By Lisa Rosetta
The Salt Lake Tribune
Copyright 2007 The Salt Lake Tribune
All Rights Reserved
MURRAY, Utah — Snug in her oxygenated, temperature-controlled Isolette, 3-pound Jenessa Nagel crossed her legs and flexed her fingers as her doting father, Paul Nagel, looked on.
It was a big day for the 10-day-old triplet, who made history when she became the first patient, and perhaps the tiniest, to be wheeled through the doors of Intermountain Medical Center (IMC) on Monday.
Just after 6 a.m., Nagel stood in the pre-dawn darkness and snapped pictures as LifeFlight touched down on the helipad at IMC. His delicate baby’s Isolette shielded her from the thrust of the rotors and their deafening sound.
“I was excited,” he said. “I was glad they [all of the triplets] made it OK.”
One of 30 intensive care unit babies flown from LDS Hospital to the sprawling 1.5-million-square-foot IMC campus, Jenessa’s five-minute trek marked the beginning of a massive hospital operation and a new era of health care in the Salt Lake Valley.
About 700 people — orchestrated by command centers at LDS and Cottonwood hospitals, as well as IMC — moved 142 adult acute-care patients, plus the babies, in a brigade of Gold Cross ambulances and the LifeFlight helicopter.
Floor nurses worked throughout the night and the early morning to “package” patients, rounding up their medications, drip IVs, ventilators and other life-support equipment for the trek to the new facilities.
The ambulances, which donated about $200,000 worth of their time to help Intermountain Healthcare with the move, lined up single file across from the LDS emergency entrance and took turns pulling in and hoisting up patients into their cabs.
An EMT and paramedic, many of whom work for Life Flight, accompanied each patient on the ride.
“It has been a huge deal,” LifeFlight nurse Jim ZoBell said around 6:30 a.m. “It’s been busy, exciting and exhausting already.”
The ambulances departed in about 10-minute intervals. Once on the road, they were tracked by LDS Hospital’s command center via satellite. The patients were tracked via a computer program called a dynamic integrated grease board, or DIG.
About a dozen people equipped with walkie talkies and laptop computers monitored the flow of information, including patients’ vital signs, for problems.
Todd Allen, an emergency medicine physician who began working for Intermountain Healthcare a decade ago and was involved in planning the new hospital, teared up as the first wave of patients rolled into IMC.
“It was an emotional experience,” said Allen, who finished his shift at LDS at 1 a.m. then went straight to IMC to begin preparing for the influx of patients. “It’s the real thing. It’s going to be great. It’s really going to be a special place.”
And a busy place.
Around 6:20 a.m., a man complaining of chest pains arrived, the first of an estimated 70,000 patients — 192 a day — that are expected to pay a visit to this medical facility annually, Allen said.
“This is a new day,” he said. “A new era for me and health care.”
Meanwhile, just a few blocks south of IMC, the last ER patients to ever be seen at Cottonwood Hospital were treated and discharged by 9 a.m. Gurneys lined the hallways, and the ER rooms - once among the busiest in the West - were strangely quiet.
Gary Lambert, the last doctor on duty at the hospital, recalled his first day on the job there in 1972, when a man who had driven his truck into a chain-link fence came in with one of the posts — and a chunk of concrete attached to it — stuck in his chest wall.
Using a saw and torch, the doctor and his team were able to remove the post before turning him over to thoracic surgeons.
“For a little community hospital, I thought it was pretty impressive,” said Lambert, who is retiring from emergency medicine to work as the assistant medical director at IMC.
While Cottonwood Hospital’s closure has been in the works for years, ''the feelings are still strong when you look in the rooms and realize what’s gone on over the last 35 years,’' he said.
By 2:20 p.m., the first of 51 patients to be transferred from the hospital was wheeled out to a Gold Cross ambulance. Within a couple of hours, the rest also were gone. Now, only The Orthopaedic Specialty Hospital, or TOSH, remains open.
Nurse Gennie Mulqueen, who worked at Cottonwood Hospital for 26 years, said she too is moving to IMC.
“This is my comfort zone and my comfort will be gone for a little while until I get used to the new hospital,” she said. “It’s sad, it is, because 26 years is a long time and I worked for Dr. Lambert all of those years and I’ve seen a lot of nurses come and go and I’m still here.”
But the Salt Lake Valley, she said, is ready for the new hospital.
“There’s just such an explosion of population that we’ve outgrown this hospital many years ago and it’s absolutely necessary,” she said.
While some patients are reticent to leave the hospital they’ve come to know and depend on, Mulqueen said, those people will eventually become more at ease using IMC.
“They’ll see it in time,” she said. “It will just take a few more visits . . . before they realize this is their home now. And we’re there.”
Nagel, however, said he is already comfortable visiting his triplets; Jenessa, Natalia and Connor; in their new intensive care pod at IMC. Visiting the babies on his way to work in Bluffdale, he said, is “a great way to start out the day.”
Late Monday morning, the tiny trio slumbered, cracking open their eyes periodically to take a peek at their father.