Academy Awards
Until recently, Charlie Arnold was able to control his irregular heartbeat with medication. But he's been hospitalized several times in the past six months with palpitations and dizziness so severe he feared he would pass out.
Arnold and his wife, Erika, have traveled from their Lewes, Delaware, home to see Hugh Calkins, pioneer of a procedure called catheter ablation and one of 11 physicians at The Johns Hopkins Hospital inducted this year into the Miller-Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence. "I'm hoping with this surgery to get some of my life back," says Arnold, 53, who is the pastor of Seaside Baptist Church, president of his own power-wash company and a volunteer firefighter.
His 57-year-old physician also has notable credentials. Calkins has written some 450 papers about heart irregularities and serves as president of the 6,000-member Heart Rhythm Society. He's been a full professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for more than a decade and directs the hospital's arrhythmia service and electrophysiology laboratory. Read more >
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