Expansion

The hospital board of trustees in September 1985 appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Frank Longino to consider whether the hospital’s organ transplant program should be expanded to include heart, liver, and pancreas in addition to the kidney transplants already being performed. Dr. Walter Pories, chairman of the ECU Department of Surgery, described the accomplishments of the kidney transplant program, which had transplanted 10 of the 12 kidneys that had been performed in the entire state during the month before. The hospital and medical school had also led organ procurement efforts over the entire country. Should the expansion of the program be approved, heart transplants would be added next.

Dr. Longino’s committee reported back to the trustees a month later that the organ transplant program could be cost effective, and that the medical school had guaranteed to absorb any costs the hospital could not recover. The board approved the expansion.

Dr. Jon Tingelstad, chief of pediatrics, provided the trustees with information about a possible Children’s Hospital within PCMH, to include the pediatric department, the neonatal intensive care unit, and the newborn nursery. The trustees took no action at the time, but accepted Dr. Tingelstad’s request to study the proposal. At its monthly meeting in November, the board approved a task force to study the concept of setting up a children’s hospital within the hospital. The task force was to be made up of Dr. Tingelstad, Marilyn Rhodes, vice president for nursing services, a pediatrician in private practice in the community, to be chosen later, David Speir, a trustee, and Fred Brown, hospital vice president. The study was completed, and on its recommendation the Children’s Hospital was established during the following year. It became one of the hospital’s most important centers for serving the region.

The growth in children’s and women’s healthcare continued. In February 1995 the medical center held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new pediatric intensive care unit and its new admissions lobbies for the Children’s Hospital and Women’s Health Services.

EastCare Helicopter Crash

EastCare Air Ambulance Service carried out 84 more emergency flights than expected during its first six months of operation. Transporting patients to the hospital who might have had to find facilities elsewhere or who would have died was a major benefit to the region, in spite of the risk associated with air transports.
The EastCare helicopter flew to the U.S. Naval Hospital at Camp Lejeune at 8:59 p.m. on Thursday, January 8, 1987 to transport a 3-month-old child, Xenia Lewis, daughter of Marine Cpl. and Mrs. David Lewis, who had been suffering from epileptic seizures, to the PCMH pediatric intensive care unit. At about 9:30 p.m., the helicopter crashed in Jones County, in the Hoffman Forest near Pollocksville. The three members of the crew were killed: the pilot, Perry L. Reynolds and flight nurses Mike McGinnis and Pam Demaree.

Fourteen minutes after the ambulance helicopter took off, Nurse Demaree made an emergency broadcast on a medical frequency, “Mayday! Mayday! Fire on board.” Then, “We’re going down.” After a second broadcast of the message, nothing more was heard. EastCare staffers and others at PCMH listened to the calls, fearing the worst. They knew that there had been three deaths just four months earlier in the crash of an air ambulance helicopter in western North Carolina.

It appeared at the crash scene that the pilot tried to land from the northeast among pine trees 20 or more feet tall. The helicopter created a crater five feet deep, and burned after crashing on a windrow from logging debris. About 9:40 p.m., a Marine search and rescue team from the New River Marine Corps Air Station located the burning wreckage about 20 miles north of Jacksonville.

A long, narrow trench between one of the sheared-off rotor blades and the ground at the edge of the windrow suggested that the blades had been turning when the aircraft hit the ground. Most of the cabin of the air ambulance had been burned away. The last body was taken from the wreckage about 2 a.m., and all were taken to Jacksonville.

EastCare, which before the crash had flown 858 missions without an accident over its 21 months of operation, indefinitely suspended service after the crash. Dr. Kathleen Cline, assistant medical director of EastCare, would not speculate on the cause of the catastrophe, awaiting an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. A preliminary investigation by the NTSB shortly after the crash found that the helicopter was banking to the right with its nose down when it crashed, but two months later, the causes for the catastrophe were still under investigation by the two agencies.

Perry Reynolds had flown 261 missions for EastCare. He was the lead pilot of the team of three employed by OmniFlight Airways, from which EastCare leased its helicopters. He was trained as a helicopter pilot by the military, had flown in Vietnam, and had flown helicopters for most of the 20 years since his training.
Mike McGinnis, the chief flight nurse for the EastCare program, had been employed shortly after the helicopter service was planned. He had flown 133 missions for EastCare. Before coming to Greenville, he had been an emergency care nurse in Chapel Hill and Durham.

