"Crises land in the airport clinic"

Friday, August 13, 2004  

Crises land in the airport clinic  
By Andrew Jacobs
The New York (NY) Times


NEW YORK - International travel can be glamorous. International travel
can be fun. But oops, watch out for that bottle of José Cuervo that
shifted in the overhead storage bin during the flight from Caracas.
Ouch.

Then there's the Cajun chicken in-flight meal that spent a few too many
hours on a steamy runway in Dubai. Ugh.

Running late for the 9:15 p.m. flight to Milan? Bear in mind that you
may not be as nimble as a luggage-vaulting O. J. Simpson. You could end
up like Vivien Siegel, who never made it past John F. Kennedy
International Airport's front doors one recent evening as she began her
voyage to Paris.

Siegel stepped out of her taxi, tripped over a stranger's garment bag
and as fast as you can say "quelle tragedie," ended up on the pavement
with a shattered elbow.

"Call me the klutzy traveler," she said, wincing in pain. "The second I
fell, I knew the trip was over."

More than 34 million people pass through JFK each year and another
35,000 work there as baggage handlers, ticketing agents and security
guards. About 40,000 of them - the accident- prone, the overly anxious
and the grievously injured - end up at a distinctly unglamorous medical
clinic tucked beside a roaring tarmac near Terminal B.

Kennedy Medical Offices, like the airport, never closes. At night, the
staff of 60 thins out to a half dozen paramedics, nurses and X-ray
technicians and, as the takeoffs and landings peter out, they brace
themselves for stretches of boredom punctuated by spurts of mayhem: a
pregnant Bangladeshi passenger in premature labor, a cargo handler with
an amputated digit or a delirious African traveler who may or may not be
showing the telltale signs of Ebola.

Then there's the red telephone that hangs on the wall of the emergency
room whose bracing ring indicates a possible aviation disaster, known as
a Code 33. "That's the mystery and excitement of the airport," said
Maureen Regan, a physician's assistant who works the 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.
shift. "Anything can walk through that door at any hour and chances are
we won't speak their language."

In addition to healing the sick and wounded, the staff helps customs
officials ferret out drug mules who arrive with intestines full of latex
pellets bearing cocaine or heroin. On a recent evening, Dr. Steven
Garner, the clinic president, slid an X-ray of a 34-year-old Colombian
man onto a wall-mounted light box. Garner pointed out the circular
shadows that looped through the man's rib cage. "Cocaine," he
pronounced. "If one of those condoms bursts, he's dead."

Would-be smugglers take note: Once the diagnosis is made, the shackled
passenger is kept in a heavily guarded annex until the drugs are
excreted out. Makers of the film "Maria Full of Grace," which portrays
the odyssey of a teenage mule from Colombia, conducted some of their
research at the clinic.

The post-9/11 slump in aviation travel has hurt the privately owned
clinic's bottom line, forcing Garner to seek business from foreign
airlines, commuter bus companies and the surrounding communities of
Jamaica and Howard Beach. These days a Tokyo-based pilot might stop in
at 2 a.m. for an annual physical, and courtesy van drivers come in for
mandatory drug and alcohol testing after fender benders. Last Thursday
was a fairly typical night. There was the middle-aged businessman who
slammed his finger in the door of a cab, a Swiss flight attendant who
sprained her neck hoisting a bag and a Port Authority police officer
injured while trying to subdue a belligerent limousine driver who was
illegally hustling arriving passengers.

Garner, a 20-year veteran of airport medicine who looks like Gene Wilder
and speaks as fast as an auctioneer, sorted through a pile of X-rays,
many of them airport employees hurt on the job. He pronounced most of
the injuries minor.

"We get a lot of malingerers, like TSA employees who claim they broke
their finger lifting a bag but they're just looking for time off," he
said, referring to the Transportation Security Administration. "A
malingerer can't fake an X-ray."

Already that evening the clinic's paramedics had come to the aid of a
queasy passenger arriving from Istanbul and gone to the airport's taxi
holding area to pick up a cabbie left unconscious in a scuffle with
another driver. "They keep us busy," Garner said of the drivers. "Either
it's heat exhaustion or they're beating each other up."

Then there are the more nebulous ailments, like the one exhibited by
Norma Newman, a sobbing beautician from Brooklyn who arrived in the
emergency room complaining of dizziness, heart palpitations and numbness
in her leg and mouth. Newman, 50, who had come to the airport to fetch a
niece arriving from London, was convinced she was having a stroke or a
heart attack. She was both heartened and dismayed to learn she was
probably having a panic attack.

No sooner had Newman returned to the terminal than Maggie Hoyos walked
in clutching a limp hand. Hoyos, a customer service agent for American
Airlines, had fallen off the scale at the check-in counter in full view
of passengers and fellow employees.

"The embarrassment was worse than the pain," she said. The wrist, Regan
determined, was just a sprain.

Just before midnight, two paramedics, Amy Hauck and Eric Cardamone,
returned from a string of emergency calls. Exhausted and annoyed, they
complained about a passenger in transit, clearly ill, who refused
treatment for fear of missing a connecting flight.

"You'd be surprised how many people would rather board a plane with
chest pain than lose their $200 deposit on a hotel room," Cardamone
said.


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