It has been a long road to recovery for Chris Carillo, but on Monday night he returned to East Hampton Town Hall to meet with the town trustees, for whom he serves as attorney, almost four months after a dangerous bout with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. As its name suggests, MRSA is resistant to the antibiotic methicillin as well as other antibiotics in the penicillin family.
At the trustees’ July 28 meeting, the governing body had passed a resolution appointing Richard Whalen, who had previously served as its attorney, to fill in for Mr. Carillo on a temporary basis. Mr. Carillo had undergone emergency surgery, Francis Bock, the trustees’ clerk, said at the time. While he was recovering well, the clerk said, he would be on an extended leave.
More recently, Mr. Carillo, whose private practice is in Montauk, revealed the severity of his health challenge in a blog post on his firm’s website.
“I was born with a congenital heart defect called a bicuspid aortic valve and an aortic coarctation,” he wrote. “I have had a long and complex history of heart procedures, including open heart surgeries in 1986, 2006, and 2008,” and, in 2016, a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement, or TAVR procedure.
Over Independence Day weekend, he told The Star this week, he noticed, while speaking with his wife, that “I was slurring and couldn’t form words correctly.” This had happened 10 years earlier, he said, during a bout with endocarditis, a bacterial infection of the inner lining of the heart and heart valves. From that experience, and now with a high fever, “I knew right away it was a bad situation,” he said.
Mr. Carillo, who is 41, believes that he contracted MRSA through an untreated cut on his finger sustained while fishing. “We put the wheels in motion
to get to the new emergency room” in East Hampton, he said, and then to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, and, finally, NYU Langone’s Cardiac I.C.U. in Manhattan, “where we knew we needed to be.”
He does not recall much of the first days, he wrote, but it had taken around 40 hours of shuttling through emergency rooms and “cutting through the medical world’s red tape” to get there. Several of his previous surgeries had taken place at NYU Langone, he wrote, calling it “the one place we knew that could save my life.”
Many sleepless nights followed as NYU’s specialists worked to pinpoint and treat the “untreatable infection.” It became apparent, Mr. Carillo wrote, “that the infection, as infections tend to do in heart patients, or any patient with foreign hardware in their body, had found its way onto my heart and aorta and we were rapidly losing the battle.” On July 15, “after a particularly long night and another round of M.R.I.s, I was informed the surgeon team had ‘cleared their schedule’ and I was headed for emergency open surgery.”
He described a torturous ordeal and being “physically the weakest I’ve ever been.” The odds were long, he wrote, as the dangerous, exploratory, emergency surgery approached. “Sitting next to the surgeon’s table, I had a brief last moment with one of the surgeons,” he wrote. “I recall telling her ‘I hope you ate your Wheaties’ and ‘you got this — I have children to raise and I’m going to make it.’ “ Mr. Carillo’s children are 3 and 1.
The eight-hour surgery was successful. The surgeons Jamie Eridon and Mathew Williams, and their team, “meticulously cleared, cleaned, and scraped the infection from my heart and then replaced and rebuilt my ascending and descending aorta and aortic valve,” he wrote. He woke to the sight of Kelsey Carter, a nurse, friend, and “much-need
ed friendly face in my most challenging and vulnerable of moments.” He would spend another week in the Cardiac I.C.U. before returning to Montauk.
Recovery has been “long and challenging, physically and mentally,” he told The Star. His sternum, following the latest experience and the multiple open-heart surgeries that preceded it, has yet to fully heal, he said, hindering activities like golfing, surfing, fishing, and holding his children. “But the heart itself is doing good,” he said.
Along with the medical professionals who cared for him, in his blog post Mr. Carillo thanked his parents, wife, and children, his law colleagues, and “the countless friends, family, colleagues, community, and church members who supported my family and me in so many ways and who prayed for us when every prayer mattered. It is during these difficult times,” he wrote, “that small-town Montauk shines the brightest.”
He is “coming back to life,” he told The Star, and is “putting some time in at the office, as much as I can.” His heart defect has been a lifelong challenge, one he would typically “tackle and move on,” he said, but the latest incident was “an entirely different monster.”
In the main meeting room at Town Hall on Monday, Mr. Bock said that “we have a surprise visit tonight from our attorney. . . . It’s so great to see you, Chris.”
“It’s great to be back and be seen again by the trustees,” Mr. Carillo said. “It’s been a long summer for myself and my family.” He would soon return, he said to applause.
“We’re looking forward to it,” Mr. Bock said.
“I am so fortunate to live and raise my family in this town and I have so much to live for,” Mr. Carillo wrote in the blog post. “We all do. It’s been a long and painful journey and I’m excited and grateful for these next chapters as a father, husband, law practitioner, and member of this community.”
