Bucks County Herald – March 4, 2010

Guillain-Barre Syndrome –Part Two

Dear Friends,

Good morning. My second “Small World After All” column is a continuation of my bout with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, (GBS) a malady that strikes the nervous system. You can refer to my first column (Feb. 25) for the specifics. If there is a moral to these two columns and a final thought next week, it’s this: Whenever you encounter something unusual in your physical or mental condition, see a professional ASAP. Prompt attention saved me from disaster.

After my 12 minute helicopter ride to the rooftop of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), I landed in the two-floor wing for neurology patients (brain and nervous system). It took three minutes for the team to whisk me from the landing site to my room.

The first thing that I want to tell you is that I encountered no difference in the nursing and support care between St. Luke’s Quakertown, Grand View, or HUP. Yes, at HUP, the care is neither as relaxed nor as proximate as it is at St. Luke’s or Grand View. But it’s just as fast and thorough. I found the nursing and support staff at HUP kind, caring, courteous…and keenly interested in their patients. These are the unsung heroes of community and teaching hospitals.

When in doubt, get to a teaching hospital, especially if your malady is complicated or unusual. I felt most comfortable being in that setting. Penn gets the neurology cases that are difficult to diagnose and treat. It sees thousands of them each year. And, as it turned out, HUP was a small world too.

The reason why I ended up at HUP was because of one of my college friends, Robert Daroff. After our graduation, he went to Penn’s Medical School and now heads neurology at Case Western Reserve Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. It was Dr. Daroff who told me to get to HUP immediately.

Let me quickly add that Dr. David Bayard of Penn Neurologic Associates correctly diagnosed my case as GBS while I was first at Grand View. It turned out that Dr. Bayard was an oarsman…first at his high school and later at Brown University.

The second thing that I noticed at HUP was the plethora of nationalities, cultures, colors, and races. And in the “small world” department, Dr. Ramoni Balu was a HUP intern who trained under my friend, Dr. Daroff.

During my stay, I often thought of the song, “We Are the World” made popular years ago by Michael Jackson. I remember seeing a busload of Japanese children at a museum in Tokyo in 1985. We were one of the representatives of the American Newspaper Association during its visit to Japan. The children held up the V for victory symbol and sang, “We are the World.”

At HUP, I was in the capable hands of Doctors John Detre, Dina Jacobs, Danielle Sandsmark, and Alex Pantelyat. Nurses Elizabeth Newhaus-Booth, Stella Tse, Colleen Chanceler, Brinna Cardillo, Kuma Thach, Jennifer Cieslak, and Joo-Hee Han kept me very busy. Every time someone approached, I automatically recited my name and birth date to insure that the scientist or helper had the right patient. Even Michael Pappano, a social worker, enforced the system. That was the rule at Grand View as well.

I was particularly intrigued with the last test, the electromyogram (EMG) which confirmed that GBS had struck me. EMG is used to record the electrical activity of muscles. When muscles are active, they prod current. The current is usually proportional to the level of the muscle activity.

Dr. Toby Ferguson is a neurologist who specializes in these impulses. His technician, Julie Christini, administered a series of electrical shocks to my arms, hands, legs and feet. The instruments of torture reminded me of the small needles used in acupuncture…except electricity came out of the needlepoints.

When I told our daughter Catherine about the procedure, she told me that she still has a game called “Operation” which she’s saved since her eleventh birthday. Its battery operated and players try to pick body parts out of a dummy’s cavity. If you get too close to an edge, the dummy’s nose illuminates and a buzzer sounds. The game is a test of eye and hand coordination.

Well, that’s exactly how I felt as Dr. Ferguson’s technician administered the EMG procedure. I told them that if they had a light bulb and stuck it in my mouth, I could have illuminated the entire building.

I’ll close today with a story about crossing the nationalistic divide. One of my nurses at HUP was a lovely Asian American young woman. Her parents live in Los Angeles and are first generation American citizens from South Korea. The problem was that she fell in love with a young Chinese man. Because her father distrusts all Chinese, it took ten years for both families to approve of their marriage. That’s what I call the geo-political fault line.

But all in all, the experience at HUP was fascinating and successful…fortunately, the story has a happy ending for our family.

Sincerely,

Charles Meredith