Posted on 01/03/2008 6:21:17 PM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK - Doctors say they have never seen anything like it: A window washer who fell 47 stories from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family and expected to walk again.
Alcides Moreno, 37, plummeted almost 500 feet in a Dec. 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother.
Somehow, Moreno lived, and doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center announced Thursday that his recovery has been astonishing.
He has movement in all his limbs. He is breathing on his own. And on Christmas Day, he opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since the accident.
His wife, Rosario Moreno, cried as she thanked the doctors and nurses who kept him alive.
"Thank God for the miracle that we had," she said. "He keeps telling me that it just wasn't his time."
Dr. Herbert Pardes, the hospital's president, described Moreno's condition when he arrived for treatment as "a complete disaster."
Both legs and his right arm and wrist were broken in several places. He had severe injuries to his chest, his abdomen and his spinal column. His brain was bleeding. Everything was bleeding, it seemed.
In those first critical hours, doctors pumped 24 units of donated blood into his body — about twice his entire blood volume.
They gave him plasma and platelets and a drug to stimulate clotting and stop the hemorrhaging. They inserted a catheter into his brain to reduce swelling and cut open his abdomen to relieve pressure on his organs.
Moreno was at the edge of consciousness when he was brought in. Doctors sedated him, performed a tracheotomy and put him on a ventilator.
His condition was so unstable, doctors worried that even a mild jostle might kill him, so they performed his first surgery without moving him to an operating room.
Nine orthopedic operations followed to piece together his broken body.
Yet, even when things were at their worst, the hospital's staff marveled at his luck.
Incredibly, Moreno's head injuries were relatively minor for a fall victim. Neurosurgeon John Boockvar said the window washer also managed to avoid a paralyzing spinal cord injury, even though he suffered a shattered vertebra.
"If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one," said the hospital's chief of surgery, Dr. Philip Barie.
New York-Presbyterian has treated people who have tumbled from great heights before, including a patient who survived a 19-story fall, but most of those tales end sadly.
The death rate from even a three-story fall is about 50 percent, Barie said. People who fall more than 10 stories almost never survive.
"Forty-seven floors is virtually beyond belief," Pardes said.
Science may never be able to explain what protected Moreno when the platform he and his brother were using atop an Upper East Side apartment tower broke free and fell to the ground.
Edgar Moreno, 30, of Linden N.J., died instantly. He was buried in Ecuador, where the brothers are from.
Alcides Moreno, whom his wife described as strong and athletic, may have clung to his scaffolding platform as it dropped. It is possible that the metal platform offered him some protection, although doctors said they were unsure how.
An investigation into the cause of the accident continues.
Rosario Moreno said that her husband remembers little of the fall but that he didn't need to be told his brother had died.
The injured window washer spent about three weeks on a ventilator, unable to speak, and initially his only means of communication was by touch.
"He wanted to touch my face, touch my hair," Rosario Moreno said.
She would take his hand and hold it to her skin. Then, one day, he reached out and touched one of the nurses.
Rosario Moreno said that when she heard about it, she jokingly lectured her husband to keep his hands to himself. He answered in English, "What did I do?"
"It stunned me," she said, "because I didn't know he could speak."
There is still a rough road ahead for the tough New Jersey man, a father of three children, ages 14, 8 and 6.
He was scheduled to undergo another spinal surgery on Friday, and he will need another operation to reconstruct his abdominal wall. There is a chance he could develop complications, even life-threatening ones, during the months ahead.
Moreno will remain in the hospital for at least a few more weeks, doctors said. After that, he will need extensive physical rehabilitation. It may be another year before doctors know how much he will improve.
The medical staff was guarded Thursday about his prospects for returning to a normal life. Doctors said they believe he will walk, but they also suggested that some of his injuries are likely to be lifelong.
"We're optimistic for a very substantial recovery, eventually," Barie said
Rosario Moreno said she knows this much for sure: His days as a window washer are over. "I told him, 'You're not going back to work there,'" she said.
Don’t quote me on this, but it seems I’ve read stories about skydivers surviving when their parachute failed to deploy. Of course if it deploys partially, that would be a factor. Anyone have any info on that scenario?
bmflr
That particular kind of event was featured in a "Mythbusters" episode. Their conclusion was that hanging onto a piece of plywood was about as good as hanging onto a rock. It must have been a VERY strong gust of wind.
“Don’t quote me on this, but it seems I’ve read stories about skydivers
surviving when their parachute failed to deploy.”
FR archiving to the rescue!
Below is a link to a thread on the topic. Also note the URL in the
first post; it leads to more reference on the subject, including
the story of the fellow that survived a fall from a bomber in WWII.
That story got at least one thread on FR a few years back.
I do seem to remember two other stories: one was a young lady that
survived a partially-deployed chute, landed (IIRC) face down on
a parking lot with some obvious fractures. But she survived and got
patched up “near as new”. And happily discovered she’d was “just
pregnant” at the time of the fall; eventually delivered a healthy baby.
I think that was in Oklahoma.
I did also see a film clip of someone surviving a streaming chute;
I’m sure the ground-level videographer thought...”well, that will
help the local coroner close this case after one view of this clip”.
But the guy went into some sort of boggy area and survived with some
injuries.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1784379/posts
This seems as good a place as any to point out that Ecuadorans are considered the Mexicans of Colombia.
“I think I saw a recommendation for suicide that the jump be at
least eight stories.”
That “death zone” phrase is one I heard tossed around by some friends
that were rock-climbers.
I’d guess the folks giving suicide advice are trying to assure “success”
by getting folks to jump from at at least 80 feet (not the 50 feet
of the rock-climber’s “death zone”).
I’m aware of two more even more miraculous survivals.
The first was in WWII. A tailgunner on a British bomber survived a fall of over 10,000 feet without a chute. This was documented by the Germans who captured him.
In the 1950s or 60s, a Navy pilot ejected over the Pacific. His chute failed to deploy. Not a streamer. Total failure. He survived the fall of over 20,000 feet. Read this in Reader’s Digest.
“There was a show just on that had footage of an F-18 crashing at
an air show.
The Marine pilot survived the estimated 75G stop.”
IIRC, during the airing of that segment, the narrator said that the
fellow set a record for “survival of G-forces” during that accident.
The narrartor mentioned it, but I can’t recall the level of G-forces
in the previous “record holder” that became “second place” in the category.
India.
Dang! A goodly fraction of the people here in Silicon Valley are from India.
The one thing I didn't like about India were the malaria pills I had to take. (And it looks like I'm going back again next month.)
Further south it would have been a different issue.
You don’t have to take them. Plasmodium gotta eat too...
Thanks for posting that cool picture of Joe Kitinger jumping from 102000 feet! Thats 20 miles up!
I thought the narrator said 30Gs(?) was considered fatal, but I seem to recall an F-111 cockpit hitting the ground at ~37Gs. The one or both crewman suffered cracked vertebrae.
There was a russian fighter pilot who survived at least a 10,000 foot fall when he hit the side of snow covered mountain at a steep angle.
Why won’t they accept your blood if you went to UK?
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