It was a night that any wife would dread. Dorothy Lubahn’s husband, Arthur, a proud and athletic man, was experiencing sharp pain on the right side of his chest after undergoing heart surgery two days prior. He was admittedly feeling so weak, that he couldn’t even stand on his own two feet. Dorothy did the only thing she could think of: check his blood pressure and give him the pain medication prescribed by the hospital. Luckily, for both of them, she checked Arthur’s blood pressure using a HomMed® TeleHealth system from Great Lakes Caring.
“All of the pain was on the right side of his chest, so I didn’t think that he was having heart problems,” said Dorothy. “If the pain would have continued for a few days, I probably would have taken him to the doctor then.”
Arthur’s vital information was digitally transmitted to the Great Lakes Caring central office, where a registered nurse immediately identified a serious condition from his abnormal blood pressure readings. After the nurse talked with Dorothy on the phone, it was only a matter of minutes before she was at the Lubahn’s doorstep, assessing Arthur’s condition first-hand and realizing he needed emergency medical care. The Great Lakes Caring nurse called an ambulance, which rushed Arthur to the hospital in time for physicians to perform life-saving procedures, and subsequently insert a pacemaker to regulate his heart.
“We use HomMed® TeleHealth for exactly this reason,” said Ann Johnson, TeleHealth nurse manager at Great Lakes Caring. “If Arthur hadn’t had the daily monitoring, we might not have had a true reading on his heart until it was too late.”
Today, Arthur and Dorothy are looking forward to what the future will bring them, because they know that without HomMed® TeleHealth, they wouldn’t have had a future to look forward to.
“I know that the machine saved my life,” said Arthur, with a smile. “We will be celebrating 67 years of marriage soon.”
