Media Contact: Michelle Pinto
516-465-2649
mpinto@nshs.edu

NEW HYDE PARK, NY -- A nine-year-old girl who suffered a brain hemorrhage in May and later slipped into a coma thanked her doctors at Cohen Children’s Medical Center (CCMC)  of New York on Thursday after undergoing life-saving neurosurgery, aided by a new portable computed tomography (CT) scanner that helped the hospital to successfully monitor and treat the child in CCMC's new $7.8 million Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

Katie Melendez of Deer Park, NY, woke up at 3 a.m. on May 15 with a severe headache, which progressed quickly to nausea and vomiting before she lapsed into a coma. A CT scan taken at Forest Hills Hospital  – the girl and her family had been visiting relatives in Queens -- revealed a massive brain hemorrhage that appeared to have been caused by an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a congenital, life-threatening condition that occurs because of pressure and damage to the brain’s blood vessel tissue.

With blood leaking into the brain and her life at risk, Katie was transferred immediately to CCMC, where two tubes were placed into the ventricles of her brain. As Katie was being monitored in the hospital’s PICU over the next 24 hours, her brain continued to swell, so her surgeon, Mark Mittler, MD , performed a decompressive hemicraniectomy , removing part of the skull to allow the brain to swell and placing the skull in her abdomen for sterile storage. (When Katie awoke, a social worker had to explain to her the cause of the large protrusion in her stomach.)

The following day on May 16, Katie’s unstable condition and the need to evaluate her brain for evidence of a stroke prompted hospital officials to break out their new portable CT system, called Ceretom, on which staff was training. The $400,000 device is used to scan the brains of critically ill children as they rest in bed, rather than running the risk of transporting them to the hospital’s radiology area for this vital procedure. Clinicians used Ceretom to scan Katie’s brain -- the first time the portable CT was used at the hospital. Within moments, surgeons had a perfect picture of Katie’s brain. She eventually underwent an endovascular embolization of the AVM, which sealed off blood vessels and prevented further bleeding, and was then brought back to the OR to remove the brain lesion and replace the portion of the skull that had been removed. The Ceretom CT was then used once again on Katie to confirm the removal of the lesion. After a week at CCMC, she was sent to rehabilitation. On Wednesday, June 29, Katie was allowed to go home.

During a news conference on June 30 in the hospital’s new $7.8 million PICU, Katie, her parents Linda and Anthony Melendez, and her three siblings gathered to thank the surgeons, doctors, social workers and nurses who helped save Katie’s life. Reading from a hand-drawn card designed especially for Dr. Mittler, she said, “Thank you for helping me fix my brain and using your new machine on me.”

According to Dr. Mittler, Katie’s miraculous recovery is due in equal parts to the depth of resources offered at the hospital and the addition of state-of-the-art technology, such as the Ceretom scanner. “We were able to understand the exact nature of Katie’s AVM, and provide appropriate treatment, thanks to the depth and breadth of the resources available at this hospital to treat children in the most dire of straits.”

The features of the hospital’s Gertrude and Louis Feil Pediatric Intensive Care Unit also enhance the hospital’s life-saving capabilities. The new unit, scheduled to open in early July, features eight single-bed rooms large enough for parents to stay comfortably by their child’s bedside. With the addition of this new unit, CCMC will now have 28 ICU beds to care for the most critically ill children and their families.

Once the new unit opens in the coming days, the hospital will renovate the existing 20-bed PICU, made possible by a generous donation from the Leon Lowenstein Foundation. An additional 25-bed PICU is being incorporated into CCMC’s new six-story, 100,000-square-foot pavilion now under construction and due for completion in early 2013.

To see a video of this story, go to http://www.northshorelij.com/NSLIJ/media-portal/neuroscience/CCMCNY-New-PICU