Sully Sullenberger’s latest miracle - Rory Staunton’s hero lends name to fight for more stringent hospital checks

Sully Sullenberger and his wife Lorraine with Orlaith, Kathleen and Ciaran Staunton
last week in O’Neill’s. (Photo by Sean McPhail)

They say you should never meet your heroes in case you are disappointed, but in the case of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the opposite is true.

I had the great pleasure of meeting the man responsible for the “Miracle on the Hudson,” when he saved the lives of the crew and 155 passengers on a US Airways flight en route to North Carolina by executing a perfect landing on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009.

Earlier last week Sully, who has Swiss and Irish heritage, had appeared on Katie Couric’s talk show where he met 10 little babies born to passengers since that miracle day, and to recount the story of the incredible landing.

Sully’s bravery that day was one of the greatest feel good stories of its time, but his heroism does not end there.

Since that day he has resolved to continue his efforts to make air travel safer and also to ensure, based on pre-flight check lists, that hospital procedures, especially in emergency rooms, are greatly improved.

On January 15 Sully met with my family, my sister Orlaith and brother-in-law Ciaran Staunton, who lost their son Rory, a dedicated flier in the making who considered Sully his hero.

Rory died from sepsis last April after catastrophic medical mistakes were made in his care at NYU Langone Hospital in New York after he suffered a scrape in a basketball game at his school.

Rory’s battle for life was featured in The New York Times, and the coverage included his admiration and hero worship for Sully.

Sully read the article and contacted Ciaran and Orlaith, so a meeting was finally set up for last week.

It turned out to be a wonderful dinner at O’Neill’s, which the Stauntons own, in Midtown Manhattan as relatives and friends of Orlaith and Ciaran gathered. Sully, his charming wife Lorraine, and daughter Kelly also attended.

Sully sat down and read Rory’s term paper on him in its entirety, asked every question about Rory and his love of flying and what kind of child he was.

Sully was the polar opposite of so many self-obsessed “celebrities,” a title that does not fit easily on this former Air Force fighter pilot.

There was self–deprecating humor too, when discussing that fateful day and when he finally got off the plane after the most traumatic experience imaginable.

He called US Airways and introduced himself, and the official told him he’d have to call back as one of their planes had just gone down in the Hudson. “I am the pilot,” Sullenberger told him, followed by a stunned silence.

His wife at home was on a long call to a close relative and did not immediately pick up when Sully called, and when she did she was quietly annoyed. Why was he so anxious to speak to her?

“Turn on the TV,” he told her.

Sully unselfishly gives much of the credit to his co-pilot Jeff Skiles that day, who kept his cool and calmly told him his altitude, speed and likely landing trajectory as the water rushed up to meet them and alarms were going off all over the cockpit.

Sully believes that the extraordinary safety record of major US airlines (excluding commuter flights) since the last major airline crash back in 2001 is due in large part to improved communication procedures between pilots, and check lists that ensure flying is made as safe as possible.

He believes the same system should apply in hospitals all over the world, and that it would make a profound difference in the death rate for patients killed by medical errors.

My family’s loss is the living nightmare of the consequences of such errors. Blood tests that revealed Rory’s worsening condition were never even checked.

Having someone like Sully onboard is a tremendous boost to the chances that such a checklist system will son be implemented coast to coast.

Meeting Sully would have been a huge deal for Rory, and his hero would not have disappointed him. The wild blue yonder is where they were both most at home.

So fly straight Sully, and keep up the marvelous work. You made us all so proud to meet you.

A blue Christmas made worse by Newtown massacre of the innocent -- Memories of my late nephew Rory Staunton amid sad scenes from Connecticut

Rory Staunton taking his first flying lesson in 2011. 

Last Saturday I should have been at my sister and brother-in-law’s in Sunnyside, Queens, trimming their tree with my daughter Alana and wife Debbie.

Their kids Rory and Kathleen should have been there. Rory, as always, the more serious older one, watching the two other scamps as they dressed up and performed silly sketches. Instead, he would definitely have been engaging me in some discussion about a world trouble spot.

