How Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital's Hyperbaric Center rescued this diabetic's leg

Lennox Logan has stared down mortal danger before. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a hijacked jetliner barreled into the south tower of the World Trade Center about six floors above where Logan worked as a system administration supervisor for Morgan Stanley. He wasn’t in the building.

By some stroke of luck, he recalled, he was running late that morning. Heading toward his building along Church Street, within the radius of what would become ground zero, he was plugged into the music on his Walkman until he caught a glance of a woman dropping her purse. He unplugged his music to look at her, noticed her screaming, then looked in her direction, and saw the unthinkable.

To this day, he remains as much in awe as he was then over the fact that as a spry 30-something-year-old, fate allowed him to live.

The Takeaway 

• A minor injury in Lennox Longans' foot escalated into a severe infection, resulting in gangrene that threatened his leg and life. Medical intervention at Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital, including hyperbaric oxygen therapy, became crucial in saving his limb.
• The hopsital's wound care center has given patients like Lennox the specialized medical resources needed in combating his diabetic complications and healing his wounds.
• LIJVS officials recently celebrated the opening of a revamped Hyperbaric Center, complete with an additional changing room, new art display, and more. 

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“I feel like there’s an angel on my side,” he said. 

But now, as a 55-year-old diabetic, the threat wasn’t outside bearing down destruction, but inside him, silently eating his body away.

Roughly two years ago, Logan came to Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital lugging around a pus-ridden foot that, if not for the resources on hand and the quick-thinking care of its medical staff, would have taken his leg, and potentially his life.

Northwell podiatrist Dr. Mary Ann Bilotti, sizing up the foot, immediately knew the situation was critical. “We know that when he came to the emergency room, Mr. Logan had this massive infection which became a medical emergency,” she said.

Logan suffers from diabetic neuropathy of the foot, an all-too-common disease in people with diabetes, especially those who poorly manage their blood sugar levels, in which the body’s nerves become damaged and can lead to a host of life-altering symptoms. Logan, in his case, could not feel his feet.

The silent killer within

That loss of sensation, noted Bilotti, left Logan extremely vulnerable to wounding himself without realizing it. And for a man in his condition, even the slightest of injuries, like stepping on a pebble, if not treated properly, could get seriously infected.

And so it happened as predicted. What started as an open sore on the foot, known as a foot ulcer, soon enough got infected. Out of benign neglect, the infection was allowed to get progressively worse until gangrene had set in, in which festering bacteria was starving his leg of oxygen-rich blood, making his leg tissue shrivel and die.

At that point, explained Dr. Devendra Brahmbhatt, a vascular surgeon and the wound center’s medical director, the next medical step would be to go in, remove the gangrene from spreading up the body, and amputate the leg.

Barring any tools to stave off the infection and supercharge the wound-healing process, if Logan were to survive in any form, it would be as an amputee.

“I didn’t want anything cut off,” he said, his face scrunched in discomfort. “It’s me. I’m Lennox. I’m supposed to be me standing tall, walking tall.”

Fate, indeed, had other plans.

Roughly a year and a half later, Logan returned to the Franklin Square hospital — ambling around with the aid of a walking stick but free of the infection that would have robbed him of his leg — to stand alongside his doctors to celebrate the grand reopening of the Hyperbaric Center on Feb. 22.

It was a full-circle moment for Logan to come back to the remodeled room where he fought and succeeded in keeping his leg. Largely because of the aggressive wound-hyperbaric oxygen treatment offered there, designed to boost his leg’s ability to heal itself, was Logan able to walk away, literally, with all his limbs intact.

Well, almost his entire limb. A pinky toe was sacrificed in the surgery doctors noted, but no matter. As with Logan, so with the Hyperbaric Center, new life had been breathed into them.

“We went from a single changing room to two to provide a better patient experience,” said Nadelyn F. Backer-Ali, the program director at the Comprehensive Wound Care and Hyperbaric Center. “We placed new floors and repainted. An undersea mural was installed as a nod to the link between hyperbaric and scuba divers. Hyperbaric was originally treated for decompression sickness for divers.”

Reviving limbs, restoring lives

So, how does hyperbaric oxygen therapy work?

By lying prone inside a pressurized, capsule-like chamber, “patients, like Logan, breathe in 100 percent oxygen at greater-than-normal pressure,” Brahmbhatt explained. This helps restore oxygen-starved wounds and enhances the body’s regeneration with a roughly 80 percent success rate.

When Logan was finally discharged from the center late last month, he had undergone 59 sessions, or dives, in the hyperbaric chamber. This is on top of weekly wound care visits, where aides helped Logan methodically wrap and clean the wound until it had completely closed.

In light of the treatment, Logan says he’ll be able to regain full use of his foot, which is still padded in a supportive brace once his orthopedic shoes come in — custom-made to correct for any impaired balance in his stride and prevent new injuries to his feet. He couldn’t be happier with the results.

“Having lived through what I lived through and then coming here to heal my leg, I told myself: ‘You can do this. You can survive,’” said Logan.

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