Winter Park Memorial shuts down cardiac-pulmonary rehab

It’s only a short walk down a hallway to the living room inside Fran Gramarosa’s Winter Springs home, but for the 68-year-old housewife the couple dozen steps from her bedroom feel like a thousand to her lungs.

“Let me catch my breath for a minute,” Gramarosa said.

She takes a seat on a leather couch in front of her TV and tinkers with the black satchel she carries with her every moment, a five-pound air tank secured inside. Gramarosa turns a green dial and the nozzle quickly feeds oxygen up through a plastic tube to her nose. She takes three deep breaths, her lungs revitalized for the moment.

Gramarosa can’t leave her home or fall asleep without her oxygen tank, but the wheezing woman says she feels stronger than ever. It’s all thanks to a rehab program in Winter Park, she said, well worth drive she makes every Tuesday and Thursday.

But almost two weeks ago, Gramarosa breathed a sigh of dismay. That program would be shut down by early next month.

Florida Hospital’s Winter Park Memorial Hospital will end its cardiac-pulmonary rehabilitation program on May 1 to make room for an expansion of its radiology area, leaving 180 to 200 patients without a program they say improved their quality of life and potentially saved them.

The program at Winter Park Memorial has taught patients breathing techniques, nutrition and exercise sessions since 1995. Central Florida residents with heart and lung ailments work out with arm bicycles, leg press machines and treadmills under close observation of a nurse, a therapist and an exercise physiologist.

The staff encourages each patient to reach new health goals and milestones, all while keeping an eye on their oxygen, blood pressure and heart rate for safety.

It almost gives the patients a feeling of competition, said Gramarosa, who’s attended the program for seven months and noticed her walking distance of six minutes on a treadmill climb by 18 percent.

“It was a full program: mental, physical and spiritual,” Gramarosa said. “They really gave us the motivation to keep working hard.”

“They were right there goading us on.”

Gramarosa’s pulmonary class got news of the program’s closing on April 1, finding notice letters stowed inside their oxygen tank bags while leaving class.

“We said, ‘This is a terrible April Fools’ joke.’”

The program will be closed for at least two years until Winter Park Memorial builds a new facility in 2016, according to the letter.

“One of their slogans is ‘Live to be 100,’” said Judy Henry, a Winter Park resident who’s been in the program for five years.

“I’d rather have quality of life than number of years, but if that’s a goal than they’ve really not followed through for us.”

The conversion of the program’s room into radiology space will be just one component of an upcoming effort to reconstruct a section of the hospital built in the 1950s, Director of Respiratory Care Russ Morgan said.

Patients in the meantime will be absorbed by rehab programs at Florida Hospital’s Orlando, Kissimmee and Apopka locations, he said.

Their decision to include the rehab program room in the reconstruction project didn’t come easily, said Morgan, who noted that the Kissimmee and Apopka locations won’t offer the cardio part of the program.

“This was not taken lightly,” he said.

“There was no safe area for our patients in this facility.”

But Florida Hospital spokesperson Samantha Kearns O’Lenick said that patients will still receive the same level of care at the new locations.

“When the patients come here at Orlando, we have a concierge service that will meet them there and take those patients back to cardiac-rehab, so it’s a pretty seamless process for them,” Kearns O’Lenick said.

Central Florida residents already faced challenges with available space at Winter Park Memorial’s cardiac-pulmonary rehab program – a requirement for any patient seeking a lung or heart transplant. Morgan confirmed that Winter Park’s soon-to-be-terminated program has a current waiting list of 80 patients.

The loss of that program could make it that much more difficult for new patients to find a way in, Henry said.

“They just can’t absorb that many; they don’t have the space,” she said

“There are a lot of people who really need that exercise program. I just think the hospital should have looked ahead and seen that there was going to be a problem.”

Gramarosa knows very well what caused her lung condition. She had been a smoker for 35 years, but kicked the habit 18 years ago.

Her administrative assistant job at a municipality 25 years ago didn’t help either, Gramarosa said. She remembers breathing pungent fumes at her desk for a year while a janitor mixed undiluted cleaning chemicals to mop the floors with each day

“They had to twice call the fire department to ventilate the building,” Gramarosa said. “It smelt like an indoor swimming pool.”

It all caught up with Gramarosa in 1996, when she noticed a constant shortness of breath and became completely disabled. Doctors diagnosed her with COPD emphysema, which has since reached the “end stage” where lung capacity reaches below 30 percent.

She’ll make the longer drive to the downtown Orlando location, she said, despite considering herself a nervous driver.

But Gramarosa said she doesn’t have much of choice. Doctors told her she needs the rehab to prepare for a future transplant – she needs both of her lungs replaced.

“I don’t intend to just die,” Gramarosa said.

“I have to keep breathing.”

But Gramarosa fears even more for the health of other patients in her pulmonary class. She looks over a petition she wrote to keep the program alive and counts signatures and addresses from 30 patients. Some live right up the street from Winter Park Memorial while others commute from as far away as DeBary and Chuluota.

Most of the patients are seniors, so anyone who can’t make the transition to one of the new sites could be in danger, Gramarosa said.

The hospital may be well within their right to move the patients, she said, but that doesn’t mean it’s in their best interest.