6:28:29 AM 07.28.09
By JAMES BARRON
Published: January 3, 2008
Alcides Moreno plunged 47 stories that morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer’s platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him, was killed when the platform landed.
Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.
He was given 24 units of blood and 19 units of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopedic operations.
Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.
In his hospital room, amid all the machines that kept him alive, his wife, Rosario Moreno, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that that simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.
Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out — and stroked the wrong face.
“Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses,” Rosario Moreno said Thursday, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. I’m your wife, you touch your wife.’”
For the first time since the accident on Dec. 7, he spoke.
“He turned around and, in English, said, ‘What did I do?’” she said. “It stunned me because I didn’t know he could speak.”
Surrounded by doctors who had helped save her husband, Mrs. Moreno told her story at a news conference at which medical professionals with long years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like “miraculous” and “unprecedented” to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a Manhattan alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.
“If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one,” said Dr. Philip S. Barie, the chief of the division of critical care at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, where Mr. Moreno, 37, is being treated.
“We are very pleased — dare I say astonished? — at the level of recovery that this patient has enjoyed so far,” Dr. Barie said, “and although there is more work to be done, we are very optimistic for his prospects for survival.”
Optimistic though they were, the doctors tempered their discussion of Mr. Moreno’s prospects with some pragmatism. He will undergo surgery on Friday to stabilize his spine. Sometime after that, he faces one last orthopedic operation. Then there will be long months in rehabilitation.
But they predicted that his recovery would be complete in about a year.
Asked at the news conference whether Mr. Moreno would walk again, Dr. Barie said, “We believe so, yes.” He noted that Mr. Moreno’s pelvis had not been injured in the fall. Dr. Barie also said that all the injuries to Mr. Moreno’s legs — some 10 fractures — had been “repaired” except one.
“Our goal is not just survival, but functional survival,” Dr. Barie said.
Still, Dr. Barie suggested that Mr. Moreno has taken the team treating him into largely uncharted medical territory. Dr. Barie said that doctors have no experience with someone who had fallen so far. He said that falls from even three stories can be fatal if the victim hits his or her head on landing.
“Above 10 stories, most of the time we never see the patients because they usually go to the morgue,” Dr. Barie said, although he added that the staff at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell had treated, and had written a medical-journal article about, a patient who survived a 19-story fall.
But Mr. Moreno confounded the odds from the beginning. He was sitting up when firefighters arrived at the building, at 265 East 66th Street. He was “on the borderline of consciousness” when he was wheeled into the emergency room, Dr. Barie said, despite a long list of serious injuries to his brain, his spine, his chest and his abdomen, along with several fractured ribs, a broken right arm and two broken legs.
Mrs. Moreno said her husband’s determination had not been crushed that day. “If anything, he keeps me going,” she said.
A moment later she added: “He wants to go to rehab. He wants to start walking.” She also said she had told him that he was not going back to his old job.
“I keep telling him ‘I love you,’ ” she said at the news conference. She added, “He keeps telling me it just wasn’t his time.”
She said their three children — ages 14, 8 and 6 — have visited their father, the younger children only once. She said she had wanted to show them that “Mommy wasn’t lying” and that “unlike Edgar, he’s alive.” But she said the visit was a particularly emotional moment for her husband because their youngest child, Andrew, “looks just like” Edgar Moreno.
Mrs. Moreno said her husband apparently knew all along that his brother had died. She said that she did not tell him, but he mentioned it on Tuesday night. “He doesn’t remember much about that day other than his brother passed,” she said.
A full explanation for how the man survived, while his brother died, remained elusive. One theory is that Edgar Moreno, 30, was thrown from the platform as it sped toward the ground. One official who was at the scene said that part of Edgar Moreno’s body was under the platform when rescuers arrived. But Dr. Barie also noted that Alcides Moreno had landed without striking his head.
Mrs. Moreno was asked more than once at the news conference why she believed her husband had survived. “He was trained,” she said “He knew what to do with the platform” — meaning, according to other window washers, lie flat and ride it down.
But she also hinted that he was all too aware of the risks of the job. “Even knowing about his brother, not a tear came down, and they were very close,” she said. “They lived together. They did everything together.”
Mrs. Moreno said she did not know whether her husband and brother-in-law had been worried about whether their scaffold was safe that day. After the accident, another family member who is also a window washer, Jose Cumbicos, said they had mentioned their misgivings in a telephone call that morning. Mr. Cumbicos also said that the Morenos’ supervisor had reassured them, saying a mechanical problem with their rig had been taken care of.
At least three agencies are investigating the accident, among them the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. A spokesman, John Chavez, said Thursday that the investigation was “open and ongoing” but would provide no details.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/nyregion/03cnd-fall.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&hp