The shooting in Connecticut would have been on his mind. He hated to see injustice or people hurt.

Rory was like that; a very savvy kid, described by his teacher as the most profound 12-year-old he had ever met.

After the trimming we would then have settled down to our dinner, all the food you could eat, usually topped with an Irish Christmas trifle.

Except all of that didn’t happen and will never happen again.

Rory passed in April after doctors at NYU Langone Hospital missed vital signs that he was contracting sepsis from a simple cut. Rory now lies in a lonely graveyard in Co. Louth with my parents.

The awareness of untimely death is everywhere this week. It is writ large on the beautiful and innocent faces of those destroyed by the madman in Connecticut, on the faces of the grieving parents and the shocked public grappling with an evil reality.

I don’t know how the parents will cope. I read they stood around for hours hoping against hope in the local firehouse until Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy told them their kids had not survived.

I know something of what they felt. We too waited desperately for good news, or any news about Rory as he lay in the ICU.

Read More: Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write

Like the Connecticut parents, no one in authority came and told us. The onset of Rory’s passing was never first communicated by the doctors.

Rather it was the sudden presence of the social workers and counselors flitting into the hospital waiting room as we waited desperately for word.

I saw them, heard their comforting murmurs and knew we were in the shadow of death. Despair opened that has remained when I think of those dreadful hours.

In James Joyce’s classic short story “The Dead”, the title character Gabriel sees that same shadow flicker on the faces of his two elderly aunts as he carves the Christmas dinner and he realizes how silly and trite so much of his life has been.

He thinks of the dead who have gone before him, he sees the snow falling softly, and he realizes even though they are gone, the dead are still with us in so many ways in our every waking thought, in our actions and our deeds.

There is not a day goes by I don’t think of or talk to my nephew Rory. I know that is true of all who knew him and loved him.

I think of those grieving parents in Connecticut and know it will be the same for them too.

The dead are indeed with us, and when we commence that final journey westward as Joyce called it, they will be waiting for us too, of that I am certain.

As Joyce wrote: “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.

"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Read More:A New York Times investigative article into my 12-year-old nephew’s death -- Columnist Jim Dwyer discovers the truth of what happened to Rory Staunton

"It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Election night, Barack Obama’s re-election and Rory Staunton -- There is far more to this world than we have figured out just yet

Rory Staunton

There were few bigger fans of Barack Obama than 12-year-old Rory Staunton. His father, Ciaran, had brought him to the White House to the Irish celebration on St Patrick’s Day in 2011 and he had met the president and the first lady.

To say he was proud as punch was an understatement. When the president stopped on the rope line and briefly chatted with him, Rory was in seventh heaven.

Rory was the kind of kid who lived and breathed politics anyway, so the Obama meeting set him even more on a course that his parents and I, as his uncle, thought would surely bring him into politics some day.

He worshiped John F Kennedy too and featured him on his Facebook page as a hero. He already understood what it meant for an Irish Catholic in 1960 to make it to the White House at a time just one generation removed from ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs.

Rory was already spreading his own civil rights message. In his school he began a campaign to “Spread the word to end the word,” the word was “retard”, and Rory was determined that its use be ended.

In late March when Rory became ill with sepsis after receiving a cut in a basketball game at school and was misdiagnosed at NYU Langone hospital, he was rushed back there the second day when he was clearly very sick.

Doctors wanted to measure his mental status and asked him two questions.

“Who is President of the United States?”

“Who will be the next President of the United States?”

"OBAMA. OBAMA."

Those were the last words he ever spoke before going into a coma.

After he died the President sent a beautiful letter. To say we were rooting for his re-election was putting it mildly.

That is why I missed Rory so much on election night this week. We sat in Rory’s house in Queens watching the returns come in, missing the big redhead on the couch who would surely have thrown a wad of facts and figures at us to beat the band and bore us all explaining the electoral college to anyone who would listen.

Though the race seemed close in the early states we figured Rory would take care of any minor problems in Obama’s path to re-election.

We all sensed he was with us -- just a feeling, hard to explain. To me there is far more to this world than we have figured out just yet.

