Guy Henry

Review of Eastern Idaho Regional Medical...

I went into the ER the day after Christmas as I'd ...

I went into the ER the day after Christmas as I'd been having an irregular heartbeat for a couple of days prior (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day). It felt like my heart was skipping beats 3 - 4 times a minute when I listened to it on my stethoscope. Fortunately it wasn't busy in the ER for a change, and I was taken back to a room relatively quickly.

I explained to the medical staff what I'd been experiencing, and advised them that I had two previous bouts with A-FIB back in 1999 and 2001. I've had heart palpitations most of my life, but for the past 10 years or so they were only about one or two a month. After explaining all this to the doctor assigned to my case, I also advised him and other medical staff that I'd recently began a daily exercise program and that I was taking some vitamin supplements.

One of the vitamins I was taking was D3, which I'd discovered that I'd possibly accidently been taking 30,000 IU's (six 5000 IU gel caps) which I thought were 1000 IU's each. I'd been doing some reading on Google and found that excessive doses of D3 can cause an irregular heart rhythm, including A-Fib, so I wanted to be sure this was checked when they did any blood work.

I was given two chest x-rays, they took four tubes of blood for analysis, and a EKG was run. The doctor watched my heart monitor while he was in the room and asked if I'd ever been told my heart was throwing PVC's, like I'm supposed to know what a PVC is. I had to ask for the English translation of what it was, and he explained it to me. I found out this is basically a fancy term for heart palpitations. He then left for a while only to return saying my blood work all came back normal, and that if I'd come in sooner, they might have been able to stop the palpitations. I'm not quite sure how they would have done this, since he really had no clue what was causing them.

He told me I had a couple of options. One was to cut out all stimulants I consumed and see if the heart rhythm would go back to normal on its own. Or I could put on a heart monitor for about a week and not change anything in my daily routine. They might possibly be able to figure out what I was doing or consuming to cause the palpitations.

I elected to put on the monitor for a week. So he said he'd get it ordered for me. A few minutes later, he came back only to inform me that the hospital (Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center) DIDN'T HAVE A HEART MONITOR AVAILABLE. Idaho Falls largest hospital, a trauma center, didn't even have a portable heart monitor for me to use. I ended up having to leave the hospital and go to my cardiologists office, and by the grace of God was able to get a monitor put on there.

The following day I checked all of the lab results and found out that a vitamin D3 level was never even checked in my blood work. My wife has over 20 years of medical experience in a variety of medical fields, (including cardiology). When she looked at the blood tests that were run, she noticed that only one cardiac enzyme was checked and said that there were 3 other tests for cardiac enzymes that should've been checked that weren't.

My wife and I love Idaho, but the medical community in this state is severely lacking when it comes to quality of care which is provided in most cases. People who've lived here there whole lives believe that Idaho has an excellent health care system, and believe they have been receiving an excellent quality of care. The problem is, that they've never experiences what real quality of care is, so their point of view is tainted by not having ever experienced real quality of care. There are some (a few) doctors we've been able to find which are good doctor's, but for each one of those few we've found, we've been seen by numerous ones that cause us to wonder what medical school they attended, and how well they did.

Our overall view of the Idaho health care facilities and the majority of its providers is that it's poor at best. Makes us wish we'd retired somewhere else.