying to focus on that and not worry.”

The surgeon they talked to after the MRI said he was 99% sure it was ependymoma, a rare tumor arising from ependymal cells found in the brain and the spinal cord’s central canal, though they wouldn’t know for sure until they took it out.

“I said, so you think it’s cancer?” Abby Smeal said. “He said, ‘I do think it’s cancer.’”

The next challenge was finding a surgeon with the experience and equipment to perform the surgery. At one point it looked like the Smeals would have to go to St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Tennessee.

The first MRI looked at Merrit’s neck. Before surgery, he would have to take a full-body MRI to see if there were tumors anywhere else. That was scheduled for Dec. 17. Merrit, who someday wants to be an architect, arranged with his teachers to take his semester tests on Dec. 16.

The morning of the 16th he woke up in more pain than usual. It hurt to swallow. He couldn’t take his pills. They called the doctor who told them to immediately take Merrit to the emergency room at Children’s.

He would not leave the hospital for the next 13 days.

Unlike his previous 7-hour visit to the ER, this time things started happening quickly. Within 2 hours he was given the full-body MRI. The proper referrals were quickly arranged and surgery was scheduled for Dec. 23.

“We went from having zero plans and no urgency from anyone to having everything taken care of,” Abby said.

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