When nine-year-old Ryan Barnett was admitted to the emergency room at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park with sepsis infection one month ago, his chances of surviving were doubtful.
“He really could have died,” said Dr. Peter Silver, chief of pediatric critical care at Cohen’s. “He’s lucky in a lot of ways. He survived intact and he went back to school.”
Silver described Ryan’s ordeal along with the boy’s parents in a press conference last Thursday in the new $130 million six-story 120,000-square-foot Cohen Children’s Medical Center pediatric emergency department pavilion at 76th Avenue in New Hyde Park celebrating its opening. The facility is part of the North Shore-LIJ Health System.
Silver said the prompt, effective critical care response at Cohen Children’s center quickly stabilized the young Huntington resident’s condition and ultimately enabled his recovery.
“We’re used to remarkable things,” Silver said.
The new Cohen Children’s Center trauma unit will continue to do remarkable things as one of only three level 1 pediatric trauma units in hospitals statewide, Silver said. He said 45,000 children are treated in the emergency room there annually and 1,800 are treated in the intensive-care unit. Silver said the hospital sees four or five patients a year with conditions like Ryan’s. The mortality rate for such infections is between 20 percent and 30 percent, he said.
“We stand as a beacon of hope for the communities in the New York metropolitan area and beyond,” said Kevin McGeachy, executive director of Cohen Children’s Medical Center.
After Ryan was transported by ambulance to Cohen Children’s center early last month, Silver said he and his team immediately set up three intravenous lines into Ryan, pumping antibiotics into his body as he slipped into a coma. Silver said medication administered to the boy for a flu infection has suppressed his body’s ability to fight auto-immune hepatitis, a liver disease.
Silver said Ryan was in “sepsis shock” when he arrived at the trauma center with a strep infection that had infected his sinuses and the tissue around his eye and his brain.
“It took its toll on Ryan and affected his heart and lungs,” he said.
Three days after arriving at the Cohen Center, Ryan sat up for the first time. He returned to school on April 8.
Ryan had only sketchy recollections of what happened after he arrived in the emergency room.
“I was scared when they had to put the [needles] in. Some of them hurt. Some of them didn’t,” he said.
He said remembered how much his stomach hurt while he was throwing up and having diarrhea at the beginning of his ordeal.
Coming out of his coma and realizing he was in a hospital, he said, “I was about to freak out.”
When Dr. Silver told him he could go home after nine days in the hospital, Ryan said his first thoughts were, “I could see my friends again and go back to school.”
Silver said Ryan’s father had initially asked whether his son would be able to make lacrosse practice a few days hence on Thursday.
Silver’s patient answer at the time was in the negative, but he said, “That’s what the Cohen children’s hospital is all about, getting kids back to lacrosse practice. It’s not just about the building. It’s about the kids.”
Ambulances from the Cohen’s Center pick up an average of 10 children a day from 65 outlying hospitals.
“Not only is it built for children. It’s designed for children,” he said, showing reporters a CT scan machine decorated with fish painted on a sea-blue background to “de-stress” the young patients.
The computed tomography scanner is a low radiation dose machine
He said design of the pavilion that houses a 25-bed pediatric intensive care unit began in 2001. A first floor waiting area features four interactive stations where children can play with screens displaying changeable colored geometric patterns. The medical-surgical unit has been designed as a mountain ecosystem with tracks of mountain animals crisscrossing the floor. Rooms have a sleeper sofa for families, two televisions and a gaming system for the young patients.
The children’s hospital was named in honor of Steven and Alexandra Cohen in 2010 after he made a $50 million pledge enabled construction of the new pediatric emergency department pavilion.
