Doctors share work during Flathead Med

Dr. Ashleigh Magill is simultaneously attending to four patients in the emergency department at North Valley Hospital.

Along with a team of other medical professionals, she’s diagnosing and monitoring the patients who have come to the hospital seeking treatment — a 34-year-old pregnant woman, an 8-year-old with an injured arm, an adult man who turns out to have pneumonia and a 55-year-old man suffering from chest pain.

“People come into the emergency department with cardiac arrest or with a sore throat,” she said from the stage last week at the Whitefish Performing Arts Center. “Big or small, day or night, our team will be there and your care will be phenomenal.”

The woman eventually requires surgery and the 8-year-old, after getting an X-ray to diagnose a fractured bone, gets a splint and a teddy bear. The man with pneumonia gets fluids and antibiotics with plans to admit him to the hospital, and the man with chest pain turns out to be suffering a heart attack so he is prepped and transported to Kalispell Regional Medical Center for further treatment.

“Now maybe I would have time to grab some breakfast,” says Magill with a smile, noting that at this point in the scenario all of the patients have been treated or transferred to other doctors who will continue their care.

Magill, who is NVH’s emergency medical director, provided a look into the life of an emergency physician during Flathead Med at the Whitefish Performing Arts Center. Three other physicians in internal medicine, orthopedics and pediatrics also presented cases of real-life medicine during the event sponsored by North Valley Hospital.

NVH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jason Cohen opened the evening noting that the physicians would present interesting cases from their fields, but also a take-away for the evening that organizers plan to make an annual event.

“We don’t have adequate care here,” he said. “We have exceptional care in the Flathead Valley. To deliver great care takes a team — as you listen to these cases think about all the people behind the scenes.”

Dr. Federico Seifarth, a pediatric surgeon at Montana Children’s Specialists, ended his presentation showing photos of his patient baby Torin just 24 hours after surgery smiling and a few weeks later outside playing with family. Torin, now a bit older, was also in the theater drawing applause from the audience.

Torin suffered from a diaphragmatic hernia, a birth defect that occurs when the diaphragm does not properly form allowing for his intestine to move into his chest. Though the defect is most often diagnosed before birth, for Torin it wasn’t discovered until his parents brought him into the hospital at 4 months old after he was vomiting and refused to eat.

A team of pediatric specialists diagnosed him and proceeded to operate to repair the issue. Operating on such a small patient is not easy, Seifarth noted, showing a video of clip of the operation and pointing out that the instruments used are the size of chopsticks working in a very small space.

“For five stitches it takes an hour to suture the diaphragm closed,” Seifarth explained.

Surgeon Dr. John Means presented the case of an 84-year-old woman from Sidney, Montana, who was able to seek treatment in her home state while staying with her daughter in the Flathead Valley. Surgeons performed robotic laparoscopic surgery to remove her spleen and to make repairs to her stomach which was bulging into her chest and was upside down. They performed two major surgeries with six incisions, 1 centimeter in size.

Means said the high level of technology at the hospitals in the Flathead allows for great care and for patients to stay close to home when receiving treatment.

“It’s mind-blowing to see the technology and the talent we’ve accumulate here,” he said. “It’s all about delivering high-quality care and keeping Montanans in Montana.”

Dr. Tim Joyce, an orthopedics and sports medicine surgeon, using X-ray images showed normal bones and joints alongside images of those where patients required surgery to repair broken bones or replace joints.

Joyce said the future of orthopedic surgery will be more use of robotic and computer technology, but his talk pointed out that the field has already come a long ways.

Showing a historical picture of a patient lying in bed in traction, he said, a bone break in the pre-World War II era would have required a patient to lay in bed for up to 12 weeks while they healed.

“Today someone with a hip fracture can be standing immediately after surgery,” he said. “A patient who needed a total joint replacement after a hip fracture as the result of a fall could be out of the hospital in one to two days.”