By SALLY GOLDENBERG
First gas, then milk, now ambulances.
The city is raising the cost of an ambulance ride - with transports for the most critical patients going up to $850 per ride - as part of Mayor Bloomberg's orders to slash costs to raise revenue and plug future budget holes.
Basic Life Support rides will increase to $515 from $475; Advanced Life Support will jump to $750 from $600 and Advanced Life Support for the most critical patients will go up to $850 from $700,
FDNY Commissioner Nicholas
Scoppetta told a City Council Public Safety Committee hearing Monday.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Paramedic accused of stealing from patient
Cops arrested a Pasco County paramedic accused of stealing money from a patient's wallet while transporting the man to a hospital, reports the St. Petersburg Times.
Joshua Vitori, 26, was arrested on a charge of grand theft.
The Pasco County personnel director says he plans to resign from his job today.
Here's the story: Vitori went by ambulance to a home in Zephyrhills, where a man was having chest pains. The man's wife handed his wallet to a paramedic to retrieve his insurance card.
A few minutes later, the man was asked for a list of medications and was handed his wallet back, the report says.
That's when he discovered the money — $300 — missing.
Poor patient got taken for a ride.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
When a heart attack goes undiagnosed
By Robert Davis, USA TODAY
Editor's Note: On October 25, 2006, USA TODAY published an article entitled "When a Heart Attack Goes Undiagnosed" regarding the emergency medical care received by James Pettry of Lafayette, Indiana, prior to his death in April 2006. The article may have conveyed the impression that Edward Seall, an emergency room physician who treated Pettry, failed to detect or diagnose a heart attack (myocardial infarction) during Pettry's emergency room visit the day before his death. That is not the case. Seall ran several tests for myocardial infarction and other acute heart problems, and all of the tests were negative. Pettry was later discharged and died suddenly the next day. An autopsy requested by the Pettry family concluded that the cause of death was severe occlusive coronary atherosclerosis, or severely blocked arteries in the heart, and that there was "no evidence" of myocardial infarction or necrosis (cell and tissue death). The story could have used more precise medical terminology in defining the cause of death.
When chest pain woke James Pettry early one morning this spring, his wife, Mary, found him sitting on their bed, short of breath and sweating profusely. She dialed 911.
In the five minutes it took for an ambulance to reach their home in Lafayette, Ind., on April 28, the seriousness of her husband's condition hit Mary. "I thought he was having a heart attack," she says.
The paramedic, who gave Pettry oxygen and aspirin and then used an electrocardiogram machine to examine the heart's electrical function, agreed. The ambulance crew whisked Pettry 3 miles to St. Elizabeth Medical Center.
The doctor in the emergency room, Edward Seall, disagreed with the paramedic. After running more tests, he sent Pettry home nearly five hours later, saying Pettry just had anxiety. The patient was advised to follow up with his doctors but to return if his chest pain became worse.
Pettry, 74, was dead the next day, one of thousands who perish each year when their heart attacks are undetected by doctors.
The retired salesman, a father and grandfather, died from severely clogged arteries while sitting in his easy chair within 24 hours of being discharged, according to an autopsy report.
In part because there is no foolproof test, one in 50 heart attack victims are mistakenly sent home by emergency room doctors, researchers from New England Medical Center in Boston reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2000. Other studies have documented higher rates of missed heart attack diagnosis.
Through his attorney, Jon Pinnick of Indianapolis, Seall stands by his diagnosis and says his patient died from chronic heart disease that had no connection to the symptoms that landed him in the ER.
"It's unfortunate about Mr. Pettry's death, and all concerned wish it hadn't happened," Pinnick says. "Obviously (Seall) feels sympathetic toward the family. But he does not view this as a missed myocardial infarction (heart attack). "We don't believe the care he was provided was below the standard of care and is what led to his unfortunate demise." Mary Pettry says, "It seems like I lost somebody unnecessarily, like there could have been something done."
Going the extra step
Experts say she is right, that often more can be done. Nobody knows exactly how many people die from missed heart attacks every year, but doctors say the number is high despite advances in diagnostics and refinement of medical protocols. "It's tens of thousands of potential cases across the United States each year," says Joseph Ornato, professor and chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, who has researched the emergency care of heart attacks. "Even in the best of hands, you can easily miss cases. This is a very perilous area."
