The Associated Press reports on a window washer who fell 47 stories to the ground. Not only did he survive, he is making a remarkable recovery. The story is amazing, precisely because it mentions so little about cognitive deficits:
Doctors say they have never seen anything like it: A window washer who fell 47 stories from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family and expected to walk again.
Alcides Moreno, 37, plummeted almost 500 feet in a Dec. 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother.
Somehow, Moreno lived, and doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center announced Thursday that his recovery has been astonishing.
He has movement in all his limbs. He is breathing on his own. And on Christmas Day, he opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since the accident.
. . .
The death rate from even a three-story fall is about 50 percent, Barie said. People who fall more than 10 stories almost never survive.
''Forty-seven floors is virtually beyond belief,'' Pardes said.
And from today's NYT, this interesting claim from the victim's wife:
Mrs. Moreno was asked more than once at the press conference why she believed her husband had survived. “He was trained,” she said “He knew what to do with the platform” — meaning, according to other window washers, lie flat and ride it down.
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