Virginia Rossano is seventeen years old and has been suffering from epileptic seizures since she was six. She and her family live north of Boston. After consulting with Orrin Devinsky, a renowned neurologist and epilepsy specialist at the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, the Rossanos decided to pursue a surgical course for their daughter. Virginia and her mother, Cathy, came to N.Y.U. last week, and on Thursday Virginia underwent a craniotomy. Surgeons removed skull tissue and connected electrodes to the brain to monitor her brain functions. The next step was to wean Virginia from her medications and induce a seizure. Doctors could then locate the source of the seizures and remove the offending tissue. “Dr. Devinsky said that surgery could be a home run for us,” Cathy Rossano told me.
Then came Hurricane Sandy.
Virginia’s first surgery was a success. While she and her mother waited, word came that the ominous storm approaching New York would be powerful beyond prediction. Doctors and nurses started discharging patients from the Langone Medical Center, in the East Thirties, near the East River. Hundreds of patients were sent home or to other facilities. But many of the sickest and most fragile patients—some of them infants—stayed in the hospital. What no one had counted on was that when the power failed all over downtown Manhattan on Monday night, so, too, did the hospital’s backup generator. Now everyone would have to be evacuated, and in terrifying conditions.
“It was incredibly frightening for the patients,” said Alyson Silverberg, a nurse practitioner at N.Y.U. “There were babies that had to be evacuated down nine flights. We had to do their breathing manually for some of them.” One of the patients that was evacuated was Kenneth Langone, the chairman of the hospital, who is suffering from pneumonia. Langone gave N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center two hundred million dollars in 2008.
Mayor Bloomberg said that the generator failed “in spite of them ensuring us that it’s been tested.” Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot, told Bloomberg Businessweek, “We believed we had the machines, we believed the machines would work, and we believed everything we were told about the scope and size of the storm. Do you think they’d have kept me in there if they thought I was going to be unsafe?”
By late Monday, the conditions were frightening. The lights were out. There was no water. The toilets didn’t flush. There were power failures in the emergency room and the transplant unit. Medical personnel had to bring more than two hundred patients down the stairs and get them to other hospitals all over the city and beyond. Earlier, Virginia Rossano had been going through a seizure—just as planned. But now was no time for that, and she was given Ativan, a drug that relaxes the brain and relieves seizures.
Medical personnel (including one med student) put Virginia on a kind of sled and began moving her out of the building. “Three young men carried Virginia down twelve flights of stairs, so slowly, so methodically,” Cathy Rossano said. “They were phenomenal.”
The delicate process, repeated with hundreds of patients, took nearly a half hour, and, when they got to the street, the Rossanos encountered a line of ambulances, many of them with volunteers who had driven hundreds, even thousands, of miles to help. “There were people from California, Texas, from everywhere,” Cathy Rossano said. “Our guys were from somewhere in Illinois.”
The only problem with ambulance drivers from somewhere in Illinois is that they don’t necessarily know how to get from N.Y.U. to Columbia Presbyterian, in Washington Heights.
“We all got in the ambulance, and Virginia, she is being so brave, and Alyson Silverberg is in there, too, and none of us knew where we were going, so those guys just switched on the G.P.S., and off we went,” Cathy said. “I’m pretty sure we went uptown. Right? Anyway, there wasn’t any traffic, not with a hurricane in the middle of the night, and by the time we got there, it was about six in the morning. And the people at Columbia were great. They just took us right in.” Silverberg, for her part, said that the experience was the latest in a string of disasters marked by heroism at the hospital: “9/11, Irene, and now this.”
Virginia Rossano is now waiting for her second surgery, the one that everyone hopes will relieve her seizures. Cathy Rossano said that they are not sure when that will happen, or where—at Columbia or at N.Y.U. “In the meantime,” she said, “Virginia is doing great. She is very stoic, she’s stable, and she’s even bored. She’s doing a lot of lying around. Everyone’s been just so great to us. I’m from Boston, but New York—they’ve been amazing.”
See our full coverage of Hurricane Sandy.
Photograph by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times/Redux.