And costly. The monetary risks are huge for physicians. A missed heart attack diagnosis, research has shown, brings the highest malpractice payout of all conditions. The overwhelming majority of malpractice settlements for heart attacks come from errors in diagnosis, according to data from Jury Verdict Research, which tracks and analyzes nationwide trends in personal-injury litigation.
Over the past decade, the median jury verdict for heart attack malpractice lawsuits has been $941,000. The lowest was an Oklahoma judgment for $81,000 in 1996, and the highest, $9 million, came in an Illinois case in 1997.
The Pettry family is considering a lawsuit, but his adult children say what they want most is for other lives to be saved.
The story of Pettry's final hours — and how his death spurred a friend to fight to survive a similar situation — illustrates both the difficulties that doctors face and the actions that can be taken by patients and their advocates.
Stricken before dawn
When medics rolled Pettry into the medical center just after 5 a.m. on April 28, according to medical records, Seall, the doctor on duty in the emergency room, was told the patient with a history of heart problems had suffered "chest pain on and off for the past 24 hours."
Seall ordered the standard tests. The following is from hospital records provided by the Pettry family:
According to the medical records, after seeing all of the test results, Seall ordered Pettry to take an anti-anxiety drug, Ativan, which had made him feel better in the emergency room, as needed at home. He told Pettry to follow up with his primary physician or cardiologist within two to three days. And he advised him to come back to the emergency department if his symptoms became worse.
As he was getting dressed to leave the hospital just before 10 a.m., Pettry had more chest tightness. Notes in the medical record say: Doctor notified, no further orders and patient instructed to return for any problems. "I know what the record says," Pinnick says. "There was a shift change, and at the time that was recorded, (Seall) was not the emergency room physician. Seall was off at 7 a.m., so I don't know if it's a reference to a resident or what, but it wasn't Seall."
In an e-mail response to questions, the hospital said the nurse could have notified "any doctor on staff in the emergency room at that time." The hospital would not comment further on the case, referring all other questions to Seall.
Seall wrote in his "patient instructions for follow-up care," which Pettry signed at 9:55 a.m., "return to the ED (emergency department) if your symptoms get worse." "They dismissed him and told him to rest, and that is what he did," Mary Pettry says. But the next morning she awoke to find him in his favorite chair with the pains he had had for two days. "He said he had these tight chest pains again, but having spent time down at the hospital, we had no place to go but the same place," she says. "He said: 'I think they're going away. They're going to get better."
She went to feed the cat, Pebbles, but because her husband always brewed the coffee, she returned to ask him how many scoops to use. "I touched his arm the way you do when a person is asleep," she says. "His arm was cold, and he didn't have a pulse. I called 911, but when they came, they said it was too late. I knew that."
During the memorial service the following week at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Jim Pettry was remembered as an astute and deeply religious man who developed a love for fishing while growing up in West Virginia.
"Jim was concerned for our world's future and the future of this congregation and thoughtfully sought out a vision and discernment of God's will for our future and worked faithfully toward that future," the Rev. Kevin Bowers told Pettry's friends and family. "He never quit caring about others and will have a positive impact on people's lives even beyond his years."
Two weeks after she attended Pettry's funeral, Connie Gustafson, a longtime friend of Pettry's daughter Deborah, found herself at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis with her husband, Rick. On a quiet Tuesday afternoon, he had suddenly felt weak, nearly fainted and broke out in a sweat. The pressure in his upper right chest felt like a previous heart problem that had required bypass surgery 11 years ago.
Despite the similarities and Gustafson's strong feeling that he was having another life-threatening problem with his heart, a cardiologist in the hospital, Irmina Gradus-Pizlo, came to a different conclusion.
'Nothing obvious'
After Gustafson had the same battery of tests Pettry had taken and doctors found no evidence of a heart attack, they went a step further. They admitted him to the hospital and performed more tests, including a stress test, putting Gustafson on a treadmill and monitoring his heart as the 59-year-old social worker was pushed to his physical limits.
"They could find nothing obvious," Connie says. "The cardiologist on call was dismissive. She said there was nothing to support the diagnosis that he had any kind of heart event."
But Connie says her husband "could feel that something was not right."
When no problems were found, doctors determined the uneasy feelings Gustafson had experienced were an "anxiety/panic attack," according to medical records electronically signed by Gradus-Pizlo. Gustafson, like Pettry, was given Ativan and "told he has anxiety attacks and to take a deep breath," the records state. Upon discharge, he was told "to return to the ER if any chest pain recurs."
