BY STEVE KRAUSE
The medical profession, like everything else, is constantly evolving. Fifty years ago, a heart attack was truly a heart attack. It was a sudden event that often left its victims dead at the moment of impact. For me, that reality hit home on Father’s Day 1967, when my next-door neighbor, Ray Berthiaume, died of one at the age of 46.
We know now that there is nothing sudden about the overwhelming majority of heart attacks. They happen because a certain set of circumstances, occluded arteries, get to the point where blood and oxygen cannot flow adequately enough to the heart. Now, we have stress tests, cardiac catheterizations and other procedures that enable doctors to detect the types of blockages that can prevent myocardial infarctions and save lives.
In 1991, my father had a triple bypass at Beth Israel Hospital. The procedure was still new enough that patients needing a bypass went directly to Boston to have one done.
But medicine is ever-improving. In 2016, you don’t necessarily have to have a bypass anymore if you have clogged arteries. Doctors can clean them out and insert a stent into the affected artery after to restore adequate blood flow. There are still certain circumstances where stents don’t work, or are not practical, and in such cases the entire coronary artery bypass graft (heretofore known as CABG) must be done.
Such was the case with me, on Jan. 22 of this year.
Plenty of “Boston snobs,” as I like to call them, acted as if I was signing my own death warrant by going anywhere other than the Hub to have the procedure done, but I chose the emergency room at the North Shore Medical Center’s Salem Hospital. My sister is a nurse in Salem’s intensive care unit and when you’re heading to the emergency room because of angina pains, it is a very good thing to have allies.
When Dr. David Roberts did my angiogram, and told me I needed a bypass, there was probably an hour or so where I could have arranged to be transferred to Mass. General or Beth Israel. Then, I met the chief of cardiac surgery, Dr. Ann Torin, and I liked her. So did my family. As a result, I chose to stay there and have the “CABG Times Three” in the relatively-new cardiac surgical unit.
There wasn’t just the excellence of the staff to consider, although I cannot say enough about the care I received there. There was my family. We’re talking January here. And on Jan. 18, Martin Luther King Day, when I had this bombshell dropped on me, I also considered the travel time between Lynn and Salem, as opposed to the vehicular gymnastics needed to get into Boston at rush hour, as well as the fact that inclement weather was always a possibility. That helped me make my choice too.
The presence of a cardiac surgical unit in Salem made the hospital unique. Not every hospital around here is equipped to perform these procedures, which is why I felt it a particular godsend to be cared for in the unit. Each room was equipped to handle an immediate post-surgical patient, meaning that there was no recovery room. You were transported from your room to surgery and back again.
Life, of course, goes on. The wonderful doctors, physicians’ assistants, techs and nurses who took care of me for the 12 days I stayed in the surgical unit have faded into my memory. But they’re not so far from my consciousness that, upon hearing that North Shore Medical Center might close the unit, I don’t feel for every one of them. Nor could I think anything else other than the reinforcement of a long-held belief that bean-counters are the bane of all our existences.
The reasons, as outlined in an April 19 Item story, are almost too ironic to be believable. According to North Shore Medical Center president Robert G. Norton, improvements in procedures such as angioplasty (the insertion of a stent), and better preventative care, has led NSMC, a Partners HealthCare subsidiary, to consider consolidating cardiac surgery at Mass. General.
If this happens, Partners will reinforce its growing reputation as a healthcare provider that does its best not to provide health care. First, the announcement of the total evisceration of Union Hospital; and now, this.
I really hope and pray that NSMC and Partners changes its mind and backs off this plan, both for the sake of the families whose lives have been made immeasurably easier by the cardiac surgical unit’s presence on the North Shore and the people who have made it such a wonderful place for first-class care.
Steve Krause can be reached at skrause@itemlive.com.