Five More Minutes: How an Ellis Education Shaped Carolina Vélez ’06’s Advocacy Journey
Carolina Vélez ’06 remembers the last family vacation as a picture-perfect escape. She and her husband, Adam, traveled to a Western Mexico beach town, with sixteen family members—parents, sister Nicole Vélez ’00, cousins, and friends. The setting felt impossibly secure: a gated peninsula with immaculate grounds, attentive staff. Each day, they rotated between beach clubs, riding golf carts under cloudless skies. By every measure, it was idyllic.
On the final afternoon, gathered at a shallow, covered children’s pool, Carolina’s four-year-old daughter Paloma asked, “Five more minutes, Mommy?”
Carolina said yes.
Moments later, screams shattered the calm. In what appeared to be the safest corner of the resort—a one-foot-deep baby pool—Paloma was critically injured by an improperly secured drain cover. There was no immediate emergency shutoff. By the time staff reached maintenance below the pool, the damage was done.
Within hours, Carolina was in an operating room in Mexico being told her daughter might not survive—and that if she did, she would need to leave the country immediately. Emergency surgery, frantic calls, and a medivac flight later, Paloma arrived at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh septic. Over the following weeks, she endured multiple surgeries, ten days intubated, and forty-four days inpatient. Paloma lost nearly all of her small intestine.
Today, Paloma survives on twelve hours of Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN) each night, delivered through a permanent central line. She attends school, plays with cousins, and reconnects to the line each evening.
For many families, survival would have been the end of the story. For Carolina, it was just the beginning. Those five minutes, seemingly ordinary, have marked the beginning of a journey that daily tests Carolina’s resilience and has redefined her life’s work.
Advocacy for Safety and Awareness
“You go somewhere beautiful, somewhere that feels perfectly maintained, and you assume it’s safe,” Carolina says. “Now the first thing I look for at a pool is the drain. Where’s the shutoff? Is it compliant?”
What Carolina has learned since is that Paloma’s injury was not the result of an obscure or newly discovered hazard. The dangers of pool drain suction entrapment have been recognized for decades. In 2007, U.S. Congress passed the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act after the granddaughter of Secretary of State James Baker died in a similar incident. The law requires anti-entrapment drain covers and additional safety protections in public pools and spas. Yet children are still being injured and killed.
Oversight remains inconsistent, and enforcement varies—particularly outside the United States. The hazard is well known and preventable. In Paloma’s case, the system involved was reportedly manufactured by a U.S. company and installed at a luxury resort catering largely to American families, where safety is assumed. The resort is backed by one of Mexico’s most powerful corporate entities.
“If it weren’t for quick action by our family and medical professionals, luck, a supportive community, and a very strong young girl, Paloma would not be here,” Carolina says.
“I’m not going to sit around,” she says. “If I see something broken, I want to fix it—not just for Paloma, but for the next family.”
The Power of an Ellis Education
The family is pursuing legal action, but Carolina’s broader goal is prevention and accountability. She is actively working to bring greater visibility to the risks of suction entrapment—sharing Paloma’s story with fellow Ellis alumnae to raise awareness among families and collaborating with national and international journalists, to help elevate the issue. Her aim is simple: clearer oversight, stronger enforcement, and informed parents who know what questions to ask before their children enter the water.
“If this can happen in a place that looks perfect,” she says, “it can happen anywhere.”
Advocacy for Innovation
Advocacy for Innovation
Because small intestine transplants carry significant risk and limited long-term success, Carolina refuses to accept that current medicine defines Paloma’s future. She has sought second opinions at leading pediatric institutions, connecting with specialists across the country and world, even exploring experimental research in organoids and stem-cell-based tissue engineering—even in Japan and the Netherlands.
“I want every expert to know her,” she says. “If someone is working on something that could help her, we will find them. I will take her anywhere.”
Her approach is strategic and relentless, fueled by the analytical and problem-solving skills she honed at Ellis and further shaped through her professional work. She builds networks, asks for introductions, studies the science, and refuses to be intimidated by credentials. “Our job is to advocate for her,” she says.
Advocacy Within the System
Advocacy Within the System
Some of Carolina’s fiercest advocacy has taken place not in research labs, but in hospital hallways. She pushed for trauma-informed psychiatric support, questioned procedures that seemed unnecessarily harsh, and demanded alternatives.
“When you’re up against experts, it’s hard,” she says. “But I know my child. And I don’t want her to feel unnecessary pain—physically or emotionally.”
Her work has extended to other families as well. When a small hospital pantry lost funding, Carolina and her family launched Paloma’s Pantry to provide meals for parents beside their children’s bedsides. She is working with University of Pittsburgh engineers to redesign ostomy bags and partnered with philanthropic groups to improve pediatric physical therapy equipment.
The Power of an Ellis Education
Through it all, Carolina credits Ellis for instilling the confidence to speak up, to pursue solutions, and to rely on a network of women who can amplify change. “Ellis taught me to trust my voice,” she says. “To walk into a room and say, ‘This is wrong.’ The alumnae network shows that if every woman reaches out her hand, almost anything is possible.”
Paloma is a regular little girl who experienced something terrible. “She had four perfectly healthy years,” Carolina says. “She remembers that life. Our job is to give her the most normal, joyful childhood we can.”
Each night at 7:00 p.m., when the house quiets and the TPN line clicks into place, Carolina begins another shift of vigilance. It is exhausting, relentless, and love in its most determined form.
“One day,” she says, “I want to tell her—we fought for you. And we didn’t stop.” And she hasn’t.
About Carolina Vélez ‘06
Carolina Vélez serves as Chief Operating Officer for the Federal Civilian business at Microsoft. She holds a JD in Alternative Dispute Resolution from Cardozo School of Law, an MSPPM in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, and a B.S. in Decision Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Carolina shares her story to raise awareness about preventable pool injuries and their impact on families, and she encourages any Ellis connections with expertise in stem cell research or related fields who might be able to help her daughter Paloma to reach out. She lives in Shadyside with her husband, Adam, daughter, Paloma, and son, Enzo.
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