The records show Gustafson was advised to follow up with his own doctor within four weeks, eat a heart-healthy diet, and take his cholesterol medicines and aspirin, among other medications.
Connie thought of Pettry. "It was heavy on my mind that this was exactly what Jim had gone through: not getting somebody to listen to him."
As the staff prepared to discharge Gustafson, he saw Barry Crevey, a cardiologist he had met through his social work, in the hallway. Crevey listened to Gustafson's story and explained that 25% of heart attacks may be "silent."
Considering Gustafson's history and the fact that both his parents had cardiovascular disease, the doctor suggested his arteries should be checked by threading a heart catheter into them, injecting dye and measuring the openings.
"When he told me his story, I'm thinking, 'This person needs a heart catheterization,' " Crevey says. "This is Cardiology 101. I would not have even bothered to do a non-invasive stress test."
A doctor intervenes
After he was discharged from the hospital, Gustafson became Crevey's patient and two days later had a cardiac catheterization, which, according to his medical records, found "severe, multivessel coronary disease."
Gustafson's medical record detailing the findings of the coronary angiography reads much like Pettry's autopsy report. Both major heart vessels and some of the 11-year-old bypass vessels were 90% to 100% blocked.
The arteries were cleared with stents and a drilling procedure, and Gustafson is now back at work with "a clean bill of health," Connie says.
"They were big arteries," she says, noting one of the arteries that was almost completely blocked — the left anterior descending artery — is sometimes called "the widowmaker" because of the deadly result when it gets clogged.
Gradus-Pizlo says, "In a patient with known disease, there is no question there are blockages there," but none of the blockages were putting Gustafson's life at immediate risk.
His heart was working fine with the reduced blood flow, which was confirmed by the fact that he passed the stress test, she says. "Even with those blockages, he had adequate blood supply. I'm not saying he doesn't have disease. He has severe disease. I didn't recommend therapy. I recommended aggressive medical management based on guidelines."
Though she agrees the blockages should have been opened once they were seen, she does not believe she misdiagnosed Gustafson. "I believe it is a difference of approach," Gradus-Pizlo says.
"This is a matter of clinical judgment."
Crevey's medical record of Gustafson's condition shows frustration with the initial diagnosis.
"He gave a vivid classic description of a major cardiac ischemic event," the report says, meaning an artery in his heart was blocked. In addition to his parents' heart disease, Gustafson's
"personal history began with a false-negative cardiac stress test" before his initial bypass surgery. "All of that was far too much to overlook, despite the 'normal' stress test," the report says.
Crevey says a doctor relying too much on tests instead of the patient's own story "is a classic dilemma in medicine."
"The tests are not perfect," he says. "I think the clinician must be super wary of worshiping at the altar of the tests. Unfortunately, that is often the case. They say the test here is negative and therefore you are OK, and that is the end of the story. It certainly happened with Mr. Gustafson."
In Crevey's opinion, based on his review of the record, Gradus-Pizlo's decision was a "serious misdiagnosis."
Many similar stories
Ornato, an expert on emergency room cardiac care, says stories such as Pettry's and Gustafson's represent the difficulties doctors face in diagnosing heart problems.
Over the past six years, studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and other journals have found a heart attack diagnosis is missed in 2% of heart attack patients seeking help in the USA's emergency rooms, 3% in Canada and 6% in the United Kingdom.
"It is the horns of the dilemma. On one hand, there are limitations to the diagnostic tools, and they are very real limitations," Ornato says. "The electrocardiogram is the first screening tool, and it's only going to pick up, on a good day, 70% to 75% of heart attacks."
He says new devices, including an experimental ECG that maps the heart and CT scanners that can look inside of clogged heart arteries, offer new hope for the future.
But he says patients and their advocates must sometimes push doctors who are not listening.
"If something doesn't feel right to them, they have the responsibility to express that," Ornato says. "It's the responsibility of the nurses and physicians to listen."
Prediman Shah, director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, says better listening might have saved Pettry.
"A 74-year-old is already a high-risk candidate," he says. "Then, having symptoms, that patient deserves a full evaluation in the hospital. No question. If he is admitted and treated, the risk of sudden death is dramatically reduced."
Mary Pettry wishes she had fought for more aggressive treatment of her husband's symptoms.
