Lois Chase used to be a gymnast and coached tennis for years. And she and her husband love taking cross-country road trips in their motor home. But the 73-year-old Chase has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since 1978, and the condition has affected every aspect of that active life.

“It’s very painful,” Chase says. “My hands were so bad that I couldn’t even open doors. Then one day I met a lady on the beach who told me about Dr. John Hand and how he made a difference in her life.”

“Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that can lead to progressive joint destruction, deformity and chronic pain,” Hand, of Schofield, Bright and Hand Orthopedics, explains. “Treating a patient with a rheumatoid hand is both high-risk and high-reward; if you’re not careful, someone who has a fair amount of deformity but a hand that functions well may [after surgery] have a hand that looks better but functions worse. If it’s successful, however, you can make a significant impact in the patient’s life.”

Hand operated on both of Chase’s hands, performing surgery on the right one first and the left two years ago. “In a case like Lois’, I use rubber knuckles, which are made of a plastic-like, rubber material,” he says. “The goal of the surgery is to improve pain and realign the digits to improve function. So we’ll replace a patient’s joints with elastic implants and realign them so that the joints act as spacers between the bones.”

“I didn’t realize doctors could even do this,” Chase says of her new joints. “It’s a long recovery process. But now my hands feel like they’re mine again. He’s given me my life back.” —Megan McDonald

SUNNY OUTLOOK
Jane Scannell’s skin cancer has a positive prognosis after treatment by dermatologist Dr. Susan Weinkle.

Jane Scannell is a busy woman. In addition to her everyday routine, she likes to travel and takes care of her mother. So it’s not surprising that, after moving to Sarasota three years ago, she put her own well-being on the back burner for awhile.

“When I was younger, I used to get sunburned all the time,” Scannell, 68, says. “About 25 years ago, I had what was diagnosed as an inner cyst in my nose. I had surgery, but had to repeat the process a few years later. When I went to see the dermatologist after moving here, he told me my cyst looked like basal cell carcinoma and did a biopsy. The results came back positive and I was referred to Dr. Susan Weinkle.”

Basal cell carcinoma, or BCC, is the most common form of cancer and is generally caused by overexposure to the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Weinkle, a Stanford-trained dermatologist and skin cancer expert, treated the disease through Mohs surgery.

“With Mohs surgery, you excise the skin cancer and small sections around it,” Weinkle explains. “The tissue is then put on a cryostat, frozen, stained and looked at under the microscope to see if there’s residual cancer. If there is, you go back into the operating room and keep taking more tissue until all the cancer is out. The cancer is taken out, pathology is performed and the defect is repaired all in one day, in one spot, and in one office under local anesthesia.”

Scannell is thrilled with the results. “I’m doing beautifully,” she says. “And Dr. Weinkle is a lovely person. She doesn’t rush you, and she follows up and explains things. She’s a petite little dynamo.” —Megan McDonald

HEART HEALTHY
Thanks to a quick-thinking team of doctors, Gary Boylan walked out of Sarasota Memorial Hospital seven days after a heart attack.

Port Charlotte resident Gary Boylan is generally healthy, which is why, when he started feeling ill on a Sunday afternoon in March, he asked his wife, Pat, to take him to Englewood Community Hospital. “When we got to the emergency room,” he says, “I felt better, so my wife asked me if I wanted to talk a walk before we went inside. She turned to lock the car, and when she turned back around I was lying on the ground [in] cardiac arrest.”

A team from Englewood rushed Boylan, 60, into the E.R., charged his heart seven times to get it pumping again, and called Dr. Stephen Culp at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where Boylan was airlifted. Culp, an interventional cardiologist at Heart Specialists of Sarasota and a graduate of Yale and the University of Vermont Medical School, treated Boylan, who was comatose when he arrived.