As the Director of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, Scott Comenzo assists with the installation of medical equipment, helping to set up and maintain monitoring systems and AED defibrillators in the Hospital’s Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory and Coronary Care Unit (CCU). Needless to say, it never crossed his mind that he would ever be a patient in either unit.
But on January 4, Scott became one of the 334 procedures that took place in the Cath Lab since it opened last September. That afternoon, Scott left work, went home to Hampton Bays, and got out his snow blower to tackle the foot of snow a blizzard had dumped earlier in the morning. He started to feel chest pains while clearing the snow, so he took an aspirin. Ten minutes later he asked his wife to call an ambulance.
Scott was rushed to the Hospital’s Jenny and John Paulson Emergency Department, and staff there immediately called a Code H, the clinical code used to alert medical personnel of a patient having a heart attack. Scott was taken to the Cath Lab, located in an operating room within the Audrey and Martin Gruss Heart & Stroke Center, where cardiologist Scott R. McGlynn, MD, implanted stents to help open up the blocked arteries that had caused the heart attack. Scott Comenzo was up and walking around the CCU by 5 p.m. Today he’s down 25 pounds and feels healthier than ever.
The standard of care for a person experiencing a heart attack is that the blocked artery should be opened within 90 minutes of contact with medical care—and that procedure can only be done in a Cath Lab by highly trained personnel. If not for the Cath Lab in Southampton, and the specialists on site 24/7 from Stony Brook University Heart Institute, Scott’s outcome might have been drastically different, as it would have taken him more than an hour to get to a hospital. “I don’t even want to think about it,” Scott says. “It’s scary.”
But Scott knew he was in safe hands at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. “I was so comfortable and at ease,” he adds. “And I think it’s that way whether [you] work here or not. Everybody is just wonderful.”