"You look back, and you know what you should have done," she says. "It was a great loss. He was such a good person to talk to."
Connie Gustafson, who won her own battle with breast cancer, says her husband's fight to survive reminded her "how vigilant you have to be in taking care of yourself in hospitals. The system is very precarious, and it is easy for mistakes to be made."
Editor's Note: On October 25, 2006, USA TODAY published an article entitled "When a Heart Attack Goes Undiagnosed" regarding the emergency medical care received by James Pettry of Lafayette, Indiana, prior to his death in April 2006. The article may have conveyed the impression that Edward Seall, an emergency room physician who treated Pettry, failed to detect or diagnose a heart attack (myocardial infarction) during Pettry's emergency room visit the day before his death. That is not the case. Seall ran several tests for myocardial infarction and other acute heart problems, and all of the tests were negative. Pettry was later discharged and died suddenly the next day. An autopsy requested by the Pettry family concluded that the cause of death was severe occlusive coronary atherosclerosis, or severely blocked arteries in the heart, and that there was "no evidence" of myocardial infarction or necrosis (cell and tissue death). The story could have used more precise medical terminology in defining the cause of death.
When chest pain woke James Pettry early one morning this spring, his wife, Mary, found him sitting on their bed, short of breath and sweating profusely. She dialed 911.
In the five minutes it took for an ambulance to reach their home in Lafayette, Ind., on April 28, the seriousness of her husband's condition hit Mary. "I thought he was having a heart attack," she says.
The paramedic, who gave Pettry oxygen and aspirin and then used an electrocardiogram machine to examine the heart's electrical function, agreed. The ambulance crew whisked Pettry 3 miles to St. Elizabeth Medical Center.
The doctor in the emergency room, Edward Seall, disagreed with the paramedic. After running more tests, he sent Pettry home nearly five hours later, saying Pettry just had anxiety. The patient was advised to follow up with his doctors but to return if his chest pain became worse.
Pettry, 74, was dead the next day, one of thousands who perish each year when their heart attacks are undetected by doctors.
The retired salesman, a father and grandfather, died from severely clogged arteries while sitting in his easy chair within 24 hours of being discharged, according to an autopsy report.
In part because there is no foolproof test, one in 50 heart attack victims are mistakenly sent home by emergency room doctors, researchers from New England Medical Center in Boston reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2000. Other studies have documented higher rates of missed heart attack diagnosis.
Through his attorney, Jon Pinnick of Indianapolis, Seall stands by his diagnosis and says his patient died from chronic heart disease that had no connection to the symptoms that landed him in the ER.
"It's unfortunate about Mr. Pettry's death, and all concerned wish it hadn't happened," Pinnick says. "Obviously (Seall) feels sympathetic toward the family. But he does not view this as a missed myocardial infarction (heart attack). "We don't believe the care he was provided was below the standard of care and is what led to his unfortunate demise." Mary Pettry says, "It seems like I lost somebody unnecessarily, like there could have been something done."
Going the extra step
Experts say she is right, that often more can be done. Nobody knows exactly how many people die from missed heart attacks every year, but doctors say the number is high despite advances in diagnostics and refinement of medical protocols. "It's tens of thousands of potential cases across the United States each year," says Joseph Ornato, professor and chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, who has researched the emergency care of heart attacks. "Even in the best of hands, you can easily miss cases. This is a very perilous area."
And costly. The monetary risks are huge for physicians. A missed heart attack diagnosis, research has shown, brings the highest malpractice payout of all conditions. The overwhelming majority of malpractice settlements for heart attacks come from errors in diagnosis, according to data from Jury Verdict Research, which tracks and analyzes nationwide trends in personal-injury litigation.
Over the past decade, the median jury verdict for heart attack malpractice lawsuits has been $941,000. The lowest was an Oklahoma judgment for $81,000 in 1996, and the highest, $9 million, came in an Illinois case in 1997.
The Pettry family is considering a lawsuit, but his adult children say what they want most is for other lives to be saved.
The story of Pettry's final hours — and how his death spurred a friend to fight to survive a similar situation — illustrates both the difficulties that doctors face and the actions that can be taken by patients and their advocates.
Stricken before dawn
When medics rolled Pettry into the medical center just after 5 a.m. on April 28, according to medical records, Seall, the doctor on duty in the emergency room, was told the patient with a history of heart problems had suffered "chest pain on and off for the past 24 hours."
