Patient Stories | Mount Sinai Today

Cerebrovascular Stroke Center Opens in Queens

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Patient Stories

At the Mount Sinai Queens Cerebrovascular Stroke Center opening, from left: Argero “Roula” Siklas, Program Officer, Stavros Niarchos Foundation; Michael E. Minikes, Vice Chair, Mount Sinai Health System Boards of Trustees; J Mocco, MD, MS, Vice Chair, Neurosurgery, Mount Sinai Health System; Caryn A. Schwab, Executive Director, Mount Sinai Queens; David L. Reich, MD, President, The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens; Howard A. Zucker, MD, JD, New York State Commissioner of Health; and Costa Constantinides, New York City Council member, 22nd District.

The New York State Commissioner of Health, Howard A. Zucker, MD, JD, and New York City Council member Costa Constantinides were among the esteemed guests at a special celebration as Mount Sinai Queens unveiled its world-class Cerebrovascular Stroke Center, officially establishing a new model of stroke care in the nation.

The opening of the Stroke Center on Wednesday, June 19, also kicked off festivities marking the 20th anniversary of Mount Sinai Queens becoming a part of The Mount Sinai Hospital. “Even 20 years ago, we had a vision that Mount Sinai Queens would be a great hospital in its own right,” Caryn A. Schwab, Executive Director, Mount Sinai Queens, told the standing-room-only audience. “This is a glorious way to begin our 20th anniversary celebration.” Added Michael E. Minikes, Vice Chair of the Mount Sinai Health System Boards of Trustees: “This is a most exciting time and a stunning achievement. This is a top-of-the-line Stroke Center.”

Mount Sinai Queens intends to vastly improve the speed and efficiency of stroke diagnosis and treatment, including the most devastating form of stroke, emergent large vessel occlusion (ELVO), which occurs when there is a blood clot in a major artery in the brain. Stroke may cause severe symptoms in the patient and, when not diagnosed or treated quickly, may result in severe disabilities or even death.

“Every passing minute that blood flow to the brain is blocked, about 2 million neurons die,” said J Mocco, MD, MS, Professor of Neurosurgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Vice Chair of Neurosurgery for the Mount Sinai Health System, and Director of the Health System’s Cerebrovascular Center.

Dr. Mocco led the effort to establish the Mount Sinai Queens Cerebrovascular Stroke Center, which has specially designed equipment that is unique in the United States. It permits the stroke team to rapidly conduct a CT scan, and then an angiogram, to precisely locate the clot, and then perform an endovascular procedure known as a thrombectomy—all in one room, and while the patient remains on the same table.

“The patient doesn’t have to go down multiple halls, or through multiple doors, and they don’t need to be transferred from a stretcher to a bed multiple times before they get their treatment,” said Dr. Mocco.

J Mocco, MD, MS, center, with Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai faculty, from left: Hazem Shoirah, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology, and Radiology, and Director of Thrombectomy Services in Queens; Stanley Tuhrim, MD, Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs, Department of Neurology, and Director, Comprehensive Stroke Center, The Mount Sinai Hospital; and Reade A. De Leacy, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, and Radiology, and Director of Cerebrovascular Services, Mount Sinai Queens; and Danny Hom, RT, Administrative Director, Mount Sinai Queens Cerebrovascular Stroke Center.

Thrombectomy is the gold standard of care for most ELVO strokes. It requires the expertise of a highly specialized neuroendovascular surgeon who guides a catheter through an artery in the groin or wrist to the brain and uses suction and/or a stent to remove the clot and quickly restore blood flow to the patient’s brain, often eliminating or minimizing brain damage. The goal, Dr. Mocco said, is to drastically reduce the time between hospital arrival, diagnosis, and the start of the clot removal.

“This is cutting-edge medicine,” said David L. Reich, MD, President of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens. “Mount Sinai Queens has changed the paradigm of medicine and shown what a community hospital can do.”

Dr. Zucker and Mr. Constantinides, who represents the 22nd District, joined the celebration as a show of support for effective and efficient stroke care. Dr. Zucker acknowledged that New York State is a national leader in stroke care and congratulated Mount Sinai Queens. “This is really about leadership and vision—this is big vision,” he said. Mr. Constantinides helped secure funding from the City Council for the specialized equipment. Mount Sinai Queens also received significant support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for the newly named Stavros Niarchos Foundation Advanced Thrombectomy Suite, where stroke diagnosis and treatment take place.

“Only about 10 percent of people who have this kind of stroke ever even get a chance at this therapy because patients don’t have access to treatment where they live,” said Dr. Mocco. “Conservative estimates suggest there are about 600 patients a year in Queens who have one of these emergent large vessel occlusion strokes. Those patients now have access to treatment that will not only save lives but rapidly restore function so they are able to live their best lives.”

Organ Transplant Team Offers “HOPE” to Patients

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Patient Stories, Transplant

Jose Velez, seated, with, from left, transplant team members Sander S. Florman, MD; Shirish S. Huprikar, MD, Chief Medical Offi cer, The Mount Sinai Hospital; Vikram Wadhera, MBBS, Assistant Professor of Surgery (Kidney/Pancreas Transplantation); Brandy Haydel, Clinical Research Program Director; and Meenakshi M. Rana, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases).

