It was the third round of the 2009 Charles Schwab Cup championship, at the Sonoma Valley Golf Club, and tour golfer Joey Sindelar felt a little dizzy and short of breath. “I remember saying to my caddie, ‘John, are these hills getting to you?’” The caddie said “No.”
The 51-year-old pro wasn’t feeling pain, but was light-headed and was having difficulty breathing. He thought maybe it had been all the flying he’d been doing recently. “It felt like I was in Denver air,” he said.
He tried to play a few more holes, but couldn’t make it. The next thing he knew, Joey Sindelar was in the Sonoma Valley Hospital emergency room.
“I’ll never forget Dr. Cohen coming in and sitting down and saying, “You’re telling a really good story, but it doesn’t match anything. So we’ve got to keep looking.’”
The golfer’s symptoms seemed to indicate heart failure, but he’d recently had a calcium CAT scan and his heart was fine. Cohen called in Dr. James Price, the cardio-pulmonary specialist, and the emergency room team proceeded with a technique known as “diagnosis by exclusion.”
“The sequence,” says Cohen, “was EKG, lab studies, chest x-ray, additional lab studies and finally a CT angiogram of the chest, which ultimately led to the diagnosis of pulmonary embolus.”
Price explained, “If we go on a cross-country trip, or we sit for long period of times, as Sindelar had, the blood in the veins stagnates because we’re not up and moving around, and as a result can form clots. And the clots can propagate and get larger. And those can break off and go to your lung.”
Sindelar was lucky, Price said, he got off that golf course in time. “A lot of people die of those things,” says Price, “He could have died on the course.”
For Price, this was one of many similar events the emergency room handles and serves to emphasize the need for a nearby emergency room. “There are number of people who come in with similar situations, get diagnosed, treated, and their lives are saved. The emergency room really does serve the community very, very well. If we didn’t have this here, if he had to be transported some other place, it’s possible there could have been a different outcome.”
Sindelar remembers Price telling him, “There’s no ego here. If you need to be somewhere else, we’ll get you there.”
“That’s right,” says Price, explaining Sonoma Valley Hospital has relationships with other hospitals in the area, if people come here and the diagnosis is beyond the scope of this hospital, patients are stabilized and then triaged to other centers. “But this,” he says, looking out the window to the emergency room sign, “is a very important starting point.”
For Sindelar, it was vital. “They gave me, right from the start, just the perfect amount of knowledge I needed, and comfort. It felt like home.”
When he was released, Sindelar took a moment to appreciate his good care and good health. “I just needed to look around the hospital and to drive around the Plaza. I remember saying to my wife, ‘Sue, I almost died here!’”
Sindelar, who had seven Top-10 finishes on this year’s Senior Tour, said he expects to be ready for the 2010 season opener in January.