Pam Demaree, the assistant chief flight nurse, had worked at PCMH since the early 1980s. She joined EastCare at its beginning, and had flown 172 missions.

Dave McRae, hospital senior vice president, said that many things would have to be investigated before the hospital board could decide whether to continue the EastCare program, and how it would be restructured after the death of its key people.

The EastCare staff, outfitted in their distinctive blue uniforms, had been a tremendous source of pride throughout eastern North Carolina. Cards, letters, flowers, and memorial donations poured in to offer homage to the lost crew. A crowd of mourners estimated at more than 1,000 filled Jarvis United Methodist Church in downtown Greenville and spilled out into Washington Street. Many of them represented rescue squads from throughout the region, coming to pay respects to McGinnis, Demaree, and Reynolds.

First Pancreas Transplant

About 130 kidney transplants had been performed at PCMH since the hospital’s board of trustees had authorized expanding the organ transplant program in 1985.

A 36-year-old Martin County farmer received the first combined pancreas and kidney transplant in North Carolina between Wednesday night July 16, 1986 and 4 a.m. Thursday. Dr. Francis T. Thomas led the surgical transplant team that performed the operation. There were three other ECU School of Medicine surgeons participated in the operation: Drs. Paul. R. G. Cunningham, Larry S. Lewis, and Beth Foil. The patient’s physician was Dr. Joseph Newman. Dr. Jose Caro, a diabetes specialist, was a consultant in the case.

Dr. Walter Pories, chief of surgery, said the patient had chronic juvenile onset diabetes diagnosed when he was 17 years old. His pancreas was unable to produce insulin, and as an effect of his diabetes, his kidneys had begun to fail about three years before. Without the transplant he would have required renal dialysis for the rest of his life, and the diabetes would most likely have progressed, causing damage to other organs, possibly blindness and circulatory problems including gangrene in his feet and legs. Such kidney-pancreas transplants are rare in the U.S.

First Heart Transplant

When the medical school opened in Greenville in 1977, said Dr. Walter J. Pories, medical care in the region did not meet national standards. Ten years later, PCMH and the school had improved existing services and established additional ones to where the most advanced of surgical procedures could be performed. Pories also said, “Just like people in eastern North Carolina deserve roads, they deserve heart transplants.”
About 130 kidney transplants had already been performed at the hospital. The surgeons there had the capability to do heart transplants for several months before the operation was performed for the first time. However, an appropriate match between a heart donor and the recipient had not been made until the day of the operation.

Open-heart surgery had started in July 1984, and during its first six months, the cardiac surgery team had performed operations on over 90 patients, mostly coronary artery bypass grafts, and about a quarter of them heart valve replacements or repair. By 1988, three heart surgeons were doing altogether 500 operations a year.

The first heart transplant at PCMH was done on a 59-year-old Beaufort County man, Malcolm Huffman, on February 17, 1987. Drs. Randolph Chitwood and Mark Williams led the team that performed the procedure. The patient was listed in critical but stable condition after the six-hour operation.

Dave McRae, senior vice president of the hospital, said at a news conference that the patient was formerly an auto mechanic, disabled since a heart attack last summer. “His doctors had recently listed him in critical condition without hope of improvement, except through a heart transplant,” McRae added.

The heart transplant was the first one done in North Carolina east of Durham, where Duke University Medical Center had performed several. The operation was also being done at Charlotte Memorial Hospital, Bowman-Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, and N.C. Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. The Carolina Organ Procurement Agency coordinated organ donations for the area east of Greensboro, with offices in Greenville and Chapel Hill.

Surgery Chief Pories felt that the expanded services and the attention that heart transplants bring would encourage more people to donate organs.

PCMH’s first heart transplant patient went home on March 31, six weeks after his operation. Huffman was taken through the hospital lobby in a wheelchair, guided by Nurse Wendy Bridgers, and was met by reporters and well-wishers. He responded to their attention, but as he left, he had turned away to talk to his wife, Katie. She had earlier told reporters she was grateful to be able to do something that she had never thought they would be able to do—return home with her husband. Huffman’s daughter, Karol, walked beside her father’s wheelchair, carrying a sheaf of lilies. His son, Paul Huffman, drove the car that took him away from the hospital.