In June, Jose Velez became the 50th person at the Mount Sinai Health System’s Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute to receive a transplant under the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act, which allows organs from HIV-positive donors to be transplanted into HIV-positive recipients with end-stage disease, thus increasing the organ donor pool. Prior to the HOPE Act, which went into effect in late 2015, all patients—those with and without HIV—were required to use organs from HIV-uninfected donors.

During the nine years that Mr. Velez waited for a kidney transplant, he was notified four times that a kidney might be available only to be told that it had gone to someone else on the waiting list. “I would tell anyone who is eligible to be in the HOPE program that they should do it,” he says.

Before surgery, he was dependent on dialysis several times a week and could not travel freely or participate in activities that conflicted with such a constricted schedule. Now Mr. Velez’s plans include buying season tickets to the opera and traveling to Abu Dhabi, London, and Paris. “It’s a whole new world, a very different life than I was living for nine years,” he says. “I’m open to so many things now.” He credits Mount Sinai for providing a “safe, secure, and caring” environment. “Sometimes they make you feel as though you’re their only patient,” he says.

Mount Sinai was the first hospital in New York State and the second in the nation to perform a HOPE transplant in 2016. Today, Mount Sinai performs more of these transplants than any other U.S. hospital.

“Thanks to tremendous advances in antiviral therapies, patients with HIV now live long lives and may suffer from end-stage liver and kidney diseases that can be treated by transplantation,” says Sander S. Florman, MD, Director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at The Mount Sinai Hospital. “Carefully selected people with HIV can have comparable outcomes with transplantation as people without HIV and deserve an equitable opportunity to get a transplant. This has increased the availability of organs for these patients, and has allowed people with HIV to be donors and offer the gift of life to others.”

Creating a “Circle of CARE”

May 13, 2019 | Community, Patient Stories

Navjot Kauer, RN, left, and Wendy Chow with patient Mohammed Choudhury.

On a recent Friday afternoon, patient Mohammed Choudhury was delighted to see Navjot Kaur, RN, and Wendy Chow, a recent nursing school graduate and volunteer in the Care and Respect for Everyone (CARE) program, walk into his room on the sixth floor of the Klingenstein Clinical Center. CARE is a Mount Sinai volunteer program that helps promote mobility and physical activity in patients to improve patient outcomes.

The two assisted Mr. Choudhury as he walked down the corridor, making certain he did not lose his balance.

Before becoming a Mount Sinai clinical unit nurse, Ms. Kaur had been a CARE volunteer when she was a nursing student, and she was wearing an “I’m a proud CARE Volunteer Alum!” button on her uniform.

Today, she is one of several CARE alumni who mentor nursing students or recent graduates interested in becoming a CARE volunteer, an effort that not only enhances the overall program for patients but strengthens the pathway for these volunteers to become Mount Sinai staff.

Ms. Kaur says CARE has helped her form stronger bonds with patients. “Talking to people and providing comfort is very important,” she says. “Some people don’t have visitors, so this also helps change their mood.”

Established in 2012 in the Emergency Department, the CARE program now has more than 100 volunteers throughout The Mount Sinai Hospital.

“They do an excellent job,” Mr. Choudhury said after his walk.

The Mount Sinai Hospital Welcomes New Facility Dog

May 13, 2019 | Community, Featured, Patient Stories

Emergency Department technician Suzi Steele, left, stopped to greet Moby and his handler, Jaclyn Damiano, in the lobby of the Icahn Medical Institute on East 98th Street.

The Mount Sinai Hospital recently welcomed Moby as its newest four-legged employee in the Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy Department. The young, sweet-natured golden doodle now serves as the hospital’s third facility dog—along with Professor Bunsen Honeydew and Amos—offering attention and affection to faculty, staff, and patients.

“Animals create a therapeutic environment for patients, parents, and staff ,” says Diane Rode, MPS, Director of the Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy Department. When one of the facility dogs is at a child’s bedside, she says, doctors and nurses often take a moment to sit down, too, and the atmosphere surrounding the patient becomes calmer and more harmonized.

Like Professor and Amos, Moby visits patients and their families. But his main emphasis is supporting faculty and staff, and helping clinical units de-stress during the course of a normally hectic week or during times of sadness. Ms. Rode says she has seen the dogs have a profound effect on grieving staff members.

To some degree, Moby’s schedule for the first year will be open-ended. But, accompanied by his handler, Jaclyn Damiano, MPS, a licensed Creative Arts Therapist, he does have structured time with certain units at The Mount Sinai Hospital and during visits to Mount Sinai Queens.

Ms. Rode credits the Mount Sinai Health System’s leadership for recognizing the value of facility dogs and says she is grateful for the support of David L. Reich, MD, President of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens, and Jonathan Kyriacou, MPH, Vice President, Hospital Operations, who helped bring Moby to Mount Sinai.