Election night was just one more instance of that.

Twice that night the doorbell rang in Rory’s house and when we went outside to open the door there was no one there.

I remember sitting with Ron Clifford who lost his sister and his little niece on 9/11 when the television in his front room suddenly came on, frightening the wits out of me as no one was near.

Ron explained to me how the lights often flickered mysteriously especially when he was discussing them.

So, yes I do think Rory was there in some way with us on election night and that he celebrated with us around 11.15pm when Ohio put the president over the top.

Yeats wrote: “Come away O human child
To the waters and the wild
With the fairies hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

And more full of wonder and mystery sometimes too. Like when a doorbell rings and no one is there.

Sully Sullenberger’s latest mission is to make hospitals safe -- In wake of death of Rory Staunton, Sully seeks major changes

Sully Sullenberger

The voice on the other end of the phone was amazingly, that of Sully Sullenberger, the Hero on the Hudson, who had landed his stricken plane filled with 155 passengers in the icy waters off Manhattan in January 2009.

He is the last great American hero, an authentic one too, who grabbed responsibility for his plane and the lives of his passengers on that dreadful day when a flock of geese killed his engines and he had only seconds to react.

“Your nephew Rory was a remarkable young man,” he told me, “We should ensure that his death was not in vain and that some good can come out of it."

These days, Sullenberger, Irish on his mother’s side and with daughters named Kate and Kelly, is seeking to change medical  treatment as profoundly as he changed our perception that there were no more American heroes.

Soon after my sister and brother in law’s son Rory Staunton died in an horrific medical screw up at New York University’s Langone center, my brother in law Ciaran, told New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer that Rory’s hero was Sully and that he had been inspired by his heroism.

Rory had taken his first flying lesson at age 12 and Sully was his hero ever after, When Sully heard this he took the opportunity to reach out and console my brother in law and sister in a beautiful personal note to them.

It was the one time since their ordeal that I saw both of them crack a smile and give a thumbs up. “Rory would have been so proud,” said Orlaith, remembering how he had idolized the hero pilot.

Amazingly, Sully was also working on the issue that Ciaran and Orlaith will spend much of the rest of their lives on -- ensuring children and indeed, adults, are given proper attention and focus in emergency rooms all over the world.

Rory fell between the cracks, no one at NYU bothered to check out his blood test results even though they showed that he was a very sick but saveable child in the early stages of toxic shock syndrome.

For Sully, Rory epitomized everything that had gone wrong with the system where there was no responsibility, and no chain of command that followed Rory’s treatment from the moment he came to the hospital until he was erroneously checked out.

Sullenbrger wants to make the airline-hospital comparison stick. Due to better safety measures and repeated training, airlines have reduced fatalities ten fold. If such steps were taken in hospitals, countless lives would be saved, he points out.

Sullenberger has advised hospitals that the current mindset that “accidents are inevitable” must be changed to “accidents are unimaginable.”

As he said to Maureen Dowd in her column on Rory, "If something good comes from Rory's death, it will be that we realize we have a broken system...Patient care is so fragmented. For the most part, medical professionals aren't taught these human skills that some deride as 'soft skills.' So there's insufficient sharing of information and ineffective communication.”

Amen to that, and a seal of approval to Sully as he continues his latest mission to cut down on tragic hospital mistakes. There is yet another reason to be proud of this authentic American hero.

A New York Times investigative article into my 12-year-old nephew’s death -- Columnist Jim Dwyer discovers the truth of what happened to Rory Staunton

Rory Staunton taking his first flying lesson in 2011. 

As many of our readers are aware my beloved nephew Rory Staunton passed away in NYU hospital from Toxic Shock Syndrome on April 1st.

I have written extensively about Rory and what happened to him but neither me or his parents, Ciaran and Orlaith Staunton, had any idea of just how a devastating series of events and mistakes cost him his life.

They occurred both with his primary care physician and in the NYU emergency room and doomed Rory’s chances of survival which should have been 100 percent with proper treatment.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Dwyer, a columnist with The New York Times, a close friend who knew Rory, launched his own investigative effort to determine the facts. What he discovered is carried today in The New York Times and has been the top rated story on their site.

