By Barry Eberling | DAILY REPUBLIC | September 29, 2009
Dr. Gurinder Dhillon, center, performs a procedure in the cardiac catherization lab at NorthBay Medical Center Tuesday morning while being assisted by scrub nurse Shelly Navarro, RN, second from left. NorthBay started offering coronary angioplasty procedures at their Fairfield facility in late August. Photo by Brad Zweerink
FAIRFIELD - Dr. Gurinder Dhillon and a four-person team inserted a catheter into the coronary artery of a sedated 77-year-old Vacaville woman on Tuesday and used it to inflate a tiny balloon within the artery.
The expanding balloon pressed against a tiny mesh coil, which in turn crushed plaque into the artery wall. An 80 percent blockage got cleared up. The result: The woman should get relief from shortness of breath and chest pains.
'We're not reinventing the wheel,' said Dhillon, an interventional cardiologist at NorthBay Medical Center, when the procedure had ended.
Indeed, Dhillon has been doing coronary angioplasty since 1990 and has been at NorthBay Medical Center since 1991. But neither he nor anyone else had done angioplasty in Solano County before August.
In past years, the woman would have had a catheter placed in a coronary artery at NorthBay to look for blockages. Should doctors have found a problem, they would have had to wait and done the angioplasty at either John Muir Medical Center in Contra County or Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa County.
No Solano County hospital offered angioplasties. Local doctors couldn't find a problem and then correct it during the same procedure. The patient and the family members who wanted to be with them had to travel.
In April, NorthBay Medical Center opened a $4.6 million surgical suite where doctors can perform open heart surgery. That provided the emergency backup needed for coronary angioplasty. NorthBay in late August started offering the procedure in a cardiac catheterization lab recently remodeled at a cost of $3.6 million.
See the complete story at the Daily Republic online.
