A terrified Long Island mom’s quick-thinking but devastatingly painful choice helped save the life of her toddler son over the summer — and eventually revealed the exceptionally rare condition he suffers from.
“Picture breathing through a milkshake straw, then breathing through a regular straw, then trying to breathe through a coffee straw,” Maria Carlin, 36, recently told The Post of her 4-year-old Jack’s harrowing experience in late July.
“We got to a point where I said to myself, ‘It doesn’t get higher-pitched. … I know what comes next.’ [His breathing] just stopped.”
Carlin, a nurse at North Shore University Hospital, got her stricken son — who was previously undiagnosed — into the car and began driving to the medical facility after he had spent the night crying in agony without “a single symptom of anything.”
Jack suddenly lost all of his air halfway into the 10-minute drive, forcing his mom to make to an impossible choice: pull over to give him CPR or keep rushing to the hospital.
Carlin decided to continue to the ER, knowing immediate resuscitation wouldn’t be enough, given Jack would need rapid intubation among other urgent procedures.
“I heard him slump over. I went to look back, and God said, ‘Maria, don’t look back. You made your decision. You’re not going to be able to handle seeing him right now,’ ” she recalled, fighting back tears.
“Knowing that you have a child in the back of your car who’s not breathing and needs CPR and not doing that for them — I don’t wish that scenario on my worst enemy.”
Carlin blared her car horn as she pulled up the car to the doors of ER, and a team of doctors and nurses flew into action over Jack, who was now in cardiac arrest and without a heartbeat.
“I just saw this lifeless kid who had no pulse, who looked blue,” said emergency-room Dr. Jennifer Gibb, who rushed to Jack after hearing Carlin “screaming.”
“I didn’t know she was a nurse at the time,” Gibb said of Carlin.
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“I heard her saying, ‘Come on, Jack,’ and that’s my son’s name. It sends chills through your spine when you’re helping this little child that could be your own,” said Gibb of her own 11-year-old son.
Jack’s pulse returned after the doctors and nurses worked on him for almost 10 minutes.
“I can’t even explain what that feeling is like when you know that your child’s heart is beating again,” Carlin said.
Jack was transferred to Cohen Children’s Medical Center a few hours later.
“I’ve been working here for 13 years, and I really only had a pediatric arrest like that, maybe about five times,” Gibb said.
Further examinations showed he had a laryngeal cleft, which impacts between 10,000 and 20,000 annual births, according to Northwell.
“It’s an abnormal opening in the back of the voice box that separates the voice box from the esophagus,” said Dr. Lee Smith, Cohen’s chief of pediatric otolaryngology.
Mucus or fluids can block airflow as a result of the “extremely uncommon” occurrence.
The boy’s dire situation was even more incredibly unique, according to Smith, who later performed his corrective surgery with no complications.
“I’ve never seen that before. … This was an extremely unusual and severe presentation,” Smith said of the boy losing lethal amounts of air.
Jack is now a happy, healthy pre-K-enrolled kid who, along with his mom, dad and siblings Luke and Emma, makes up a family incredibly grateful to the frontline workers who brought about their happy ending.
“The survival rate of a child going into cardiac arrest outside of a hospital is terrifyingly low,” Carlin said.
“After everything happened, I turned to my husband, and I was just like, ‘We’re going to Disney World. This child is going to experience Disney World.’ “
The Carlin family just returned from the Happiest Place on Earth, where Jack and his siblings and their dad Stewart got their fill of the magic they deserve after the mid-summer ordeal.
“I really liked the Slinky ride,” Jack told The Post.
“And I love being in school.”
