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NOVEMBER 2004

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.

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