Seall ordered the standard tests. The following is from hospital records provided by the Pettry family:
- An electrocardiogram. The first ECG done just minutes after Pettry arrived in the emergency room was "abnormal." When the test was repeated two hours later, the computerized device said "cannot rule out anterior infarct," a type of heart attack. Pinnick says such computerized findings "are not absolute, and when there are circumstances and clinical findings that kind of trump that, you can't make a diagnosis simply based on a computerized reading."
- A chest X-ray and a CT (computed tomography) scan. Both pictures gave doctors a virtual peek inside and showed Pettry did not have any life-threatening problems that sometimes mimic a heart attack, such as large blood clots in his lungs, bulging blood vessels or problems with organs in his chest.
- •Blood tests, called "cardiac markers" because they can indicate a heart attack, were normal.
According to the medical records, after seeing all of the test results, Seall ordered Pettry to take an anti-anxiety drug, Ativan, which had made him feel better in the emergency room, as needed at home. He told Pettry to follow up with his primary physician or cardiologist within two to three days. And he advised him to come back to the emergency department if his symptoms became worse.
As he was getting dressed to leave the hospital just before 10 a.m., Pettry had more chest tightness. Notes in the medical record say: Doctor notified, no further orders and patient instructed to return for any problems. "I know what the record says," Pinnick says. "There was a shift change, and at the time that was recorded, (Seall) was not the emergency room physician. Seall was off at 7 a.m., so I don't know if it's a reference to a resident or what, but it wasn't Seall."
In an e-mail response to questions, the hospital said the nurse could have notified "any doctor on staff in the emergency room at that time." The hospital would not comment further on the case, referring all other questions to Seall.
Seall wrote in his "patient instructions for follow-up care," which Pettry signed at 9:55 a.m., "return to the ED (emergency department) if your symptoms get worse." "They dismissed him and told him to rest, and that is what he did," Mary Pettry says. But the next morning she awoke to find him in his favorite chair with the pains he had had for two days. "He said he had these tight chest pains again, but having spent time down at the hospital, we had no place to go but the same place," she says. "He said: 'I think they're going away. They're going to get better."
She went to feed the cat, Pebbles, but because her husband always brewed the coffee, she returned to ask him how many scoops to use. "I touched his arm the way you do when a person is asleep," she says. "His arm was cold, and he didn't have a pulse. I called 911, but when they came, they said it was too late. I knew that."
During the memorial service the following week at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Jim Pettry was remembered as an astute and deeply religious man who developed a love for fishing while growing up in West Virginia.
"Jim was concerned for our world's future and the future of this congregation and thoughtfully sought out a vision and discernment of God's will for our future and worked faithfully toward that future," the Rev. Kevin Bowers told Pettry's friends and family. "He never quit caring about others and will have a positive impact on people's lives even beyond his years."
Two weeks after she attended Pettry's funeral, Connie Gustafson, a longtime friend of Pettry's daughter Deborah, found herself at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis with her husband, Rick. On a quiet Tuesday afternoon, he had suddenly felt weak, nearly fainted and broke out in a sweat. The pressure in his upper right chest felt like a previous heart problem that had required bypass surgery 11 years ago.
Despite the similarities and Gustafson's strong feeling that he was having another life-threatening problem with his heart, a cardiologist in the hospital, Irmina Gradus-Pizlo, came to a different conclusion.
'Nothing obvious'
After Gustafson had the same battery of tests Pettry had taken and doctors found no evidence of a heart attack, they went a step further. They admitted him to the hospital and performed more tests, including a stress test, putting Gustafson on a treadmill and monitoring his heart as the 59-year-old social worker was pushed to his physical limits.
"They could find nothing obvious," Connie says. "The cardiologist on call was dismissive. She said there was nothing to support the diagnosis that he had any kind of heart event."
But Connie says her husband "could feel that something was not right."
When no problems were found, doctors determined the uneasy feelings Gustafson had experienced were an "anxiety/panic attack," according to medical records electronically signed by Gradus-Pizlo. Gustafson, like Pettry, was given Ativan and "told he has anxiety attacks and to take a deep breath," the records state. Upon discharge, he was told "to return to the ER if any chest pain recurs."
The records show Gustafson was advised to follow up with his own doctor within four weeks, eat a heart-healthy diet, and take his cholesterol medicines and aspirin, among other medications.
