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Columbia Memorial Hospital's ICU comes full circle

By John Mason

HUDSON — The $3.2 million improvements to the Intensive Care Unit at Columbia Memorial Hospital were officially celebrated at the unit’s grand opening Friday afternoon. The ICU has been temporarily housed on the fourth floor since construction began in March, and will move back into its renovated third floor quarters Tuesday.

Cardiologist H. Louis Clinton told the attendees how the ICU began in late January 1969 as a four-bed unit overseen by a central nurse’s station.

“Now we’ve come full circle,” he said. In the intervening years, the number of patients grew, and more of them grew farther away from the nurses’ station.

“Now we have more stations throughout the ICU so they’re closer to the patients,” Clinton said. CEO Jane Ehrlich earlier told the Register-Star there will be one nurse’s station for every two patient rooms.

The first ICU head nurse, Barbara Aldredge, later succumbed to fatal illness she contacted in the unit, Clinton said. “She literally gave her life through her devotion,” he said.

When Clinton arrived in 1988, he said he was impressed by the ICU staff, that the nurses operated at the level of the best interns and residents at the New York City hospital he had come from.

“We’ve always taken care of the sickest patients in Hudson, and we’ve saved many lives,” he said. Technical advances have been made as well: He recalled the nurses’ surprise when he first wheeled the machine into a patient’s room to conduct an echocardiogram. Portability was not expected at the time.

“Now we do at least 20 a week,” Clinton said.

Chief Operating Officer Jay Cahalan, the emcee, said he had been told by a reliable source that CMH is the “only place in the U.S. where the wheels on the Echo are replaced on an annual basis.”

The ICU has not been without its controversies, one of them involving Mike Tyson. Clinton told how a “quiet, shy boxer from Catskill” was taken care of there, and the controversy of whether to keep him or send him to another hospital led to a vociferous argument between his wife and his trainer.

“We decided to send him to a hospital in New York City because he had a physician he wanted to see,” Clinton said. “The good part was our head nurse got her picture in Sports Illustrated.”

The new ICU has flexibility, Clinton said. Because there are more beds, the sickest patients can be brought in sooner, and those starting to worsen can be brought in to prevent deterioration, he said. Dialysis and monitoring can be done on the site.

“We’ve transformed a church to a cathedral,” he said, “a place of spirit, with the central staff the choir that will sing songs of quality and efficiency.”

Clinton’s happiness with the technological advances was echoed by ICU Head Nurse Liz Surprise in an interview following the ceremony.

Monitors at the nursing stations that allow nurses to keep up-to-the-second track of the heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen and other functions of the patients make for a quicker curve in treatment for the patient, she said.

The beds can be set to percuss the lungs, which loosens the lungs’ secretions and to rotate patients every two hours; they are also easily moved into a chair position, so nurses don’t have to grapple patients into chairs, Surprise said.

And she was particularly pleased with the natural lighting from both exterior and interior windows.

“Evidence-based research shows that people in an environment that bright and clean with natural light will have shorter length of stays, less pain and do better,” she said.

Brian Langlands, the chief architect on the project, compared it to the difference between a doorway and an arch. Functionally, they both do the same things, he said, “but an arch has generosity.

“In the space here, we’ve created an arch from a doorway,” he said. “The ICU has almost doubled in size, to 7,000 square feet.”

Ninety-square-foot cubicles with curtains have given way to 200-square-foot, glass-fronted rooms. Before, only two rooms had windows; now every room has natural light.

Ehrlich yielded her minutes at the microphone to two former ICU patients.

Noting that he only had been given a minute-and-a-half to speak, artist Thomas Locker said he was “on borrowed time.”

Seven years ago, he said, “I died in the elevator on my way up to surgery.”

His doctor said, “I never practiced on a dead man before.”

“I was in a coma for 17 days,” Locker said. “Then I came into the world and discovered this marvelous place.”

The ICU was also wonderful to his wife, Candace Christiansen, he said, “who at that moment wasn’t. Since then, I’ve succeeded in getting her to. Other hospitals treat non-legal wives like chattel; not this place. Thank you for borrowing some time for me.”

Coxsackie-Athens High School Interim Principal Linda Collett said one day in 2004 she was sitting at her principal’s desk at Ichabod Crane High School, not feeling too well, and late that evening she found herself at CMH, where she stayed two weeks with worsening respiratory distress.

But what could have been tragedy ended in triumph thanks to the ICU’s intensive research, knowledge and hope, she said. “Dr. Ramani does not give up ... Dr. Lynch tries one more procedure ... the nurses offer comfort to an 89-year-old mother ... and support to a 31-year-old son who was faced with possibly making life decisions for his mother.

“This facility houses the highest quality care given by individuals who place as much importance on compassion as on ... procedures,” she said. “It’s the best care anywhere.”

Also part of Friday’s ceremony was the unveiling of a work of art donated to CMH by the Danish-born artist Ulla Darni, famous for her paintings on lampshades, chandeliers and glass. Her painting “Angel of New Light” has been installed as the window in the waiting room.

“When the sun shines through it, it’s three paintings [the window and one on either wall],” she said.

The paintings are not done with any conscious planning, but by “allowing the spirit to work through me,” Darni said. “I disappear, get into that space.” She and her husband, Lawry Swidler, are now residents of Acra. The ICU also has two other original Darni paintings on loan.

After training at various art academies, Darni worked four years painting porcelain for the Royal Copenhagen Company. She then moved to the U.S. and in 1990 started painting on the insides of glass lampshades.

They were such a resounding success, Swidler said, that her lamps sold for $22,000 each and were exhibited with the watercolors of England’s Prince Charles. She also achieved success through her ads for Bombay Gin.

For awhile, she was painting and selling chandeliers. But one time Swidler told her, “You can’t sell this as a chandelier; it’s a painting.”

“We went back to flat glass because each painting seemed to have a message,” she said. Usually, her paintings on glass come with a lighting source that includes a dimmer switch. But this is not needed in the ICU because of the natural, healthy light streaming in.

The ICU work took eight years, Ehrlich said, but the construction phase was only six months. It’s the latest phase in a $10 million multi-phase capital project that’s now three-quarters through.

Next, she said, is expansion of the sixth floor, which is all private medical-surgical rooms. Then will come the expansion of the psychiatric unit, a new cafeteria and improvements to the gastrointestinal unit.

Meanwhile, more modest improvements are nearer on the horizon. Surprise said the ICU staff raised $2,000 on a used book sale.

“We’d like to buy a privacy curtain that’s a mural, probably for the isolation room,” she said.

To reach reporter John Mason, please call 518-828-1616, ext. 2272, or e-mail jmason@registerstar.com.

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