5-year-old Luke, recovering from brain injury, returns home to Greenlawn after year in hospitals

On Tuesday, 5-year-old Luke Dunn will start kindergarten the same day as his triplet brother and sister.

It’s a milestone that his mother Stephanie Griffin wasn't sure would come.

Luke will continue a yearlong recovery from a traumatic brain injury after nearly drowning last year in the family’s Greenlawn pool. He finally arrived home Thursday after spending 11 months in Westchester County at Blythedale Children's Hospital in Valhalla.

"I think for every parent, the big milestone you look forward to is that first day of kindergarten where they get their school bag and they go on the bus and you say goodbye," Griffin said. "And so the fact that he is able to have that and we're able to have that memory with him was so important to me, thinking about where we were a year ago and not knowing if this would have been possible."

Last August, two days before the triplets’ fourth birthday, Griffin, 34, said she turned her back for a few seconds while caring for the other triplets in the family’s pool, when Luke slipped under water and bumped his head.

Griffin, who is an internal medicine doctor for Northwell Health, immediately pulled him out of the water and began chest compressions and CPR to revive him. But the near-drowning had sent him into cardiac arrest and briefly cut off oxygen to his brain. Luke was taken to Huntington Hospital and then spent about a month at Cohen Children's Medical Center where he was kept heavily sedated. The prognosis was dire.

"The doctors were not optimistic. They basically said to prepare for the worst, and we just took it day by day," Griffin said. "They didn't know if he would make a meaningful recovery and said to be prepared that he would not be the same Luke that I knew before the accident."

Griffin said she trusted her maternal instinct that her son would come home. He was transferred to Blythedale, where his team of doctors saw encouraging progress and asked to keep him in physical, occupational, feeding and speech therapy for nearly a year.

When Luke arrived, he had trouble holding his head up or sitting up. He was weaned off 10 different medications and now he’s learning to walk and speak again, said Julie Miezejeski, a nurse practitioner at Blythedale who worked with Luke during his recovery.

"With brain injuries, you never know how the recovery is going to be. Luke made progress in therapy the entire time he was here," Miezejeski said. "With Luke, they treated him like family and we were so happy and sad to see him leave."

Luke’s brother, Carter, and his sister, Joelle, didn’t realize the gravity of the situation, but missed their brother, Griffin said. The family celebrated Christmas in the hospital and the triplets' fifth birthday earlier this month, a week before he was released.

The hospital staff clapped as Luke left the hospital and he returned home for the first time to sleep in the same room as his brother and sister. The family celebrated the triplets' birthday and Luke's arrival with a sign welcoming "Lukey" back home.

Luke uses a wheelchair and a feeding tube in his stomach. He will continue therapy and attend kindergarten at AHRC in Bohemia, Griffin said.

"I am so relieved that he is the exact same boy that he was prior to the accident, in terms of his just genuine good nature," Griffin said. "He has the same smile, he has the same laugh, he has the same infectious energy about him that literally everyone at the hospital would come up to me and say, he is a special boy."

By John Asbury

john.asbury@newsday.comJohnAsbury

John Asbury is a breaking news and general assignment reporter. He has been with Newsday since 2014 and previously worked at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California.