The pulse of a hospital
Newton-Wellesley treats patients with a mix of the high tech and the hands on
NEWTON -- It's still before dawn on a frigid morning in midwinter, but Newton-Wellesley Hospital is already roaring to life.
A large hospital like Newton-Wellesley resembles a city within a city. It has its own rhythms, a workday, a night life, and a vast array of citizens -- from professionals to floor cleaners to engineers to volunteers, from wealthy to poor, and, of course, from the sick and the healthy.
This is a day in the life of a hospital.
6:59 a.m.: Day-shift nurses and other staff members are streaming in. Dawn hasn't even broken yet as technician Kathy McCann and nurse Darryl DuVall stride into the hospital's surgical wing, with Kathy clinging to her big cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee as if it were a life preserver. They both work in the anesthesia department and describe this time of the day as almost like stepping on a fast escalator -- whoosh, it takes you at its own speed, no turning back or slowing down.
"You have to be on the ball right away," DuVall says. "There's no coming to work and reading your e-mail or getting a cup of coffee. You have to do that before you get here.
"You are on at seven o'clock. You have to be ready."
7:13 a.m.: Surgical technician Stephanie Felix and registered nurses Fran O'Shea and Heather Bovat are headed in the opposite direction.
Their overnight shifts in the labor & delivery department are over, and their breath makes little white puffs in the frigid air as they head toward their cars, homes, and, eventually, sleep.
7:33 a.m.: The morning bustle has already enveloped much of the hospital. Yet a conference-sized room on the surgical wing's second floor remains an oasis of calm, with dim lighting, meditative New Age music, and the soothing voice of physical therapist Hazel Dreyer as she leads a yoga class for cardiac patients. Her four students are in their 50s or 60s and have had a heart attack or heart surgery or both. The class aims not only to help get them in shape but also to reduce the sorts of daily stresses that could land them right back in the cardiac unit.
The students describe the yoga class as both meditative and physically demanding.
"Those hamstrings should be screaming at you right now," Dreyer says during a series of bent-over stretches. "And that's just fine."
8:12 a.m.: Food service employee Beverly Park puts Cheerios, milk, Yoplait yogurt, cream cheese, peach slices, and a bagel on a large beige fiberglass tray, one of more than 2,600 meals that the hospital's huge central kitchen and satellite cafeterias will prepare during the day.
9:20 a.m.: Technician Susan Pizzano is scurrying around the center supply area of the surgical department, one of three pods that serve a total of 15 operating rooms. Each pod is stacked to the ceiling with linens, tubes, prepackaged instrument kits for various kinds of surgeries, and other items. Technicians and nurses never want to be more than a few feet from supplies because seconds matter when a patient is undergoing surgery.
Pizzano is assisting with an exploratory laparotomy; surgeons have opened the abdominal cavity of a 45-year-old woman to check out something suspicious that showed up on an ultrasound scan.
Pizzano quickly grabs a bottle of sterile surgical fluid from what looks like a large refrigerator but is actually a warmer -- it keeps the liquid above 100 degrees. The warm fluid is used to offset the heat lost by a patient whose insides are exposed to room-temperature air.
9:40 a.m.: In the surgical recovery room, 95-year-old Eleanor Fraize of Auburndale is chatting with registered nurse Judy Biuso. Fraize says she had been in a hospital once before, 10 years ago, when she had an ulcer, but this will be her first overnight stay.
"It was just some polyps," she says. "It's no big deal."
10:25 a.m.: When most people think of lab tests, they imagine someone bending over a microscope. Lab director Sharon Brenner is old enough to remember those days, but Newton-Wellesley's laboratory could never handle 1.8 million tests per year without the two giant, white and green automated analyzers manufactured by the Bayer Corp.
Test tubes are placed in a conveyor belt, where a scanner reads their bar codes. Then a robotic arm grabs a tube and places it into the analyzer, where a robotic needle extracts a sample. Once the sample is analyzed, the machine enters the results in the hospital's central computer, so nurses and doctors can read them without leaving the ward.
The Bayer machines can process 1,500 tests per hour, but the lab operation is actually a whimsical mix of new technology and old -- samples are delivered to the lab from around the hospital via a pneumatic tube system not all that different from the one developed for the London Stock Exchange in the 1850s.
10:42 a.m.: Fire alarms flash all over the hospital and a loudspeaker announces a "Code Red."
It's a false alarm: A maintenance worker had accidentally bumped a smoke detector in the basement.
