Arthur Garrett: Adding another hospital to my list...

I've been in a lot of hospitals.As a 33-year-old medical student with two kids and a mortgage, my wife and I worked any odd jobs we could find. Among mine was running blood at night from the Red Cross to Mobile area hospitals.Later, as a resident, still on beans and rice but now with an M.D., I covered ERs and private practices during the owner's vacation all over the Gulf Coast.Still later, as a beginning solo pediatrician, a lot of nights and weekends were ERs of Tennessee and the Carolinas.Very much later, I went to any hospital that asked for help with a newborn, child or adult who had an urgent problem that might be genetic.All in all, it's maybe three dozen hospitals. They go from Biloxi to Darlington and Knoxville to Clay Pool Hill. Incidentally, the weekend of a Fishing Rodeo or NASCAR race was always a good time for the regular staff to bail and get a moonlighter in the pit.Well, last week my life list grew by one more, St. Francis in Charleston. Nowadays, however, these facilities are being seen from a horizontal instead of a vertical position.We were at the beach when my medicine went from the initial high, loading dose to the low, maintenance dose and, as a consequence, my heart went hoppity-skip. Hoping to get some advice such as take another pill and call me in the morning, I dialed the on-call for cardiology here in Kingsport.Instead, she said call 911 right now, and she must have known me because she said I'm calling back in five minutes to be sure you have done it. Edisto Beach has an award–winning EMS service, so there were six guys in the kitchen by the time she called back.The cardiac monitor screen looked more like the seismograph from the San Francisco earthquake than an EKG. Later, at the hospital, the ER doc very graciously avoided going "holy moly!" and calling in his friends to see it.He did say there's a normally electrically conducted beat, there's a pacemaker beat, there's a PVC, another PVC, a normal and so on. A premature ventricular contraction (PVC) is when the main pumping chambers of the heart go squeeze while still empty or only partially filled with blood. Obviously, such futile activity does not get juice to all parts of the goose.You can stand up to 10% of your heartbeats being PVCs, and some folks are like that all the time without noticing it. More than 30% starts causing damage, and mine was about 50%. That is, measured to be 80 beats per minute by the monitor detecting electrical impulses, the actual pulse you could feel in the artery of my wrist was 40.The two-toed sloth has a heart rate of 48 and above, so there was a reason I was moving slow. Also explained was the feeling that a herd of tiny kangaroos were having boxing matches in my chest.As is the case with all human conditions, I gradually got better on my own. But it was good to know they could handle it if my heart just went to nothing except hoppity-skips. Waiting to the reasonable hour of 5 a.m., we woke up a Charleston cardiologist who blessed our plan of an intermediate dose until I could get home, and here I am.Near the start of this dance, at the beach, EMS asked where I wanted to go. I named a few nearby towns and they said no sir, you're going to Charleston, we just wanted to know which hospital. Since I didn't care about that either, they told me to say St. Francis.There's one hospital there called St. Francis and another one called Roper, but they both seem to derive from a bequest by a Colonel Roper in 1829. The place I visited opened its doors in 1882 as St. Francis Xavier Infirmary, the first Catholic hospital in South Carolina. Construction began in 1850 so there seems to have been some interruption in its building.Both Roper and Saint F have been venerable institutions in Charleston for a long time, but now they seem to be combined. Or were they already? I'm so confused.I'd like to ignore this musical chairs thing going on in health care until the dust settles, hopefully on a nice, neat, shiny United States of America National Health Service, with patient health as the goal and without the billion-dollars-a-year executives. Like every other civilized country has had for decades.Unified, like every other major service in this country, such as Army, Navy, Air Force, Interstate Highways, Weather Service, Air Traffic Control and so on. If you think that's communism, go tell the Marines they're communists.Arthur Garrett is a former ecologist and educator, retired geneticist and pediatrician. You can email him at doctorg23@yahoo.com.Last week my life list of hospitals grew by one more, St. Francis in Charleston. Nowadays, however, these facilities are being seen from a horizontal instead of a vertical position.