A patient's praise

Last Sunday morning Jean Tozer knew something was wrong, though not immediately.

Stricken with pains in her chest, she got out of bed and took an aspirin, hoping the discomfort went away. When it didn’t, it was off to Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, where a battery of tests showed she’d had a heart attack.

By the next day she was in the hospital’s cardiac catheterization lab, having four stents installed in her coronary arteries.

On Tuesday, still confined to a wheelchair, Tozer was praising the hospital for its efforts to add a second cardiac catheterization lab, thanks in part to a $150,000 donation made by the Fort William Rotary Club through its annual house lottery draw.

She’s just glad the operation was possible in her hometown, and looks forward to the day when no one needs to travel to far off destinations like Toronto for surgery.

“I think it’s very important because a lot of people here in Thunder Bay need this service,” she said. “I think we have to realize that we’re not in a big city, but we need to have big-city services because we serve a lot of Northwestern Ontario.”

According to figures released by the hospital, about 1,500 procedures have been completed since the original lab opened.

The addition of a second lab will provide near 24/7 emergency access for patients who arrive unexpectedly at the hospital’s doors, suffering from cardiac arrest with no time to spare to save their lives.

Mark Henderson, the director of interventional cardiology at the hospital, said the demand is particularly great in Northwestern Ontario, where heart disease and heart attacks are more prevalent than elsewhere in the province.

One lab just isn’t enough, he said, given the round-the-clock use of the initial lab.

“We have a back-up lab downstairs, which is adequate for taking pictures for diagnostic procedures,” he said, “but it’s not good enough to do angioplasty. About 50 per cent of our patients have to into the other lab, have their pictures taken and then come up to the angioplasty lab for the definitive procedure.

“That will change in July because we’ll have two state-of-the-art labs side-by-side with a common control room. So the care of the patients would then be pretty much seemless.”

Under the current structure, the second stage can take hours or even days, Henderson said.

Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation president Glenn Craig said about $500,000 still remains left to be raised in their capital campaign program, but he remains confident the money will be found to cover the cost of the second lab.

Tickets for the FWRC house lottery are $100 for a chance to win a $378,000 home in Sherwood Estates.