Women’s Health Provider’s Quick Thinking Saves Patient’s Life

Sharleen and Adam Storey were having one of those very special days every family with children can remember. Sharleen was delivering their daughter Freya at Valley View Hospital, under the supervision of Dr. Joel Dickens, one of the excellent OB/GYNs at Women’s Health. “I’m from South Africa, and I originally wanted a ‘bush birth,’ as natural as possible,” she recalls. “But with a C-section necessary, of course we couldn’t do that. But we knew we were in great hands with Dr. Dickens.”

Sharleen would soon realize how right she was.

Valley View Hospital—and American hospitals in general—can seem almost magical in their use of modern technology and equipment. It’s easy to see medical school as a very specialized version of technical training, with physicians learning which buttons to push when and relying on their machines rather than their training.

Doctors know, however, that this view is far, far from the truth. Even as our medical personnel benefit from the most cutting-edge training and equipment, sometimes the knowledge necessary to save patients’ lives comes from less obvious places, as Dr. Joel Dickens can attest.

After Freya was delivered, Sharleen’s condition took a turn for the worse. “I lost consciousness,” she says. “I started just going in and out, and it was clear right away that Dr. Dickens was concerned. He told me that I had to get in for exploratory surgery right away, and the sense of urgency he had wasn’t something I’d seen before—everything happened very quickly. They called Adam and told him I had to go back into surgery, and then I was there.”

Just before she went under, Sharleen remembers asking Dr. Dickens if she would see her family again. “He squeezed my hand and promised that yes, I would,” she says. “Then I went under, and Dr. Dickens took it from there.”

He did so not with some cutting-edge gadget or advanced modern clinical technique. Instead, like any excellent physician would, he called on a lifetime of learning and experience to find a way to save his patient.