TWIN SMILES—Kyle Roche recently returned from a mission trip to Uganda where he visited children he’d met on previous trips to the local orphanages and elementary schools. The horseshoe-shaped scar is barely visible behind Kyle Roche’s left ear.

His sense of smell has not yet returned. And it will be at least next summer before he’s allowed to step on a basketball court again and trade elbows and jump shots.

All are acceptable tradeoffs considering what could have been.

It’s only been 4½ months since Kyle, 18, was discovered lying in a tunnel near Lynn Road and Avenida de Los Arboles in Thousand Oaks, fading in and out of consciousness after a head-first fall from the sidewalk 15 feet above. A fun evening with friends playing a game called “Manhunt”—a grown-up version of hide and seek—had gone terribly wrong.

Doctors at Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center braced the family for a long road to recovery. During a three-hour operation in the early morning hours of March 14, they’d found significant bleeding in Kyle’s brain. It could be awhile before even basic tasks became normal again, they said.

“Once (Kyle) got in there it was like, oh my gosh. His head was like if you broke a piece of wood and had all the splinters,” said Rob Roche, Kyle’s dad.

The Moorpark resident and senior at Oaks Christian School would not be attending his senior prom or graduating on time. His planned summer missionary trip to Uganda would not happen. He would not start college in the fall.

Those were the facts. But they were no match for faith.

That’s the only plausible reason the Roche family, gathered in their living room, could give for Kyle’s rapid recovery.

How else to explain Ventura County Fire Department Capt. Jack Nosco’s sudden intuition that Kyle was nowhere near the command center that had been set up to search for him near Wildwood Park but had instead fallen into the aforementioned overlooked tunnel?

“Oh, yeah. I have a strong faith in the Lord,” Nosco said. “Most definitely there had to be someone intervening to some degree. He (Kyle) was very fortunate, that’s for sure.”

Kyle’s rapid recovery even had doctors scratching their heads.

“Every doctor that we’d see, they would say, his accident was March of this year? Not last year? Not two years ago?” Rob Roche said.

The Roche family also found support in a Facebook prayer group that mushroomed overnight.

It took three days in the intensive care unit at Los Robles, another three in a regular hospital room, two weeks of inpatient rehab at Northridge Hospital and Medical Center, and six weeks of outpatient work at the Center for Neuro Skills in Encino to bring Kyle back to, in his words, “98 percent” of the young man he was before the accident.

Along the way he did attend his senior prom, where classmates voted him prom king. He did graduate with his class. And he did make that trip to Uganda. He returned on July 22 after spending 12 days in the outskirts of Kampala, the nation’s capital.

While there, Kyle, four classmates and an adult chaperone visited an elementary school and orphanage, reengaging with children they’d met on previous trips.

They also spent three days helping with the construction of a new high school—a project aided in part by $12,000 raised via a prayer bracelet campaign by Kyle’s classmates after his accident, and another $6,000 donated by Oaks Christian’s Class of 2010 as its senior gift.

Kyle now looks forward to a future of helping even more people. He will enroll at California Baptist University in Riverside this fall and plans to major in theology, with the ultimate goal of becoming a youth pastor.

“I felt like there was something (God) kept me alive for,” Kyle said.