Nurse mom heard her son fall in the backseat and raced to the hospital without looking back — the toughest choice became his lifeline
Sometimes a parent is forced into situations where every moment feels difficult and even a second matters. Every choice feels weighed by “what if.” These are the moments that test instinct, decision-making, and courage all at once. Maria Carlin, from Long Island, still remembers when a fun evening became a horrifying one. The sound of her 4-year-old son’s breathing was like air squeezing through a straw, per a report by ABC7 NY on November 20, 2025.
The day had been great with fun around the water, the kind of easy summer any family would look forward to. Then, Jack went to bed with a croupy cough, which seemed an ordinary issue. But within hours, everything changed. Maria, a nurse by profession, heard the shift first. A squeak, almost like a tiny mouse. Then the frightening realization that her son was struggling for every bit of air. “All of a sudden it sounded like he was breathing through a coffee straw,” she recalled.
And that was not it! Within seconds, she heard Jack stop breathing and go into cardiac arrest. “I just heard him fall forward in his car seat,” Maria said. They were already on the road, and now she had to choose what no parent should ever face: pull over and try CPR immediately, or continue driving and reach the closest hospital as soon as possible. “Do I continue driving,” she asked herself, “Knowing that every minute that passes is another minute that I'm getting closer to permanent brain damage?” She kept going. “I remember God just saying, 'Don’t look back at him, you can’t handle this right now,'” she said.
The drive to Huntington Hospital took nine minutes, the longest nine minutes for any mother. That time with her child silent behind her, every second stretching into something unbearable and painful. She leaned on the horn as she pulled up, signaling the urgency before racing him inside. The Northwell doctors and nurses took over immediately. They got Jack breathing again. “We owe them everything,” Maria said.
After stabilizing him, he was transferred to Cohen Medical Center for further evaluation to understand why it all happened. That’s where doctors discovered the cause behind the terrifying incident, a rare congenital condition called laryngeal cleft. In this disorder, the trachea and esophagus don’t separate, allowing food and liquid to slip into the airway. It is something that affects only about 1 in 10,000 to 20,000 live births. As per the research done on ‘Laryngeal Clefts’ by Russell De Jong, Marc H. Hohman, and Clay Farahani, published in the National Library of Medicine in June 2025, the symptoms often look like everyday issues such as coughing, choking, or recurrent croup. The condition can be hard to diagnose. Physicians typically rely on imaging studies and endoscopy to identify the problem, with treatment ranging from conservative care to surgical repair depending on its severity.
Northwell Pediatric Airway Surgeon Dr. Lee Smith noted that many children show similar warning signs. “Most of them present with recurrent croup or chronic cough,” he explained. “Children will sometimes have difficulty swallowing thin liquids.” For Maria, the diagnosis brought answers but also clarity about just how close they came to losing Jack. He underwent surgery to repair the cleft. Today, Jack is recovering, breathing steadily, eating comfortably, and returning to the life a 4-year-old deserves.
For sure, the horrifying moments from that night still linger, but now there is gratitude, for life, for the instincts that carried Maria through the longest nine minutes of her life, for the medical teams who saved her son’s precious life, and for the chance to help others recognize when something isn’t right.