Dr. Jamie Doucet
Day in the life of a cardiologist
While a team of young doctors and nurses swarm around him watching a live x-ray of his chest cavity, a man lays on a table in the cardiology department of Boulder Community Hospital. Wires and tubes disappear under a surgical sheet and into the man’s body. The doctors and nurses in their blue scrubs and lead aprons watch the slight rise and fall of his chest, the continuous creeping of the EKG across the black screen and filmy gray pictures of his heart.
A camera the size of a pinpoint traverses the man’s inner highways, enabling all present to map the topography of his internal landscape. With every heartbeat a black shockwave spreads out in all directions across the screen, revealing an intricate lattice of veins and arteries. At one place in the web, the flow is obviously constricted.
Dr. Jamie Doucet stands quietly over the patient’s still body as if engaged in a silent chess game as nurses bob and weave through the room. Most of the equipment is covered in clear plastic. Funk music plays over the loud speakers.
8:15 a.m. that morning
Dr. Doucet sits at a round table with three relatives of a heart patient recently admitted to the hospital. He speaks in very specific medical terms while his hands gesture vigorously in front of him. His gaze is intensely focused. He compares the patient’s condition to an electrical storm. The odds of survival are not good. Because their relative waited until the end of the weekend to come in rather than being seen right away, his condition would be much more difficult to treat. All three listening family members nod and say they understand.
“I don’t know if he’ll make it, because I don’t feel I determine that,” Doucet says. “One thing is, he’s kind of a tough guy — we never count those ones out.”
In Doucet’s line of work, there are no guarantees, only educated guesses. Just as in emotional matters of the heart, cardiology always is somewhat mysterious.
“At one point we may decide to take him off life support,” Doucet continues.
The family members don’t seem surprised to hear this.
8:30 a.m.
“I have to give people a med school education in 15 minutes,” Doucet says as he takes off down the hallway. “I try to be as gentle and honest as I can be, reassuring them that we’re doing everything we possibly can. I don’t think we’re doing anyone any favors by hiding information or glossing things over. You have to tell them exactly what is going on in your opinion.”
Doucet earned his medical degree from Louisiana State University in New Orleans and completed both his internship and residency at the University of Texas in Houston. He was chief cardiology fellow at Baylor University. For the past couple years he has been at Boulder Community, where he’s proud of the successful cardiology team.
“We have very, very good cardiology in Boulder,” he says. “We can do things with modern cardiology that not only save people’s lives, but also improve the rest of their lives.”
Doucet speaks to three different people on his tiny silver cellphone as he winds through the maze of electronic doors on the way to the x-ray room. He stops for only a moment at the coffee cart, where he attempts to calculate the probability that the coffee thermos would run out on him three times in a row.
He estimates he meets with 10 to 14 patients a day. While he enjoys the instant gratification of saving someone’s life on the operating table, he gets a lot of satisfaction from helping patients prevent future cardiac problems.
“I like seeing people when they’re well,” he says. “Many patients are very appreciative and trusting.”
For women, the risks of cardiac diseases are especially high. Strokes and cardiac diseases kill 10 times more women than breast cancer each year.
“Men are more likely to have heart attacks, but women are less likely to survive them,” says Darryl Brown, director of cardiopulmonary services at Boulder Community. “Women are also more likely to die of stroke than men.”
Doucet adds, “The problem is that women’s symptoms just tend to be ignored.”
He requests an x-ray and chats with another doctor while he waits. When he slides the x-ray into the viewer and flips on the light, he says only one thing: “Lord have mercy.”
“Dr. Jamie Doucet stands quietly over the patient’s still body as if engaged in a silent chess game as nurses bob and weave through the room. Most of the equipment is covered in clear plastic. Funk music plays over the loud speakers.”
8:45 a.m.
The patient, a lifetime smoker, had checked into the hospital about a week before after suffering a heart attack. Now he lay, exhausted, an oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. The x-ray revealed his lungs are full of fluid. Doucet approaches the bed, tucks the blanket around the patient’s ivory white feet.
“Hello, young man!” he says enthusiastically, although the patient is old enough to be his grandfather.
After a brief conference with a nurse practitioner, Doucet decides to perform a cardiac catheterization, which involves inserting a narrow, flexible tube about the size of a drinking straw into the groin or arm. The catheter is guided to the heart and arteries. A dye is introduced through the catheter, allowing the doctor to see the shape and size of the arteries, as well as any blockages on an x-ray screen.
Doucet performs three or four of these procedures each day.
9:00 a.m.
The small room sandwiched between the two procedure rooms where catheterizations take place looks like a space program control center. There are computer screens in every direction. In that room, eight to 10 people chat loudly and consistently, using the abbreviated language of a community that spends up to 80 hours a week in each other’s company.
Doucet secures his lead apron and scrubs. He enters the room where his patient lays flat on the table. He makes an incision and begins feeding the tube into the patient’s body. Within a half hour it becomes clear that the situation is more serious than anticipated. Doucet has to decide the next step quickly, or the “young man” whose feet he covered earlier will not survive.
Doucet performs an angioplasty—he uses the cardiac catheter to place a tiny balloon inside the artery at the site of the blockage. As the balloon inflates, it compresses plaque against the artery walls, restoring blood flow.
A short time later, it is clear Doucet made the right choice.
10:55 a.m.
“Thank you, everybody,” Doucet says as he exits the room. “We’ve accomplished what we came here to do.”
On his way to meet the family of the man whose life he just saved, Doucet reflects on the past couple hours. “Whenever someone is dying, the adrenaline is what keeps you going,” he says. “You don’t think about being tired or hungry. You just think about saving that person’s life.”
“Oh, what a day,” he adds. “I have three more catheterizations after this.”
Originally published by Women’s Magazine