A doctor from Massachusetts is alive today thanks to quick reactions by hotel employees, first responders, and the skilled medical teams and surgeons at Health City Cayman Islands, a partnership of Ascension and Narayana Health of India. The doctor now plans to partner with the facility that saved his life.
Click here to see an emotional video about what the doctor's wife, Judy Josephs, calls a "Christmas Miracle."
In December, vascular surgeon Leon G. Josephs, MD, FACS, was in the Cayman Islands with his wife for a board meeting. Following the meeting he began exercising on a treadmill at his hotel, where he collapsed with what he calls a "sudden death arrest." Hotel employees administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation and two shocks from an automated external defibrillator. The stricken doctor then was taken to Cayman Islands Health Services Authority, the government hospital.
Once Dr. Josephs arrived at the government hospital, staff stabilized him before speeding him to Health City Cayman Islands, where he arrived unconscious and on a ventilator.
"Within 30 minutes he was taken to the cath lab and an emergency angiogram was done that showed one of the arteries was totally occluded and the other two were more than 95 percent blocked," said Dr. Binoy Chattuparambil, Senior Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgeon at Health City Cayman Islands, who is known locally as Dr. Binoy.
Blood thinners that Dr. Josephs was taking threatened uncontrollable bleeding, so immediate surgery was not wise. Health City doctors decided to delay surgery for 48 hours and used the time to run a battery of tests to ensure the operating team had as much information as possible by the time they started a heart bypass procedure.
"The surgery took around five and a half hours and he came out of the operating room in very stable condition. After he came to the ICU (Intensive Care Unit), within two hours he was taken off the breathing machine and his recovery was quite smooth and straightforward," Dr. Binoy said.
"I'm amazingly pleased with my care," said Dr. Josephs, who is Acting CEO at Reliant Medical Group in Worchester, Massachusetts. "I'm a vascular surgeon at home so I see plenty of patients after cardiac surgery, and my care, my recovery, in my opinion, was as good (as) or better than anyone I've ever seen.
"I saw my nursing care teamed with a doctor much more than I do at home. I found my doctors to be very easy to speak with. My physical therapists (were) very involved in a team with my physicians. So I really felt that there was a team-based care here that was really focused completely on the patient being the center of that. And I really don't think that it has anything to do with the fact that I'm a healthcare executive, or the fact that I'm a physician. I think that's how they treat everybody who comes through the doors of the hospital."
After four days, Dr. Josephs was discharged from Health City.
"This actually was a beautiful recovery … the focus on patient satisfaction is visible and palpable. They live it every day and they're really good at it," said Dr. Josephs, who shared that his practice will consider sending some of its patients to Health City for their care "because the model here is a model that the United States healthcare system is striving to get to."
Noting the Caribbean's reliance on tourism, Dr. Binoy suggested it is vitally important to ensure there are facilities capable of handling urgent medical needs for local residents and for visitors. In the Cayman Islands, "visitors can enjoy their holidays, knowing if anything happens we have a very well established tertiary care hospital here," he said.
Dr. Josephs said he will eschew U.S. doctors to undergo his follow-up checks with the Health City specialists.
"In fact, we'll make a couple of trips (for) post-op checks that I would typically do at home, but I think I'm actually going to just come down here and see Dr. Ravi (Kishore and) see Dr. Binoy instead just because I feel good about that," he said. "They were excellent."
Health City Cayman Islands and Dr. Binoy also will benefit from the experience of Dr. Josephs.
"We're forming a partnership, actually," Dr. Josephs said. "He's coming up for me to teach him some newer vascular techniques. Hopefully the day will come when I actually come down here and do some of those with him. That's kind of the plan we started to develop."
Health City Cayman Islands provides compassionate, high-quality, affordable healthcare services in a world-class, comfortable, patient-centered environment. Offering healthcare to international, regional and local patients, Health City Cayman Islands delivers excellence in adult and pediatric cardiology, cardiac surgery, cardiac electrophysiology, medical oncology, orthopedics, sports medicine, pediatric endocrinology, gastrointestinal and bariatric surgery, neurosurgery, minimally invasive spine surgery, and pulmonology services.