Connie thought of Pettry. "It was heavy on my mind that this was exactly what Jim had gone through: not getting somebody to listen to him."
As the staff prepared to discharge Gustafson, he saw Barry Crevey, a cardiologist he had met through his social work, in the hallway. Crevey listened to Gustafson's story and explained that 25% of heart attacks may be "silent."
Considering Gustafson's history and the fact that both his parents had cardiovascular disease, the doctor suggested his arteries should be checked by threading a heart catheter into them, injecting dye and measuring the openings.
"When he told me his story, I'm thinking, 'This person needs a heart catheterization,' " Crevey says. "This is Cardiology 101. I would not have even bothered to do a non-invasive stress test."
A doctor intervenes
After he was discharged from the hospital, Gustafson became Crevey's patient and two days later had a cardiac catheterization, which, according to his medical records, found "severe, multivessel coronary disease."
Gustafson's medical record detailing the findings of the coronary angiography reads much like Pettry's autopsy report. Both major heart vessels and some of the 11-year-old bypass vessels were 90% to 100% blocked.
The arteries were cleared with stents and a drilling procedure, and Gustafson is now back at work with "a clean bill of health," Connie says.
"They were big arteries," she says, noting one of the arteries that was almost completely blocked — the left anterior descending artery — is sometimes called "the widowmaker" because of the deadly result when it gets clogged.
Gradus-Pizlo says, "In a patient with known disease, there is no question there are blockages there," but none of the blockages were putting Gustafson's life at immediate risk.
His heart was working fine with the reduced blood flow, which was confirmed by the fact that he passed the stress test, she says. "Even with those blockages, he had adequate blood supply. I'm not saying he doesn't have disease. He has severe disease. I didn't recommend therapy. I recommended aggressive medical management based on guidelines."
Though she agrees the blockages should have been opened once they were seen, she does not believe she misdiagnosed Gustafson. "I believe it is a difference of approach," Gradus-Pizlo says.
"This is a matter of clinical judgment."
Crevey's medical record of Gustafson's condition shows frustration with the initial diagnosis.
"He gave a vivid classic description of a major cardiac ischemic event," the report says, meaning an artery in his heart was blocked. In addition to his parents' heart disease, Gustafson's
"personal history began with a false-negative cardiac stress test" before his initial bypass surgery. "All of that was far too much to overlook, despite the 'normal' stress test," the report says.
Crevey says a doctor relying too much on tests instead of the patient's own story "is a classic dilemma in medicine."
"The tests are not perfect," he says. "I think the clinician must be super wary of worshiping at the altar of the tests. Unfortunately, that is often the case. They say the test here is negative and therefore you are OK, and that is the end of the story. It certainly happened with Mr. Gustafson."
In Crevey's opinion, based on his review of the record, Gradus-Pizlo's decision was a "serious misdiagnosis."
Many similar stories
Ornato, an expert on emergency room cardiac care, says stories such as Pettry's and Gustafson's represent the difficulties doctors face in diagnosing heart problems.
Over the past six years, studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and other journals have found a heart attack diagnosis is missed in 2% of heart attack patients seeking help in the USA's emergency rooms, 3% in Canada and 6% in the United Kingdom.
"It is the horns of the dilemma. On one hand, there are limitations to the diagnostic tools, and they are very real limitations," Ornato says. "The electrocardiogram is the first screening tool, and it's only going to pick up, on a good day, 70% to 75% of heart attacks."
He says new devices, including an experimental ECG that maps the heart and CT scanners that can look inside of clogged heart arteries, offer new hope for the future.
But he says patients and their advocates must sometimes push doctors who are not listening.
"If something doesn't feel right to them, they have the responsibility to express that," Ornato says. "It's the responsibility of the nurses and physicians to listen."
Prediman Shah, director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, says better listening might have saved Pettry.
"A 74-year-old is already a high-risk candidate," he says. "Then, having symptoms, that patient deserves a full evaluation in the hospital. No question. If he is admitted and treated, the risk of sudden death is dramatically reduced."
Mary Pettry wishes she had fought for more aggressive treatment of her husband's symptoms.
"You look back, and you know what you should have done," she says. "It was a great loss. He was such a good person to talk to."
Connie Gustafson, who won her own battle with breast cancer, says her husband's fight to survive reminded her "how vigilant you have to be in taking care of yourself in hospitals. The system is very precarious, and it is easy for mistakes to be made."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
