‘Miraculous’ Recovery for Man Who Fell 47 Floors

Rosario Moreno, center, the wife of Alcides Moreno, with the medical team that has helped her husband.

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 on the platform, was killed.

Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.

In his hospital room, amid all the machines that helped keep him alive, his wife, Rosario, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a 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 on 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 press 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 Hospital in Manhattan, where Mr. Moreno, 37, is being treated.

Optimistic though they were, the doctors tempered their discussion of Mr. Moreno’s prospects with some pragmatism. He will undergo surgery today to stabilize his spine. Sometime after that, he faces another orthopedic operation. Then there will be long months in rehabilitation.

But they predicted that his recovery would be complete in about a year.

photos & story courtesy nytimes.com 1/4/08