It is a shocking story of medical malpractice in my opinion, and I only hope it can help other parents whose kids may face emergency room situations to learn from it. If Rory’s death can help save another child then it was not totally in vain.

Copyright The New York Times
“In a Boy’s Fight for his life , signs that went unheeded”

By Jim Dwyer

“For a moment, an emergency room doctor stepped away from the scrum of people working on Rory Staunton, 12, and spoke to his parents.

“Your son is seriously ill,” the doctor said.

“How seriously?” Rory’s mother, Orlaith Staunton, asked.

The doctor paused.

“Gravely ill,” he said.

How could that be?

Two days earlier, diving for a basketball at his school gym, Rory had cut his arm. He arrived at his pediatrician’s office the next day, Thursday, March 29,vomiting, feverish and with pain in his leg. He was sent to the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center. The doctors agreed: he was suffering from an upset stomach and dehydration. He was given fluids, told to take Tylenol, and sent home.

Partially camouflaged by ordinary childhood woes, Rory’s condition was, in fact, already dire. Bacteria had gotten into his blood, probably through the cut on his arm. He was sliding into a septic crisis, an avalanche of immune responses to infection from which he would not escape. On April 1, three nights after he was sent home from the emergency room, he died in the intensive care unit. The cause was severe septic shock brought on by the infection, hospital records say.

Because sepsis, a leading cause of death in hospitals, can at first look like less serious ailments, a campaign to aggressively identify it for early treatment has been undertaken by a consortium of 55 hospitals in the New York region, including NYU Langone.

Yet nowhere along Rory’s journey, from boy with a bellyache on Thursday to gravely ill boy on Friday night, did anyone act on strong indications that he might be fighting for his life. Critical information gathered by his family doctor and during his first visit to NYU Langone either was not used, was not at hand or was not viewed as important when decisions were made about his care, records show.

Moments after an emergency room doctor ordered Rory’s discharge believing fluids had made him better, his vital signs, recorded while still at the hospital, suggested that he could be seriously ill. Even more pointed signals emerged three hours later, when the Stauntons were at home: the hospital’s laboratory reported that Rory was producing vast quantities of cells that combat bacterial infection, a warning that sepsis could be on the horizon.

The Stauntons knew nothing of his weak vital signs or abnormal lab results.

“Nobody said anything that night,” Ms. Staunton said. “None of you followed up the next day on that kid, and he’s at home, dying on the couch?”

NYU Langone declined to discuss any aspects of Rory’s care or hospital procedures.

“Our deepest sympathies go out to the family at this difficult time,” said Lisa Greiner, a hospital spokeswoman.

The Stauntons shared Rory’s medical records with a reporter for The New York Times who had met the boy last summer in a social setting. A full airing of the case, along with a commitment to reforms, his parents said, could save lives. They have hired a lawyer, Thomas A. Moore, but have not decided how they will proceed.

Rory Staunton, 5 feet 9 inches tall and 169 pounds, was big for his age and a student of the world. “The most profound 12-year-old I had ever met,” his debate coach, Kevin Burgoyne, said. For his birthday, his parents gave him flying lessons after Rory, who spent hours on a flight simulator, tracked down an aviation school that accepted students at 12. He devoured the memoir of Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely brought down an airliner on the Hudson River.

“I told him, ‘Sully did some fast math landing that plane,’ and for a short while, he was paying attention to math,” said Ciaran Staunton, Rory’s father. “Then he came back with, ‘Yeah, but by the time I’m a pilot they’ll have a faster way of doing it.’ ”

Rory and his sister, Kathleen, 10, grew up in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, which their parents, Irish immigrants, regarded as a global village of sublime pleasures: shared courtyards, a rich brew of cultures and merry mobs of children rolling from house to house. Ms. Staunton, the former director of an international student exchange, said neighborhood kids formed their own country, Kidadelphia, designed a flag, and adapted the United States motto for their slogan: “In God and Fun We Trust.” Rory was president. When he was 8, he raided his piggy bank to treat his parents to a Chinese dinner for their wedding anniversary. At the private Garden School in Jackson Heights, he was elected to the student council in seventh grade and led a campaign, Spread the Word to End the Word, to curtail the casual, derogatory use of the term “retarded.”

