By K. Richard Douglas
It is common to hear HTM professionals mention that they treat medical equipment as if a family member will be the next person it is used for . In the professional profiles featured in TechNation this is a recurring theme. It is obvious that the biomed community thinks about this possibility.
As the laws of probability go, an HTM professional’s family member will eventually need to depend on that medical equipment and the HTM professional, themselves, may also. The fact that HTM professionals can envision themselves or their family members as potential patients helps their commitment and attention to detail in carrying out their work.
For 17 years, Kurt Krenz has been a biomedical equipment technician at Essentia Health-Virginia hospital in Virginia, Minnesota. Essentia Health-Virginia is a Level IV Trauma Center that was built in 1936. It is an 83-bed hospital. An $18 million state-of-the-art clinic was added in 2005. The hospital was once a city-owned hospital and Krenz worked there when it was the Virginia Regional Medical Center before Essentia Health took over.
Krenz says that Essentia Health has three different regions. He has been a part of the east region. He says that Virginia Hospital is a smaller hospital, served by only two biomeds. The main hub in Duluth for the east region has eight biomeds. He says that with only two biomeds, it was busy quite often. The two biomeds determined who handled what based on area of specialty. Krenz says that his areas of specialty are monitoring, telemetry and the emergency room.
While a vexing problem with equipment troubleshooting or the build out and equipping of a new facility might be a real challenge that many biomeds face, Krenz faces a challenge that eclipses those and one that has taken him off the job for months. Krenz has been dealing with two grade 4 Glioblastoma brain tumors as well as one grade 1 tumor.
His path to the HTM profession, to which he to which he hopes to return, began after serving his country.
Pursuing HTM
Krenz sought out a professional career after leaving the service.
“After I got out of the U.S. Coast Guard, I was looking at what different tech colleges had to offer. I saw biomedical equipment technology and thought that was an interesting field,” he says.
“I had gone to Northwest Technical College in Detroit Lakes to get my AAS degree,” Krenz says.
Krenz has been to several specialty training courses. He went through Spacelabs monitoring school, Alaris Medley series infusion pumps, and in March, Olympus OER-Pro scope washer, but he received his diagnosis just shortly afterwards.
Krenz says that there were some bigger projects around the hospital for the biomeds 10 or 12 years ago and a new set of projects would be coming up soon.
Hobbies
One of Krenz’s hobbies has been beer making. Ironically, because of the medications he takes, he is not able to imbibe. Despite that, over the years, he obtained a lot of experience in the craft after walking into a beer making store for the first time.
“I walked in there and just asked questions and bought a starter kit and started from there. It’s time consuming,” he says.
Krenz says you start by boiling about three gallons of water. “You need certain ingredients. Whatever type of beer you’re making, whether it’s a dark beer or light beer, a lager or ale, you boil the water and then depending on what beer you are making, you add the ingredients during certain times of the boil. Malt is one of the main ingredients, hops is another and grains, and it all depends on what type of beer you’re making that determines what type of hops you use or what type of malt you use,” Krenz says.
The boiling and ingredients portions of the process only take about an hour and a half to two hours, according
to Krenz.
“Then, you put it into a fermenter and let it ferment (depending on the type of beer you are making) for about two weeks. Then, you bottle it and let it sit in the bottle for about four weeks and then it should be about ready to drink. It’s a long process,” Krenz says.
Krenz also enjoys fishing and gardening. He has fished for Walleye and he grows tomatoes and peppers to use in his homemade salsa.
Family includes his dad, brother, twin sisters, two nieces and four nephews. He says that his brother lives in the Virginia area and the other family members live near the Mankato area.
Dealing with Cancer
He has made many trips to Duluth, Minnesota, a 64 mile drive one-way, to have chemotherapy in pill form. More recently, Krenz has been living in an assisted care facility closer to family because of the effects of the chemo. He hopes that, as those side effects improve, he can return home.
“What the chemo was doing to me, I wasn’t able to be by myself. Most of my family is in the Mankato area and found an assisted living that takes somebody my age (45). Hopefully this is temporary because I am not reacting to the chemo (side effects), these other sessions, as I did to the first one,” Krenz says.
He says that the first sessions of chemo really put him out and caused a lot of fatigue. “When I first found this out, I went through six weeks of radiation along with a low dose of chemo pills. The radiation was for six weeks, five days a week, Monday through Friday. The chemo pills, I took every day, seven days a week for that six-week period while I was doing the radiation,” Krenz says.
“Then, I had a four-week break. And then, I was doing another session of chemo; it was a stronger dose, it was double the dose of what I was taking when I was doing radiation. That was one pill a day for five days and then a 23-day break and then I started over again,” he says.
That would be six sessions in total. As of this writing, he had just completed the third and he has three more sessions of taking five daily pills and 23 day breaks in between to go.
One of the side effects of chemo is that many foods have no taste and others taste bad. Krenz says that even bread didn’t taste good. He could eat chicken soup or bananas, but anything that wasn’t on the bland side would upset his stomach. He normally likes spicy foods, but those could not be considered, along with tomato-based foods.
The grade 1 tumor has affected his sight and he needs stronger reading glasses to read.
Krenz is finding that health care insurance isn’t covering all of the required treatments and the out-of-pocket expenses are mounting. A Go Fund Me account was set up to make up the shortfall.
You can help and read more about what he has endured at www.gofundme.com/2b94ub2c