Volume 25
Number 19
September 19, 2014
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
The
Saveof a
Lifetime
“ I am so grateful for everyone who helped me when I needed it.”
`` Todd Tewksbury with Aaron Mendelson, MD, one of the people who helped save his life.
Running along the Schuykill River Trail was a frequent outing for Todd Tewksbury, a 27-year-old mechanical engineer. So when he started his run one evening last month, the last place he expected to end up was in HUP’s emergency room. “I remembered passing the Philadelphia Museum and starting to feel a little woozy,” Tewksbury said. “After that, nothing.”
Inside Celebrating Those Who CARE..................................2 PPMC Annual Cultural Diversity Conference.................2 Helping Others Get Back on Their Feet.....................3
Very luckily, two doctors were running behind him when he collapsed. “We thought at first he was seizing, so I started rubbing his chest to control the seizure while my wife [Kristine Schultz, MD, chief resident of Emergency Medicine at Christiana Care Health System] made sure his airway was open,” said Aaron Mendelson, MD, a third-year internal medicine resident at HUP. But it clearly wasn’t helping. Tewksbury’s heart had stopped beating and he remained unconscious. He was in cardiac arrest. Mendelson immediately switched to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to keep the flow of blood — and oxygen — flowing to Tewksbury’s organs. Others who saw what was happening helped as well. “It was a community effort. Some helped do the compressions. Another person went
to a local rec center and got an AED [automated external defibrillator],” Mendelson said. Someone else called 911 and other bystanders directed the EMS team to the right location.. “They couldn’t drive up because it was a pedestrian path.” One person reached out to Tewksbury’s family on his cell phone. As it turned out, Lois Tewksbury had just spoken to her son. So, when her phone rang again and she saw who was calling, she answered, kiddingly, “What did you forget?” But, instead of hearing his voice, a stranger was telling her that her son had an emergency and was heading over to the ER at HUP. Thanks to the quick responses of the many good Samaritans and the HUP (Continued on page 4)
Making Cancer Glow................3
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`` Penn Medicine CAREs grant winners David Schaaf (l.) and Craig Loundas with Pat Wren.
Celebrating Those Who
C ARE
Each year, Penn Medicine CAREs awards selected employees small grants to help expand their volunteer efforts and community service projects. A recent luncheon honored the past year’s grant recipients who used their grants for a variety of outreach efforts, including:
• medication education programs. • an initiative to help parents learn how to help their newborn
babies sleep safely. • rides for cancer patients receiving treatment at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center. “What a wonderful program this is to recognize employees for the work they were doing – and continue to do – outside of their daily responsibilities,” said Human Resources VP Pat Wren. “That the program continues to grow and bring people together to support the diverse needs of the Penn community shows how special our employees are.” Be sure to check out HUPdate online for video of the event.
Employees who volunteer their time in outreach activities are encouraged to apply for a Penn Medicine CAREs grant. Go to http://uphsxnet.uphs.upenn.edu/ community/ to learn more.
congratulations to the latest winners of a Penn Medicine CAREs grant:
• Luis Ramos Rivera (HUP)
Wisdom House: Housing for Homeless Single Veteran Women • Anup Sharma (HUP/CPUP) Stress Management Workshops for Philadelphia Prisoners & Staff • Michael Williams (PPMC) Better Nutrition for the Elderly • Sharisse Ajibade and Wanda Gbemudu (HCHS) Congestive Heart Failure Management • Kelly Convery, Bernice Jones and Kathleen Mercado (HUP) Childbirth & Newborn Care Classes
• Karen Wagner (Corp) Mill Creek Farm
• Chiamaka Onwuzurike
(PSOM) Refugee Women’s Clinic Family Planning and Contraception Project • Mel Kearney (CCA) Walnut Street School Playground for Safer Kids • Kathryn Rose Finley (PPMC) Reach Out and Read • Ann Schwoebel (PAH) Parent to Parent Mentoring/ Education Program • Janet McMaster (HUP) WEPAC (West Philadelphia Alliance for Children)
PPMC Annual Cultural Diversity Conference The annual conference of the PPMC Cultural Diversity Committee will take place on Friday, October 24. This year’s theme is “Obesity Challenges and Solutions for Diverse Populations: Eliminating Disparities and Increasing Inclusion.” Keynote speaker will be David B. Sarwer, PhD, director of Clinical Services at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders. The morning session will feature a panel presentation on obesity. Affordable, easily accessible high-tech tools and the latest behavioral incentives to support weight loss are just some of solutions to be discussed. The afternoon session will explore the myth of healthy obesity and the influence of public policy on turning the obesity epidemic around. The conference will be held on Penn Presby’s campus, in Room 106 of the Penn Heart & Vascular Pavilion. For more information, go to http://uphsxnet.uphs.upenn.edu/presbynursing/diversity_conference.
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Helping Others Get Back on Their Feet As the sun rose on a cool July morning, hundreds of eager runners were gearing up for the last leg of a 24-hour challenge that would intimidate even the most advanced athletes. Back on My Feet (BoMF) Philadelphia’s In24 event challenged participants to an Ultra-Marathon: a relay challenge, Midnight Madness 8.4 mile run and a final 5K.
As team leader, Nawalinski tracks the participants’ mileage and keeps them motivated. Sometimes that includes building new connections among group members. Finding these similarities stimulates bonding and builds peer support along the way. “If you take someone at face value, you’re not going to find these valuable things,” she said.
Kelsey Nawalinski, a coordinator in Neurosurgery Clinical Research, helps BoMF in its mission to empower those experiencing homelessness through running. The hope is that this exercise boosts participants’ self-esteem and becomes coupled with opportunities for employment and independent living.
