Defibrillators

“Sometimes, I can feel it in my brain.”The radical shift in her lifestyle “is a kind of death,” she told her listeners, “and I went through all the stages of grief for what I have lost.

Now I am resigned.”Risk factors Most of the risks seem to be a matter of common sense: smoking, obesity, high fat diet, high cholesterol and triglycerides, sedentary lifestyle, family history.Others are less obvious: genetic heart defects, metabolic deficits, and other factors an individual may not be able to control without medical intervention.Assessing personal risk The medical panel agreed that there is no single test that can definitively point out the markers in individual cases.Peter Halt, M.D., a radiologist at Mercy Mt.

Shasta, announced the acquisition of a new CT angiography machine so fast it can capture images of the heart in the rest period between beats.

It is also noninvasive.Because the test is not covered by insurance, Mercy will make it as low cost as possible, said Halt, so anyone can afford to have it done.

It has its limitations, too.

It won't show vascular narrowing caused by calcified plaque, for instance.

Other tests, taken together: blood panels, body mass index, blood pressure, etc., provide a broa...

Currently, the hospital has to transport patients to other labs for those types of treatments."The less amount of time we waste, the less amount of damage you have," Perez said.To keep everything in-house, MGH hired Dr.

Hamid Nawaz, who brings more than 14 years of experience in interventional, nuclear and clinical cardiology.Nawaz will be performing angioplasty and cardiac stent insertion, which Ann Vermilion, administrative director, said is a first for Grant County."MGH's decision to expand our cath lab department is due, in part, to the anticipated increase of angioplasty and cardiac stent procedures," she said.In addition to new staff and equipment, Perez said they are getting a state-of-the-art waiting room and there will be eight private recovery rooms.With a new paperless system, Perez said patients now would be able to check into the cath lab, as opposed to going through admissions.

Once they are admitted, they don't have to move to another location."We do the whole admission before the procedure.

They don't have to move at all," she said.

"I think it's going to be very efficient."The paperless system also will allow all nurses' notes and vital information to flow into the hospital's system.Vermilion said not having to move the patients and their families to different lo...