Medical Memories of
the Marathon
By Dr. Hugh J. Carroll
On
race day my beat was the Acute Care tent which was supplied
with EKG, defibrillators, and every device and all of the
supplies needed for a modern field emergency room. I was
frequently delighted to find, among the volunteer Critical-Care
staff, doctors who had been my students at various levels
of their training. The weather had a lot to do with the size
and magnitude of distress of our patient load. On a bad day
things could be quite hectic: cots were full, doctors and
nurses moving from patient to patient, starting IV’s,
injecting intravenous glucose, warming patients, rubbing
with ice those with hypothermia, checking BPs, transferring
those at risk to hospitals. As the long day passed admissions slowed down and
patients left the tent, alone or with family. Death was rare, but on one terrible
day 3 young men collapsed and died, one of them in the hospital and one on
the way. All 3 proved to have some sort of heart disease, but all were runners.
Our runners were fast, slow,
young, old, hale, disabled, blind, sighted, serious, comic. At the end of the
race: triumphant, exhilarated, sober, weary, cold, exhausted, limping, confused,
occasionally slightly hysterical, frequently near collapse into the arms of
the ubiquitous volunteers.
When I think
of my days at the Marathon, memories of events and individuals crowd in—Willie
Rios.
Willie Rios was
a small, potbellied sedentary smoker with a stomach ulcer, who at 65 was
retired against his will. He went out walking, and then jogging, and then
running. Willie kept on running, lost his belly, his ulcer and his smoking
habit and proved to be one of the greatest natural runners we had ever seen.
A delightful man, he won a number of senior marathon championships and seemed
to be utterly tireless; the over-60 woman sitting, after completing the course,
on a cot in the Orthopedics tent, who startled the young volunteer recording
her patient-data, when she pulled off her sweat pants, removed a lower-leg
prosthesis and began to massage her aching stump; the 34-year old Italian
man dying of heart failure less than a year earlier, who received a heart
transplant from 15-year old neighbor boy killed in a cycling accident, who
tried jobbing in rehab, made progress at an astounding rate, and now and
has finished the NY Marathon without difficulty; the small group of bright
young people from a cystic-fibrosis clinic in Sweden who volunteered to be
research subjects as they ran the marathon, admirable for their grace and
courage, a source of sadness for their prognosis; Daniel Ortega, medical
director of the Madrid Marathon, family practitioner in his native Toledo,
gentleman and world-class runner, finished 12th in the NY Marathon; the “marathon pig-out” as
my children called the carbohydrate-loading meal of mounds of pasta eaten
by thousands of runners the night before the race, and allowing us the opportunity
each year to chat with excited members of the wonderfully oddball fraternity
from all over the world.#
Andy Rodrigues, an orthopedic
surgeon, was the medical director of the NY marathon, and his wife, Yolanda
(Yolie), was the factotum and enforcer. It was Andy, a good friend, who invited
me to join his staff, and for 15 years I enjoyed our association. Andy and
Yolie died a few years ago, but the memory of these two unselfish and delightful
people is, as in my memory of the Marathon, warm and fond.
Dr. Carroll
is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Electrolyte-Hypertension Division
of the SUNY-Downstate Medical Center. He is a nephrologists whose particular
interest in salt and water metabolism, hypo- and hyperthermia led to his
invitation to join the International Marathon Medical Directors Association
(IMDDA), and to serve the NY Road Runners as consultant physician. ON race
day he was one of the acute-care doctors at the finish line in Central
Park. Dr. Carroll’s running, since he left the Army more than 50
years ago, has been limited to catching an occasional subway train.
