HEART HEALTHY
Thanks to a quick-thinking team of doctors, Gary Boylan walked out of Sarasota Memorial Hospital seven days after a heart attack.

Port Charlotte resident Gary Boylan is generally healthy, which is why, when he started feeling ill on a Sunday afternoon in March, he asked his wife, Pat, to take him to Englewood Community Hospital. “When we got to the emergency room,” he says, “I felt better, so my wife asked me if I wanted to talk a walk before we went inside. She turned to lock the car, and when she turned back around I was lying on the ground [in] cardiac arrest.”

A team from Englewood rushed Boylan, 60, into the E.R., charged his heart seven times to get it pumping again, and called Dr. Stephen Culp at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where Boylan was airlifted. Culp, an interventional cardiologist at Heart Specialists of Sarasota and a graduate of Yale and the University of Vermont Medical School, treated Boylan, who was comatose when he arrived.

“When it comes to a heart attack, time is muscle,” Culp explains. “We installed an intra-aortic balloon pump to support his blood pressure, performed diagnostic cardiac catheterization, and inserted a stent to revascularize the left descending artery.”

Boylan walked out of the hospital seven days later, and both patient and doctor credit that to the teams at both hospitals. “A study recently said that [heart] patients receive worse care on the weekends,” Culp says. “That’s not Sarasota. Our employees give up their personal time to be there for their patients.”

“There was an incredible sensitivity in communication by Dr. Culp,” Boylan says. “He was there to take care of me but also to keep [my wife and sons] informed.”

“The best part of my job is being involved in a very intense way in the lives of patients of all backgrounds,” Culp says. “It enriches my life to know them.” —Megan McDonald