We Need Awareness
14 December 2004
My story is not much different from the others, but I think it will be cathartic to share it.
It was Friday morning and it was the ususal rush to get my kids off to school. I was supposed to drive my daughter to a field trip they were having at school that morning, and my mind was on a hundred things.
My mother called to tell me that my father was on his way to work early in the morning and suffered severe chest pain so he called an ambulance from his car which took him to a local hospital. She had spoken to the doctor who said he was "stable" and she wanted me to call the doctor, because I lived out of town and was a doctor myself, so I would understand what they said.
After driving to school and to the field trip I came home and called the emergency room. The doctor told me my father had severe pain unresponsive to morphine, a normal ekg and no response to maalox (for gastrointestinal pain). He summed it up by saying that really he was fine, and just having an anxiety attack.
I believed the physician. After all I was not there in person to asses the situation. My parents had been under a lot of stress as they were dealing with my elderly grandmother, who was at times having dementia and trying to get her into a new nursing home.
My father sold luggage for a living. He was always lifting heavy pieces into and out of his car. He had been complaing of back pain and was given pain pills and told the pain came from lifting.
A year earlier, he had been "worked up" by a cardiologist who gave him only a stress test saying his coronary arteries were just fine.
The kicker of all of this; My grandmother, his mother, had had a ruptured aortic arch aneruysm. She nearly died, but was diagnosed by astute doctors, helicoptered to University of Pennsylvania, and survived surgery.
So, at the end of the conversation with the doctor, I mentioned my fathers mother had had a dissection. He had not asked about this. In fact, none of the doctors my father saw the year before thougt this was an important part of his medical history. None of them screened him for an aneruysm.
And when I asked the emergency room physician if they could do a transesophageal echocardiogram on my father, he said, "what is that?" and then when I explained what it was ( a diagnostic test for and aortic aneurysm) he proceeded to say "I don't know if they have that here."
My father died just about 2 hours after that conversation. It had been six hours he sat in the emergency room with severe crushing pain, no findings of a heart attack, and no diagnosis of an aortic aneruysm.
As a physician, I am angered that the emergency room physician did not think of an aneurysm. As a daughter, I am forever forward without the physical closeness of my father.
I urge everyone who has had a relative with an aortic anerysm to have a screening test. I also urge everyone to support the worthy cause of educating physicians and the public about this preventable cause of death.
Discussion, comments, or questions: Beth H. Lertzman, MD
© Copyright 2004 Beth H.
Lertzman
All Rights Reserved - Fair Use
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