Last summer, his uncle, a friend of mine, brought Rory, Kathleen and their mother to stay in my family’s vacation home for two nights. Rory would go from barreling down a water slide backward to sizing up President Obama’s prospects for re-election. Fascinated by North Korea, he tried to fathom how a country so afflicted by famine could afford a large army. (His parents recently found a note in his computer to the Swedish ambassador to North Korea.)

At home, said Mr. Staunton, a civic activist and bar owner, they would have nightly shouting matches over homework Rory had not done or dirty clothes he had not picked up, in between scoping out corners of global history.

During gym class on Wednesday, March 28, he dived for a ball and opened a cut on his arm. That night, Ms. Staunton said, Rory mentioned it: “How he presented it to me was, ‘I fell in the gym. Mr. D, the athletic director, put the Band-Aids on. And, I got the ball.’ ”

Then he finished his homework and went to bed.

The bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes is part of the human ecosystem, normally dwelling in the throat or on the skin, areas where the body is well defended. Also known as Group A streptococcus, the strain typically causes strep throat or impetigo.

But if it is able to penetrate soft tissue or blood, “it moves very quickly,” said Dr. Michael B. Edmond, the chairman of the division of infectious diseases at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The mortality rate is high. The clinical findings early in the infection can be relatively subtle.”

The challenge for physicians is recognizing an invasive infection, whether from Group A strep or other pathogens, before the cascading damage of sepsis has picked up too much speed. The consortium of New York hospitals has a goal of starting antibioticswithin an hour of spotting sepsis in the emergency room, according to officials with the Greater New York Hospital Association’s Stop Sepsis program.

For every hour’s delay in giving antibiotics after very low blood pressure had set in, a large study found, the survival rate decreased by 7.6 percent.

Shortly after midnight on March 29, Ms. Staunton heard Rory retching in the bathroom. “There wasn’t a huge amount of vomit, but he kept saying, ‘My leg, my leg, Mom,’ ” she recalled. Back in bed, he moaned. His mother rubbed his thigh. In the morning, he was weak, his leg still hurt, and his temperature was 104 degrees, his highest ever.

The parents began calling Dr. Susan Levitzky, who had been the family pediatrician for about five years. She saw Rory that evening.

“He was leaning on me as we were walking up to the office, because he could hardly stand from the weakness or pain in his leg,” Ms. Staunton said. In the waiting room, Rory vomited. When the doctor swabbed his throat, he vomited on her. The swab test, a rapid but not definitive detector of strep, was negative.

“We showed her the cut on his elbow, and I saw her follow up his arm from the cut,” Ms. Staunton said. “She said, ‘The cut’s not an issue.’ She focused on his stomach. We said, ‘Although you see him throwing up, that’s not what he’s really complaining about.’ Rory and I both said to her that it’s the pain in his leg that’s really bothering him.”

The doctor told them that the leg pain might be from falling in the gym. “Rory said, ‘It wasn’t a fall, it was a skid,’ ” Ms. Staunton recalled.

The parents also remarked that Rory’s skin became blotchy when they pressed a finger on it. Those concerns were well-founded, said Dr. Edmond, the infectious disease specialist, who was not involved in Rory’s care: the mottling, which Dr. Levitzky made note of, could mean that vessels in his skin were constricting from low blood pressure; the leg pain could mean an invasive infection. Rory’s temperature was 102 and his pulse was 140; he was breathing 36 times a minute.

These, too, were “worrisome” observations, Dr. Edmond said.

Nevertheless, Ms. Staunton said, she did not recall being told that any of his vital signs were off: “She said, ‘Make your way over to NYU, and get him rehydrated. He’s vomiting now. He’s going to feel better, and tomorrow, he’ll have diarrhea.’ ”

In a brief phone conversation, Dr. Levitzky said she could not discuss the case. “I sent him to a major medical center,” she said.