Nurse at South Nassau Communities Hospital Helps Save Man in Long Island Movie Theater

May 10, 2019 | Featured, Patient Stories

Shyvonne Allen-Ibitoye, right, a registered nurse at South Nassau Communities Hospital, and DeShawn Mason, the man she helped to save

Shyvonne Allen-Ibitoye woke up Easter morning intent on going to church. But instead, the registered nurse at South Nassau Communities Hospital took her son to a movie. As the movie was playing, she realized a man sitting a few rows back was having a heart attack and immediately began helping to revive him and get him to the hospital for treatment. “When I saw him awake in the hospital, it warmed my heart to know that he was ok,” she says.

Read the full story from South Nassau Communities Hospital

A Rare Bladder Condition, and in Need of a Kidney Transplant: Little Lexi’s Extraordinary Medical Journey

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Patient Stories, Your Health

Lexi Isler got a kiss from her father, Luther, before the kidney transplant surgery in January.

In 2009, when a prenatal ultrasound showed an abnormal kidney, Luther and Ashley Isler knew that their daughter, Lexi, would be born with a urinary problem. What they did not expect, however, was that Lexi would also be born without a bladder, a condition known as bladder agenesis that has only 20 known survivors worldwide.

Today, 8-year-old Lexi is among those remarkable survivors as she continues an extraordinary medical journey supported by her loving family and an interdisciplinary team of Mount Sinai physicians that has included pediatric urologists and nephrologists, and transplant surgeons, along with nurses and countless other caring staff over the years.

When Lexi was 2 years old, doctors at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital confirmed by magnetic resonance imaging that urine had been backing up into her kidney—because she did not have a bladder. While she was in diapers, not having a bladder was not immediately obvious, but as she grew older, Lexi would need a way to both hold and pass urine. Meanwhile, her kidneys—damaged by her urinary outflow anatomy—had been steadily deteriorating and doctors realized that she would eventually need a kidney transplant.

Lexi’s urology and pediatric doctors formed a close team to strategize about her case from the earliest stages. “Long before a transplant, our team first had to think about how to make a bladder and how to get it to work,” says Jeffrey M. Saland, MD, Chief of Pediatric Nephrology and Hypertension at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital and Medical Director of the Pediatric Kidney Transplant Service.

When Lexi was 5 years old, Jeffrey A. Stock, MD, Associate Professor of Urology, and Pediatrics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Urology at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, performed the complex, six-hour surgery to create an artificial bladder.

“We removed part of her colon and connected the ends to create a bowel pouch that functioned as a bladder,” says Dr. Stock. “Then, we used her appendix to create a urethra to drain urine from the neobladder.” The neobladder can store, but not empty, urine so Lexi has learned to use a catheter in the bathroom to empty her new bladder. The neobladder procedure is rare. Dr. Stock, who specializes in the surgical reconstruction of genitourinary birth defects, has done only four such procedures in his 25 years of practice.

By January 2018, Lexi’s kidney function was so compromised that at one point, she was unresponsive for days. The situation remained critical all year with very little improvement, and in December 2018, the need for a kidney transplant could not be deferred. Fortunately for Lexi, when she was 3, her father had been identified as a match for her. “It was an easy decision,” says Mr. Isler. “I felt blessed that I was a match.”

Victoria Caselnova, RN, BSN, left, and Stacey Brooks, RN, BSN, with a smiling Lexi Isler on the day she was discharged from the hospital.

In January 2019, as Lexi was about to go into kidney failure, surgeons from the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai performed the transplant using her dad’s kidney. “We had all of our firepower available,” says Ron Shapiro, MD, Professor of Surgery, and Surgical Director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program, referring to the expert team of surgeons involved with the transplant and the bladder creation. A smiling Lexi was discharged after spending nine days in the hospital for the transplant surgery.

Still, says Dr. Saland, “This is a work in progress. Lexi remains at higher risk for urinary tract infections and we’ll need to make ongoing adjustments for drainage as well as in her anti-rejection medications. But at Mount Sinai, we believe we have all the expertise and resources we need to treat all aspects of Lexi’s condition.”

“I have the utmost respect for the doctors and nurses at Mount Sinai,” says Ms. Isler. “They all treated Lexi with so much respect and love. The nurses even came to her bedside when their shifts were over to paint with her.”

Despite periodic hospital stays, Lexi is happy and back at school, facing her health challenges with grace and an amazingly positive attitude for a girl her age, says Ms. Isler. Lexi recently found the courage to stand before her classmates and tell them about the condition she was born with and how it was treated. “Her classmates have been very supportive, and they don’t treat her like she’s different,” says Ms. Isler.

At home, the child who had been taking dance classes since the age of 2 has newfound energy and dances around the house with a lack of inhibition, Mr. Isler says. “With a lot of support, our goal is to enable Lexi to live a long, happy, and healthy life,” says Dr. Stock.

To learn more about organ donation, visit www.LiveOnNY.org.

Learn more about organ donation at LiveOnNY.org

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