Kish cath lab on pace to treat 200

Rob Winner – rwinner@kcchronicle.com Registered nurse Heather Kalin, of Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb, holds a balloon catheter which is used for angioplasty of the coronary arteries. The hospital has begun performing nonsurgical procedures in which a catheter is threaded through a patient's arteries so doctors can find, diagnose and treat narrow spaces or blockages.

E-mail this story

Print this story

Share

DeKALB — It was the middle of the night on Monday, June 15 and Jim Marszalek decided he needed to act. The 47-year-old Hinckley resident had been feeling chest pains since shortly after dinner, he said, but went to sleep thinking it was heartburn.

Marszalek and his wife decided to drive to Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb, from where they assumed he'd be transferred if they learned he was having the heart attack they feared.

But he arrived at KCH and was immediately taken to the facility's six-week old catheterization lab.

"It had just opened up," Marszalek said. "It was great. They were fully equipped and ready to handle everything."

In the two months that the catheterization lab has been up and running, doctors have stopped four heart attacks, said KCH Administrator Brad Copple. Three of the patients – one of whom was Marszalek – were admitted from the emergency room, he said, and one was an inpatient transfer.

"Time is what saves lives," said Asim Nisar, medical director of cardiovascular services at KCH. "I can't say that all of them would have died, but we stopped the heart attacks in the throes of heart attacks."

The Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board gave the hospital the green light April 21 to begin performing cardiac catheterizations — a nonsurgical procedure in which a catheter is threaded through a patient’s arteries so doctors can find, diagnose and treat narrow spaces or blockages. The first of the procedures was done May 7, doctors said.

Before the DeKalb cath lab was open, patients suffering from heart attack symptoms were transferred to one of three regional hospitals.

"National statistics indicate that it takes about 180 minutes, from the time a patient walks in the door to when they are transferred to another hospital, to get that artery open," Nisar said. "Most heart attack patients survive, but about one in 10 will not."

The national standard of medical care recommends getting an artery unblocked within 90 minutes of a heart attack, which is a standard the cath lab team at KCH is now easily meeting, Nisar said. But the team's goal is to decrease that window to just 60 minutes.

Meeting both standards means having a dedicated hospital staff — cardiologists and nurses — available at a moment's notice, experts said.

"You can't have a cardiac lab that turns the lights off in the evening," Nisar said.

Other than cardiac catheterizations, staff in the cath lab perform minimally invasive intervention procedures and placement of devices, such as pacemakers.

Since the lab's opening in April, staff have realized the demand for all the procedures is great. Copple said KCH is on pace to treat at least 200 patients this year in the cath lab.

"Cardiac catheterization, as a service line, has become much more common in community hospitals," Copple said. "We always knew the need was here in the community ... We are ultimately providing a high-quality service that people are comfortable with."

The hospital does not perform open-heart surgery, but Nisar said modern technology has made the procedure rare.

"The open heart surgery need has declined in recent years from one in eight, to three in 1,000," he said, noting that the decrease is largely due to cardiac catheterizations.

After his cardiac procedure, doctors told Marszalek they had found a 100 percent blockage of one of his coronary arteries.

"If I had just gone to sleep, they said the chances are that I would have just died in my sleep," he said. "I'm grateful we were there."