11:35 a.m.: Carpentry supervisor Steve Carver, 52, and his crew are installing countertops and sinks on the third floor of the main hospital building. They custom-design and build almost every fixture in the hospital from scratch, including these Corian countertops, which have a special lip to keep water from dripping on the floor and creating slippery puddles. Carver's crew also fabricates the hospital's props and floats for local parades, including a giant stethoscope that they fashioned from flexible piping, metal tubing, and a trash-can lid.
12:59 p.m.: The hospital's CEO, Dr. Michael Jellinek, chairs the weekly meeting of the Service and Operations Committee -- basically the entire top staff of the hospital -- which reviews and responds to patient complaints and compliments.
1:13 p.m.: Janet Stinehart, a nurse-manager from a ward on Three West, tells the committee that an elderly woman called with a complaint but that it was difficult to understand what she was saying over the phone. Stinehart says she plans to visit the woman at her home.
"Our first house call!" says Jellinek as the room bursts into applause.
1:50 p.m.: In the maternity department, 2-day-old Liam Joseph Connolly is just starting to open his eyes after a nap to look at his beaming mother, Holly, 29, and proud father Joe, 28, both of Waltham. Liam had been due the previous Friday but didn't appear until three days later.
"He's just a little extra cooked," Mom says.
2:54 p.m.: Registered nurse Joan Devlin, 61, is putting her money where her mouth is as technicians use a
"I have been a little delinquent, to be honest," she says of the test. "My last one of these was nine years ago, and I tell people to take them once every five."
3:45 p.m.: Dianne Marcotte, the chief pharmacy technician, is in the central pharmacy, using a computer to check the status of the hospital's automated drug-dispensing machines. Computer-controlled and situated on every ward, the dispensers have replaced the old locked drug cabinets and are smart enough to tell the central pharmacy when they are running low on any of the roughly 500 drugs they administer.
Some hospital staff jokingly refer to the dispensers as "the candy machines."
4:10 p.m.: Summer Eurkus, a 22-year-old college student from Palmer, is in the physical therapy department's hand clinic getting help from therapist Helen Ranger. Eurkus lost the tip of a finger when a classmate unexpectedly slammed a door in her dorm. She now finds it difficult to draw or use scissors -- crucial skills for someone studying fashion design.
5:04 p.m.: Most of the administrative staff is streaming toward the parking lot as Newton-Wellesley downshifts toward the evening. No one is more relieved than telecommunications supervisor Cheryl Spaulding of Southbridge, who is one of the two or three operators at a time who handle the hospital's 2,500 daily calls.
"It's nice, you get to slow down a bit," says Spaulding, who has memorized more than 500 internal hospital telephone numbers to save herself the time of looking them up.
6:30 p.m.: In an outlying office building on the hospital campus, the gastric bypass support group is meeting. It's a packed house, with more that 60 people who have undergone the stomach-reducing surgery for the morbidly obese or are considering it. Some are accompanied by loved ones.
Members tell stories unfathomable to those who don't know the world that 300-, 400-, and 500-pound people live in. Some report losing as many as 70 pounds within six weeks after the surgery, and how their Type II diabetes simply disappeared after a week or two.
"This is your cancer," Dr. Pablo Gazmuri, the director of gastric bypass surgery, gently tells the dozen or so undecided candidates of their obesity. "The question is, are you going to fight it?"
8:35 p.m.: Kim Gannon, a child-life specialist in the pediatric emergency department, is blowing soap bubbles for smiling 19-month-old Ben Wertheim, whose parents brought him in with a 103-degree fever that he has not been able to shake. Like a good portion of youngsters who visit the ER, Ben was alarmingly lethargic at home but has brightened up considerably with the excitement of a trip to the hospital.
9:32 p.m.: Ben, David, and Jody Wertheim leave the hospital, reassured that Ben was just suffering from a particularly nasty cold virus.
9:39 p.m.: David Wertheim is back. Ben left his pacifier in the exam room. A few minutes later, Dad emerges victorious and heads back to the minivan.
10:15 p.m.: Emergency room triage nurse Jenn Dougherty looks out over the ER's brand-new waiting area, part of the hospital's $80 million expansion of the department. It is almost empty now except for a mother with a teenage girl who has an arm in a sling and a thirty-something man who has fallen asleep near a big-screen TV tuned to the Food Network. Dougherty says she likes this kind of work at this time of night despite not knowing what the next ambulance will bring in.
"There are a lot of folks that come in and you know they have nowhere else to go . . . or they have something acute happening to them," she says. "And hopefully, more times than not, you can help them so they can go home."
Ralph Ranalli can be reached at rranalli@globe.com. 
