In the hospital, Matt felt grateful to God, who had spared him permanent injury, and to those who prayed for him and pulled for him.
Giving every ounce of his being to getting well and going home was the least he could do.
Doctors loved his attitude.
"Every morning when I was in there to meet him, like 6 a.m., he'd get up, get out of bed, and shake my hand," said Jared Christophel, a chief resident who checked on Matt's jaw alignment.
"That attitude does have an effect on outcome."
If he had any chance of getting out by Thanksgiving, Matt had to build back his strength.
The nutritionist told Matt his mending body needed the calories of a marathoner - 4,000 a day.
But his jaw was wired shut. His primary nourishment was liquid pumped into his stomach through a tube stitched into his nose.
Matt hated that tube.
He made up his mind to suck down as many calories as he could through a straw.
In his second week, Matt began sipping two 440-calorie protein shakes. In bed one morning, he read the ingredients: "trans fat 3g."
"That's it," wrote Matt, who used to bake his own vita-muffins. "No more of these shakes for me."
He replaced them with orange-flavored Breeze, a juice box with 250 calories and 9 grams of protein - four or five a day.
And each day, his mother, Emily, Bernardino, or friends would bring a Ben & Jerry's peanut-butter shake.
Two weeks after rebuilding Matt's face, Park saw it had fallen out of alignment. Matt needed surgery again.
There was more.
In the accident, Matt's jaw, broken and jagged, had slammed into his carotid artery, the primary vessel carrying blood to his brain.
This caused an aneurysm. And it was weakening.
"Imagine a garden hose, and you hit it with a hammer, and the fibers break and it balloons out," said J. Forrest Calland, Matt's trauma surgeon.
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