Saving Four Year Olds

When Maria Carlin drives past Huntington Hospital now, she feels something most of us do when we drive by hospitals. It’s something between warmth, happiness, and gratitude. Hospitals have often blended into the background when we are on commutes or errands, but for Maria this hospital is a marker. A marker of nearly losing everything, and of the people who fought to give it back. It’s the place where her son, Jack, nearly died in her arms and where a team of strangers refused to let him.

Huntington Hospital, NYC. Architect: CANNONDESIGN

Today, Jack Carlin is a prototypical four-year-old: smiling, racing around the house, talking about monster trucks, and teasing his big sister. In this condition it’s hard to imagine him in the one he was when his skin turned gray-blue and he stopped breathing in the back seat of his mother’s car.

The drastic difference between those two states is a testament to the labor a team of clinicians underwent, minute by minute, to make his ordinary present-day smiles possible.

And that ordinariness, Maria says, is the miracle.