Volunteering gives Nawalinski perspective and focus that extends into her actions outside her work with BoMF. “I’ve never left a run having regretted it,” she said. “Sometimes I have that polar swing in the morning, first ‘Ah, this is a bad idea,’ and then always ‘This is the best way to start the day.’”
Volunteering with BoMF gets Nawalinski’s day off to an early start. She meets with her BOMF group at 5:30 am, three times a week, for a twoto-four mile run. After a couple months with the group, she took on a team leader role. Getting consistent participation from everyone in her group so early in the morning can be tough, but “we have a really solid attendance from our group,” she said. Those in the group residing in shelters and other facilities aim to commit to the training for 30 days. If they do the early morning runs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and maintain 90 percent attendance during that trial period, they can qualify for job training, assistance with finding long-term housing, and other important services.
It’s not about her personal record, she said, but always about those around her getting one step closer to getting back on their feet.
Do You Volunteer?
If you volunteer in the community, be sure to report your efforts on the Penn Medicine CAREs website (http://uphsxnet.uphs.upenn.edu/ community/). It’s fast, easy and will help us tell the story of Penn Medicine’s important role in the community. No activity is too small to report — an hour of volunteer time or a box of donated medical supplies can really make a difference for those in need. `` Kelsey Nawalinski (l.) with BoMF volunteer Brigid Bleaken and participants Reginald and Greg.
Making Cancer
Glow
Penn Medicine researchers are fighting cancer with color. Working with colleagues at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, surgeons have developed a way to make lung cancer flash neon green for better visibility during surgery. The procedure works by injecting patients with an FDAapproved dye 24 hours before surgery. The properties of the dye cause it to bind to receptors on cancerous tumors, causing them to fluoresce neon green under infrared light or near-infrared imaging. The glow allows surgeons to remove the tumors they can see with the naked eye and feel with their hands, but also those that may be too small or too far below the surface of the lung to view or feel. The team’s latest study tested the procedure in 18 patients. “We were thrilled to find that the dye allowed us to identify and remove five additional tumors that we did not know were there,” said Sunil Singhal, MD, director of the Thoracic Surgery Research Laboratory. “By removing these we were able to prevent a local cancer recurrence and also reduced these patients’ chances of developing metastatic disease.”
The Penn’s Way campaign is almost here!
`` Kelsey Nawalinski with Brigid Bleaken, Reginald, and Greg of BoMF.
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Oncolink’s upcoming webinar Date: Tuesday, October 7 Time: 2 pm Topic: Nutritional Strategies to Manage Lower GI Side Effects of Cancer Treatment To learn more, go to oncolink.org/webchat. `` Mendelson described how he and others saved Tewksbury’s life to 6ABC.
“ Prompt CPR is one of the key determinants of who lives or dies with cardiac arrest.”
The Save of a Lifetime (Continued from page 1)
emergency room staff, Tewksbury was soon on his way to a full recovery. He received an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, a device that’s placed internally to help treat arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats), a few days after being admitted. Less than a week after the cardiac arrest, Tewksbury went home.
Could You Help? Cardiac arrest — in which the heart suddenly stops — is the most time-sensitive disease in all of medicine. For every minute a person in
arrest goes without treatment, the chance of death increases by 10-15 percent. Over 90 percent of victims of sudden cardiac arrest die before reaching the hospital. In Philadelphia alone, more than 1,000 people have cardiac arrest each year. According to Mendelson, immediate and constant CPR — and the AED — helped save Tewksbury’s life. “Prompt CPR is one of the key determinants of who lives or dies with cardiac arrest,” said Benjamin Abella, MD, clinical research director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science. “We’ d have more survivors if more people knew CPR.” In a 6ABC interview, Mendelson said “I think anyone trained in CPR could have done what we did. It doesn’t have to be a nurse or physician.”
All clinicians at HUP — as well as members of Security — are trained in CPR but any employee can learn the life-saving procedures through the:
• Center for Resuscitation Science.
To request more information, contact Marisa Cinousis at 215-615-6573 or marisa.cinousis@uphs.upenn.edu. • Penn Medicine Simulation Center in Rittenhouse Square. To learn more, go to http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ SIMcenter/BLS_CPR_programs.html. Employees enroll directly through Knowledge Link. “I am so grateful for everyone who helped me when I needed it,” Tewksbury said, adding that he plans to learn CPR, so he can help someone else in need. Correction: In the last issue of HUPdate, Mel Kearney was identified as working in Occupational Therapy. She works in Occupational Medicine.
HUPdate Editorial Staff Sally Sapega Editor and Photographer
Where is the Nearest AED?
Lisa Paxson Designer
The AED played a significant role in saving Todd Tewksbury’s life. Indeed, “it can triple the chance of survival,” said Benjamin Abella, MD, clinical research director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science. But would you know where to find one at HUP in such an emergency? Keep the following list of AED locations close at hand:
Administration
• HUP lobby, near main security desk • 1 Maloney, near hair salon • Inpatient pharmacy in Silverstein basement • 7 Gates, near clinical lab areas • Penn Tower Bridge, near security desk • 7 Founders, near clinical lab areas • Ground Gates, near Spruce Street entrance And learn more about using an AED at http://www.med.upenn.edu/resuscitation/ UPHSAEDTrainingVideo.shtml.
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Susan E. Phillips Senior Vice President, Public Affairs
Holly Auer Director of Communications Contact HUPdate at: 3535 Market Street, Mezzanine Philadelphia, PA 19104 phone: 215.662.4488 fax: 215.349.8312 email: sally.sapega@uphs.upenn.edu HUPdate is published biweekly for HUP employees. Access HUPdate online at http://news.pennmedicine.org/inside/hupdate.