47-Storey Survivor Hailed As a Miracle

Jan 06, 01:33 PM

Alcides Moreno, 37, plummeted almost 152m in a December 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother.

Somehow, Moreno lived, and doctors at New York's Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Centre said his recovery had 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.

In the 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 haemorrhaging. 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. Nine orthopedic operations followed to piece together his broken body.

"If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one," said the hospital's chief of surgery, Dr Philip Barie.

The centre has treated people who have tumbled from great heights before, including a patient who survived a 19-storey fall, but most of those tales end sadly.

The death rate from even a three-storey fall was about 50 per cent, Barie said. People who fell more than 10 storeys almost never survived.

"Forty-seven floors is virtually beyond belief," Pardes said.

Edgar Moreno, 30, died instantly. He was buried in Ecuador, where the brothers were from.

Alcides Moreno spent about three weeks on the ventilator, unable to speak, and initially his only means of communicating with his family 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, aged 14, eight and six.

He is scheduled to undergo more spinal surgery and he will need another operation to reconstruct his abdominal wall. -- AP

(c) 2008 Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. 47-Storey Survivor Hailed As a Miracle
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