Hospital Ad Subject Finds Harmony at BMH

Suzanne Anderson came to BMH quite by accident. She had thought she wouldn’t even have wanted to come that way, but fate intervened, and she’s awfully happy it did!

It seems that when the Andersons moved to town from upstate New York, they went exploring to see what Brattleboro had to offer. Upon encountering the institution at the top of the hill on Canal Street, Suzie and her husband figured it was some kind of clinic, or some such, again having moved here from a larger city and its attendant big hospitals. Suzie remembers saying to her husband something like, “Oh, please, if I need medical care, be sure to get me to either Boston or New York.”

Enter Suzie coming to the attention of the Community Relations Department through her orthopedic surgeon, William Vranos, MD. We were looking for a patient to talk about the good and expert care available through our hospital and its orthopedic surgeons, and Dr. Vranos instantly suggested his patient Suzanne Anderson, saying that she was incredibly positive about her whole experience at BMH. Now, of course, her ‘whole experience’ ended up encompassing even more than Dr. Vranos was actually aware of initially, and so when he told us about her injuries, little did we know Suzie would have had so much more than even just multiple orthopedic experiences with the BMH Emergency Department, our surgeon, and the hospital OR.

As you may have read in our recent advertisement, Suzie fell and crashed into a wrought iron gate upon which she heard her ankle snap. Now, of course the ad is necessarily abbreviated, leaving many details of her experience on the cutting floor…details such as that she didn’t want medical care locally; details such as that she was unable to reach her husband after her fall and, hence, all bets were off for her to get to a big city hospital on the east coast.

The hospital ad goes on to say that she crawled to her car and drove straight to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital where she learned her hurting ankle was just her first challenge, as she felt a blinding pain in her shoulder when trying to use the crutches provided by the ER. As it turns out, Suzie had also torn her rotator cuff which Dr. Vranos discovered through a high-definition MRI scan. He performed her complex rotator cuff surgery with great care and expertise…élan, even… something he does fairly routinely as rotator cuff injuries can happen to anyone, even though Suzie said she thought it only happened to athletes, as you may remember from her ad.

Of course, speaking of athletes (which Suzie does not claim to be!), the BMH Rehabilitation and Sports Medicine Department helped turn her ravaged body into a thing of grace and good movement once again. Suzie has nothing but good things to say about the physical therapists who pushed her to move those aching joints and bones, but ever so expertly and lovingly.

However, what her advertisement didn’t allow space for Suzie to opine were praises for all the other people with whom she came in contact…from an amazing interaction with a liaison named Stuart in the ER (a service Suzie says she has never had the pleasure to experience at any other hospital)…every department, whether it was Registration, Laboratory, Radiology, Surgery, Anesthesiology, or Nursing…as well as all the caregivers…greeted her on every occasion with smiles and a pleasant, positive attitude. As Suzie puts it, “With a back-up system like that at BMH, who wouldn’t do well?”

It seems that Suzie – in a completely unrelated incident – was bitten on the leg and, when her husband saw the looks of the bite, he insisted on bringing her immediately to the BMH emergency room, one more time. Somehow, Suzie had been bitten by a poisonous brown recluse spider. The hospital took care of her wound initially, but further care was given at a hospital closer to their vacation spot in the Adirondacks, and it seems the wound not only wasn’t healing properly as time went on, but it was becoming badly infected. Suzie says by the time she got back here to the ‘good hospital’, the bite was showing signs of a very dangerous infection, necrotic tissue even, and she was in indescribable pain. Suzie was eventually referred to two other exceptional BMH caregivers: our wound specialist, Joan Punt, RN, BS, WOC nurse, and BMH general surgeon Gregory Gadowski, MD, both of whom ended up treating Suzie for this spider bite, now completely healed, thanks to the expertise of Joan and Dr. Gadowski.

What the advertisement Suzie did for BMH could and did say – besides some of the bon mots above – was that Suzie found her whole experience at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital part of an efficient harmony among her many caretakers – from the surgeons to the nurses to the ER liaison to the technologists to the therapists – all in tune with each other, helping her to get well. Suzie is so very grateful that her husband was simply not available when she needed a hospital because she found so much more at BMH than she could have imagined…an up-todate institution with an expert, caring, careful, harmonious, and super staff!