Helping Bridger: Boy's buddies organize Orem BBQ fundraiser

OREM — The colorful sign taped in the living-room window is visible from the street: "Get Better Soon Bridger."

A few blocks away, Jenna Jarvis and her friends Maddie James and Zach Kelling guard a bucket full of dollars, quarters, nickels and pennies: $12.07 they raised from selling lemonade, Kool-Aid and snow cones.

Another friend's mom is keeping track of the $418 that they gathered by going door-to-door — all to help their friend, Bridger Hunt.

Nearly two weeks ago on July 24, 11-year-old Bridger was playing outside his grandparents' house in Lehi when a homemade firework exploded, blowing out chunks of skin and muscle from his left side and nearly severing his left leg.

He's been in Primary Children's Medical Center ever since, drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes flailing and struggling because of the pain and confusion.

Tuesday, doctors put him back into a coma for at least a week, to

keep his heart rate and blood pressure at safe levels, said his mother, Mindy Carter-Shaw.

"So he's going to live for sure?" 12-year-old Jenna asked Carter-Shaw during a visit to her Orem home Tuesday.

"I feel like he's going to live for sure," Carter-Shaw said, but added that the doctors can't promise her that yet. They're still looking for infections that might be causing her son's heart to race, his blood pressure to skyrocket and his temperature to hover in the hundred-degree levels — all now calmed by the coma.

It's the first time the kids have heard such direct news about their friend.

Their bubbly personalities mellowed as they listened to Carter-Shaw point to her side, describing where the shrapnel ripped through Bridger and how his leg was attached only by a flap of skin.

"Will he be able to walk, will we have to push him in a wheelchair?" Jenna asked.

"Bridger will never walk (normally) again," Carter-Shaw said. "He might figure out the skateboard thing again. It will be different than before."

He's a lefty — the leg that was injured, she explained. But Bridger, who dreamed of being a pro skateboarder, had told his mom he could skate with either foot forward.

"When can we come visit him?" Zach, 12, asked quietly.

"He's in the coma, it'll be best if you visit him when he's awake," she told them.

"I can't wait to see him again," Jenna said.