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 WEST LONG BRANCH, NJ, OCTOBER 21, 2009 – It’s said
that when you suffer a near-death experience, your whole life
flashes before your eyes.
But for a local physician who recently suffered a massive heart
attack, the flashbacks that came before he underwent lifesaving
treatment at Monmouth Medical Center dated back just 13 years — to
the birth of his son.
Heart attacks are the leading cause of death for both men and
women all over the world, and for Michael Disciglio, M.D., an
internist in practice for more than 25 years, the electrocardiogram
(EKG) performed minutes after he arrived in Monmouth’s
Emergency Department showed him that he was suffering the very
massive and rapidly fatal acute myocardial infarction (AMI) that
is often referred to as the "widow maker."
“When I saw the EKG, I thought back to when I was a resident,” said
Dr. Disciglio, who completed training in internal medicine at
Monmouth Medical Center in 1987. “Back then, if we read
an EKG like that, we knew the patient was not going to survive,
and all I could think about was my son — that I was going
to miss seeing my son grow up.”
But the good news for Dr. Disciglio and 13-year-old Michael
Patrick Disciglio is that modern treatment for acute myocardial
infarctions — more commonly known as heart attacks — can
result in survival and even good outcomes. In Monmouth’s
ER, they initiated a “Code STEMI” — the process
put in place to treat all heart attack patients within the first
90 minutes of an attack.
In 2006, Monmouth Medical Center joined the American College
of Cardiology in launching a national quality improvement initiative
with the goal of ensuring that patients like Dr. Disciglio with
ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergo emergency
angioplasty within 90 minutes.
For any patient arriving at Monmouth Medical Center with symptoms
of a heart attack, Emergency Department physicians order an electrocardiogram
(EKG) within minutes. An EKG can detect signs
of poor blood flow, heart muscle damage, abnormal heartbeats
and other heart problems.
If a heart attack is diagnosed, the Code STEMI is activated,
with the on-call interventional cardiologist and the specially
trained cardiac catheterization team called in for emergency
treatment. The Code STEMI team that cared for Dr. Disciglio was
led by interventional cardiologist Rita Watson, M.D., who acted
quickly, performing a lifesaving emergency angioplasty 79 minutes
after his diagnosis.
Dr. Watson did a miraculous job,” he said,
noting that he had a near total occlusion, or blockage, of
the LAD — the left anterior descending coronary artery
that feeds the entire front wall of the heart.
An acute myocardial infarction is the interruption of blood
supply to part of the heart,
causing some heart cells to die. It is most commonly due
to the blockage of a coronary
artery following the rupture of a vulnerable
atherosclerotic plaque, which is an unstable collection
of lipids such
as cholesterol and white
blood cells in the wall of an artery.
The resulting restriction in blood supply and oxygen
shortage, if left untreated for a sufficient period
of time, can cause damage to heart muscle tissue or death.
Classical symptoms of an AMI include sudden chest
pain. It is estimated that a quarter of all myocardial
infarctions are silent, without chest pain or other symptoms.
Dr. Disciglio — a trim 59-year-old nonsmoker with normal
blood pressure and cholesterol — notes that he has always
had a special interest in cardiology and says that on the night
of his heart attack, he had given a lecture on lipids at an area
restaurant. When he returned home, he started feeling pressure
in his chest, but noting that he had a negative stress test just
a month before, he ignored it until the pain grew worse and traveled
to his jaws and teeth. That’s when he decided he needed
to get to an emergency room.
“I feel extremely fortunate that I lived long enough to
get to the hospital and have this procedure performed,” said
Dr. Disciglio, who also underwent cardiac rehabilitation at Monmouth’s
Joel Opatut Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation Program as a part
of his recovery. “It’s still hard for me to fathom
that I was able to survive that heart attack, and yet, the next
day, my EKG was completely normal. Looking back to when I was
doing my residency, a patient lucky enough to survive a heart
attack like that would have been left a cardiac cripple.”
To see where the technology was then and where it is today at
Monmouth Medical Center is extraordinary, he says.
“I’m still in awe of this place, and that I was
lucky enough to survive and get to see my son grow up,” he
said of his only child, a middle school student in Little Silver. “My
son and I are like bookends — we’re always together — and
I am so grateful to Dr. Watson and the team at Monmouth Medical
Center for giving me back my life with him.”
CONTACT: Kristine A. Brown
Director of Public Relations
732-557-3902
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