The Business of Care

Anthony Parker was tired of feeling tired. He was approaching his 70th birthday and his third decade as president of Albany Technical College in southwest Georgia. He was close to accomplishing the professional project of his dreams, a brand-new center for training nurses, when his heart began to give him trouble. He’d found that it was hard to walk short stretches across campus without getting winded. He’d stopped using the pedestrian bridge that connected the east and west sides of the college because it had become too difficult to climb the stairs. His wife and three adult children were struck by his sudden urge to take afternoon naps, something he’d once ribbed them about, saying they were sleeping their lives away.

But perhaps what most bothered Dr. Parker — which is what everyone called him because he’d earned a Ph.D. and because honorifics are considered good manners in the South — was that his severely irregular heartbeat had begun to affect his golf game. So, on the day before he checked into Phoebe Putney Memorial, Albany’s only hospital, Dr. Parker was anxious to get his stamina back.

His cardiologist, Dr. José Ernesto Betancourt, recommended a procedure called an ablation. It involved running a catheter through a blood vessel from his groin to his heart and applying extreme heat or cold to create tiny patches of scar tissue on the outer walls of the organ, blocking the electrical signals that were causing his arrhythmia. Betancourt told Dr. Parker the procedure was minimally invasive and had a high success rate in men his age. In most cases, patients were sent home the day after the procedure and able to return to normal activities in a day or two.

Because Betancourt was relatively new to Phoebe, the Parkers sought a second opinion from a close friend, a cardiologist who was godfather to their second child. After he heard what other measures had been taken to try to address Dr. Parker’s condition, he agreed that an ablation was an appropriate next step.