Rory arrived at NYU Langone, on First Avenue near 34th Street, at 7:14 that evening and was discharged about two hours later. Hospital records do not reflect any communication with Dr. Levitzky or her findings about the mottled skin.

Like Dr. Levitzky, the NYU physicians believed that Rory’s discomfort was caused by a sick stomach and dehydration. His chart states that “labs, I.V.F., Zofran” were ordered.Zofran is an anti-nausea drug; two bags of intravenous fluids, or I.V.F., were administered; three vials of blood were drawn and sent to the hospital laboratory.

“They did the various checks, up, down, back and forth,” Mr. Staunton said.

A screening tool in the Stop Sepsis program, used when a patient first arrives in the emergency room, calls special attention to a person with three symptoms of a possible eight. At the hospital, Rory showed two: he was breathing 20 times per minute and his pulse was 143.

Two hours later, though, he had three: his temperature had risen to 102, his pulse was 131 and his respiration rate was 22. But by the time those vital signs were recorded, at 9:26 p.m., they had no bearing on his treatment. In fact, the doctor had already decided that Rory was going home. Rory’s “ExitCare” instructions, signed by his father, were printed 12 minutes before those readings.

To the pediatrician who examined and discharged Rory, it seemed that the fluids had done the trick. “Pt improved,” the doctor, Camille Scribner, wrote, prescribing “home supportive care.” There is no sign in the records that Dr. Scribner, described by a senior colleague as “hyper-conscientious,” considered alternative explanations.

“They stated that it was a common flu that was going around,” Mr. Staunton said. “It would start off as high temperature and throwing up, and would end up as diarrhea.”

Dr. Scribner could not be reached for comment through the hospital.

As the Stauntons walked Rory onto First Avenue, the air temperature was in the mid-40s. “He was freezing,” Ms. Staunton said. “He took my coat leaving the hospital. It has a little frilly thing around the collar.”

“Not a thing that a boy of 12 would put on,” Mr. Staunton said.

About three hours later, Rory’s lab results were printed. He was producing neutrophilsand bands, white blood cells, at rates that were “very abnormal and would suggest a serious bacterial infection,” Dr. Edmond said.

The Stauntons said they heard nothing about it. In bed, Rory “was groaning in his sleep,” Ms. Staunton said. “I felt the heat of the fever.”

At 10 a.m. on Friday, the Stauntons began calling their pediatrician, Dr. Levitzky. “She told us to do a combination of Tylenol and Motrin,” Ms. Staunton said.

Asked last month about the lab findings, Dr. Levitzky, who is associated with NYU Langone, said, “I never knew that testing was done.”

Rory did have the predicted bout of diarrhea on Friday, which momentarily elated his family. Still, he could barely get to the bathroom. The doctor suggested fluids and crackers.

“‘I told her, ‘I’m not sure you’re getting the picture, Dr. Levitzky,’ ” Mr. Staunton said. “‘I can’t even get him to sit up. I don’t know how you expect me to get food into him.’ ”

Later, a slight touch would make him scream. “Around his nose was gone blue,” Mr. Staunton said. “Down his body side was gone blue.”

At that point, Dr. Levitzky told them to return to the emergency room. They supported him as he walked to the car. “All he said was, ‘Can I please have a wheelchair when I get there?’ ” Ms. Staunton recalled.

In the intensive care unit, his parents tried to mask their worry, Mr. Staunton chatting lightly. But Ms. Staunton noticed her son’s eyes following her. “He said, ‘Mom, my toes are really, really cold,’ ” she said.

After extending an arm for blood to be drawn, “he thanked them when they were finished,” Ms. Staunton said.

He had to be put on a ventilator. Just before he was sedated, Ms. Staunton said, “They told him, ‘We need to figure some stuff out. There are some marks on your body, and you need a little bit of help breathing, so we’re just going to intubate you and it’ll be fine.’ ” First, though, they checked his mental status.

“Do you know what date it is?”

“I know it’s March,” Rory answered.

“Who’s the president of the United States?”

He answered: “Barack Obama.”

