Lucy Wojcicki’s letter to cardiologist Raj Patcha, MD, Director of Huntington Hospital’s Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, resonates with gratitude and emotion. “This weekend you saved my husband’s life,” it begins.

Mrs. Wojcicki goes on to explain that her husband was rushed to Huntington Hospital’s emergency department by ambulance, pale and in pain, in the throes of a heart attack. Her letter relates how she was stunned at the life-saving care her husband, Richard, received — the speed, the expertise, and the equipment that combined to restore him to health within an hour of his arrival at the hospital. As a Huntington Hospital employee for 24 years, Mrs. Wojcicki was impressed that the hospital possessed such capability.

After moving some heavy furniture in anticipation of work scheduled to be done on his house the following morning, Richard Wojcicki was awakened by tightness in his chest and discomfort that felt like severe heartburn. It reminded him of his first heart attack 20 years earlier.

When the discomfort didn’t pass, he woke Lucy who called an ambulance. Within minutes of arriving in Huntington’s Emergency Department, Richard was whisked
to the hospital’s cardiac catheterization laboratory, where Dr. Patcha opened a blocked coronary artery and inserted a stent, a wire mesh open-ended cylinder that is deployed
to keep the artery open after the balloon used to widen the vessel is removed. Richard was comfortable, awake and alert throughout the procedure.

“As soon as they did that I felt like a brand new person,” Richard marveled. “I went from saying good-bye to my wife and children as I got into the ambulance, to making
a complete 180 degree turn around within an hour.”

Richard and Lucy were both struck by the changes they observed in Huntington’s capability to provide life-saving cardiac care, especially in comparison to their experience during Richard’s first heart attack more than two decades ago. At that time, he was stabilized with clot-busting medications but had to be transferred to another facility for further diagnostic testing.

Since that experience, Richard has been routinely monitored by his cardiologist, Hachiro Nakamura, MD, who encourages him to lose weight although his blood pressure and
cholesterol are within the normal range.

“My husband entered the emergency room in tremendous pain and pale white. My children and I watched in horror as he suffered a heart attack,” Lucy wrote in a letter to hospital President and CEO Kevin F. Lawlor. “I don’t even think it was an hour from his time of arrival until he was having a stent placed in his artery. He came out of the procedure pain free and his joy for life back in his face. I can never thank the staff enough for giving us the gift we received.”

Richard had equally high praise for the staff members who ushered him back to health.

“I can’t tell you how great those nurses and assistants were,” he recalled. “Everyone was just unbelievable.” /