Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the 90s, James Forbes says he’s glad he didn’t have to travel out of town in order to have his angioplasty surgery.
Doctors diagnosed the 71-year-old retired Thunder Bay Police Service officer with Parkinson’s disease in 1996, two years after he retired from the force. He said he never had much health problems but in January, he went to see his doctor complaining of chest pains from what he thought was gas.
It turned out he needed angioplasty surgery on his heart and a month later, he was under the knife for the first time in his life.
"I have Parkinson’s disease and I don’t travel well," Forbes said. "I used to be on the board for the Parkinson’s disease Association Foundation but I couldn’t travel anymore. It’s nice to have that kind of surgery available here."
What took Forbes by surprise was the way the doctor and nurses interacted with each other. They used each other’s first names and kept everything as relaxed as possible. He said that went a long way in making him more comfortable in an already stressful situation.
"The doctor came in and it was Mark this and Mark that and I thought ‘I like this’," he said. "As you can imagine my life changed in a heartbeat. Without the healthcare professionals, my destiny was certain."
Forbes wrote a letter to Mark Henderson, the director of Interventional Cardiology at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, to thank him for the good work he had done and to tell him how much he respected his professionalism.
That letter won Forbes an invite to share his story at the grand opening of the second cardiac catheterization laboratory at the hospital on Wednesday.
The $12 million lab will help to treat a greater number of patients in a shorter amount of time.
Henderson said the new lab came in just time. Normally the amount of patients who come in slows down in the summer but instead he’s seen an increase, mostly because of the hotter than usual weather.
"The problem that we were facing with one room was that we had long waiting lists," Henderson said. "We were working very long hours, which is inefficient and it’s tiring on the staff. Also, if you are doing a procedure and that takes two hours and an emergency comes in there is nothing you can do. Now with two rooms we can almost certainly get one room available within 30 minutes."
The new lab was named the J. Armand Bombardier Foundation in honour of the $500,000 contribution to the project from Bombardier Transportation.