His mother smiled.

“Ah,” she said, “but Rory, who is going to be the next one?”

“Barack Obama,” he said.

As the next two days passed, doctors tried anything that might halt the shutdown of Rory’s organs. “I can’t say enough about the I.C.U.,” Ms. Staunton said.

Relatives and a priest gathered bedside, talking of Irish football and tomfoolery and politics. Perhaps, one doctor whispered in a fleeting, hopeful aside, Rory might get away with losing his toes and nose. His skin blackened. He passed no urine. His blood would not clot. His heart had to be restarted twice. Three specialists who chronicled Rory’s decline on his intensive care chart each noted that on Thursday night, when he was sent home from the emergency room, he had a fever and significant signs of infection in his blood.

On Sunday night, Dr. Mayer Sagy, who had not seen Rory on his first visit to the hospital but spent the weekend struggling to keep Rory alive, told the Stauntons that the team had been unable to resuscitate him a third time.

“I said to him, ‘I brought him here to you the other night and you sent him home,’ ” Ms. Staunton said.

“He said, ‘You have every right to be angry.’ ”

More than anything, the Stauntons said, NYU Langone owes an honest accounting of what happened.

Racked with loss, they and others remembered Rory as an unflinching champion of schoolyard underdogs.

“Above all,” Ms. Staunton said, “we know that Rory would want no other child to go through what he went through.”

Copyright The New York Times

For more information visit www.rorystaunton.com.

The Month’s Mind -- A letter to Rory, remembering a laughing boy with us no more

Rory Staunton

The Irish religious ritual of a “month’s mind”, exactly a month after a departed has passed is a beautiful if sad occasion to remember a beloved.

So this is for my nephew 12-year-old Rory Staunton, now in the arms of the angels after tragically dying from a toxic infection in a New York hospital on April 1st.

Rory, we miss you so much.

Every morning I awake and wonder if the empty feeling will ever subside, if it all really happened that one so vibrant and beautiful should pass so unexpectedly leaving so many broken hearts.

Alas, it has.

The days have been tough for us Rory, the nights even tougher.

What your parents,Orlaith and Ciaran have endured I will never know, except they and your wonderful sister Kathleen have hearts so broken it is hard to see them ever heal.

Yet they are magnificent, trying their very best every day to keep going despite the most horrible blow possible.

The memories still cascade, so special, so sad, so unreal that we won’t see your big red head of hair come bouncing into our lives again, full of the latest breaking news from CNN or the science project you are working on, or the plane you want to fly or the car you want to drive or the dream you want to live or the cause you want us to take up.

I almost called you to say make sure you watched the last flight of the space shuttle to JFK last week when it came in perched on top of a mighty Jumbo 747.

You would have told me everything about how  the jumbo was able to carry such a massive load. You were always so comfortable in the sky.

You left an indelible mark young man. President Obama, President Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are among those hundreds who have written to your parents saying how deeply they feel for them.

Family and friends here in America and Ireland have been wonderful Rory, you have brought out the very best in everyone.

I know a family where sisters reconciled after reading about your death, deciding that they could not sustain the bitter word when life is so fleeting.

I saw an incredibly decent act when the immigration officer at Dublin readily stamped your passport one more time when you traveled home to Ireland with us on your final flight.

A Rory circle of virtue I thought at the time.

That’s a little part of your legacy Rory, and there will be much more to come.

You were a pathfinder. I remember last summer when we spent the weekend in rural Pennsylvania and I got you and everyone else totally lost trying to find the road home.

It was pitch black and I was afraid to admit I was scared, we had wandered so far off the beaten path.

You alone, so mature as always, found the way back to our friend’s house deep in the woods as if you had a GPS in your head.

Now we need you to lead the way again for all of us, to help us cope.

Oh and Rory, a little boy was born this week to your first cousin Danielle in Ireland. 

His name is Fionn Rory Muldoon after you.

Someday I will teach him about you and tell him what a difference you made and what a special boy you were.

You will live on in him and others always.

Until we meet again, Rory, and I know we will, I love you and miss you so much.

Your Uncle Niall