Heart of the Matter
Colleague-turned-patient gets a new heart and a fresh perspective
By Robin Stanley
In Arabic, “Taufiqul” means “luck,” fitting for Taufiqul Chowdhury, whose life has been marked by incredible twists of fate.
In early 2020, Chowdhury was a bartender considering a career change. He decided to pursue nursing just months before the onset of the COVID pandemic.
“COVID was a message because instead of running away from working in a hospital, I wanted to work there. It was like a calling,” he says.
That summer, Chowdhury took a job as a transporter at Hartford Hospital while studying. His duties included transporting bodies to the morgue. “I went from being a civilian to bringing four or five bodies to the morgue at a time,” he explains.
Soon after, his grandmother died of an aneurysm at Hartford Hospital. “Knowing where her body would end up was a lot on my psyche. It felt like another calling,” he says.
Chowdhury wanted to explore other areas of the hospital and joined the Specialty Trained and Responsive (STAR) Team as a patient care attendant. He helped improve the patient experience for those ready to be discharged by creating a transition lounge in the Conklin Building, not knowing he would become a patient soon himself.
In June 2022, Chowdhury contracted COVID, experiencing mild symptoms initially. However, a few weeks later, he developed shortness of breath so went to UConn Health Emergency Department to get checked out.
“The next thing I know I’m surrounded by cardiologists telling me they are flying me by LIFE STAR to Hartford Hospital,” he recalls.
In acute heart failure, he was diagnosed with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and was rushed to Bliss 10 ICU, the same unit where he worked the week before monitoring patient heart rhythms.
“Now I was the one on the heart dashboard,” he says. “It felt surreal.
Chowdhury needed a heart transplant. Remarkably, he spent less than 10 hours on the transplant list, becoming one of the fastest heart transplants ever performed at the hospital. He woke up on Bliss 3 North, a new floor he helped set up a few months earlier, moving patients and stocking heart pillows for transplant patients in the supply closet.
“Little did I know in a few months’ time, I’d receive one of those pillows and stay on Bliss 3 North for a month,” he says.
When Chowdhury was ready to return to work, his immunocompromised status meant limited patient interaction. Instead, he played a key role in moving the transition lounge he’d help create to the Jefferson Building. These days, he continues to work at Hartford Hospital, though in a different capacity. He now works in human resources with timekeeping and per diem in the staffing office. He’s thankful to be able to stay where he believes he was destined to work.
I feel like I’ve had the full Hartford Hospital experience as a colleague and patient,” he says. “Maybe I was meant to work here alongside the people who would end up saving my life.”
Finding Her Calling
Morales-Gabelmann’s past guides her when helping kids have a better future
By Elissa Bass
Many factors can influence someone’s career choice: following in a parent’s footsteps, having a specific skill, reading a book and finding a character’s work inspiring.
For Tracy Morales-Gabelmann, becoming a licensed clinical social worker was more personal. She wanted to make sure children never had the experiences she had growing up.
“As a child and young adult, I faced many challenges in life – physical and emotional abuse, kidnapping, emancipation from my parents, foster care placement,” says MoralesGabelmann, a clinical coordinator at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital. “I was fortunate to have a few caring people in my life who provided the motivation and encouragement to become more than a product of my circumstances.
“When I took my first psychology class, I was hooked.”
These days, Morales-Gabelmann does eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy with adults who have trauma from past sexual abuse. Earlier in her career, she worked closely with children who had experienced the worst.
She remembers one case in particular.
“Her abuse prior to the age of 11 was beyond imagination and, as a result, she was afraid of most people and places,” she recalls. “She was placed in a home in the North End of Hartford following a two-year inpatient stay at Elmcrest Hospital. The transition to foster home was slow and intentional. This child had never taken a school bus or been in a public classroom in years.”
At the start, Morales-Gabelmann rode the school bus and sat in the classroom with the child. Then she had an idea.
“I found a lucky charm in a cereal box and gave it to her, telling her it would bring good luck and if she got scared she could rub it to feel safe. It worked! Within a week, she no longer needed the security of my presence. She reached out to me a few years ago to let me know she had a son and gave him Tracy as a middle name,” she says.
Working in a rural area brings its own challenges to her work, including people facing barriers to care like transportation or a lack of resources. Her team partners and collaborates with other providers to increase access to services and solve transportation and insurance issues. They fundraise to provide tents and sleeping bags for the homeless and support food distribution.
Her start in life was challenging, but Morales-Gabelmann says it led her to the career of her dreams.
“I found my calling,” she notes. “Being allowed entrance into people’s lives, when they are often most vulnerable, is an honor. Working with and witnessing growth in people and knowing I participated in that is a feeling beyond measure.”
Modern-day Renaissance Man
By Susan McDonald
When his aging black lab started rousing him at 4 a.m., Srinivas Mandavilli, MD, would stay up and write or read for writing inspiration. The Hartford Hospital chief of pathology – who still regrets not following up on admission to Columbia School of Journalism – has always loved to write.
A class in poetry after he started working as an attending pathologist, a workshop at Wesleyan University and feedback from his writing group spurred him to submit poems for publication. He credits his interest in poetry to his 10th-grade English teacher in India – a tiny nun sharing the beauty of English romantic poets.
Years later, he is shopping for a publisher for his second anthology of poems and was invited to submit this poem for inclusion in the 44-poem anthology Of Hartford in Many Lights: Celebrating Hartford’s Buildings. “Most of my writing is about my family and childhood, although some relates to my work as an oncologic pathologist,” he says. “This one was requested, so I went and really looked at the BJI building from all angles to appreciate it. I find inspiration in so many things.”
His poetry has earned awards in CPS contests and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His book Gods in the Foyer is available on Amazon.
A poem by Srinivas Mandavilli: The Bone & Joint Institute
This poem is part of 44-poem anthology – Of Hartford in Many Lights: Celebrating Hartford’s Buildings.
You marvel at the illusion of the waterwall
under a stucco ceiling. In this saurian atrium,
collage of X-rays conjures up calcific
and osseous densities. You see patients transition
into motion, their bones welded by orthopedic
surgeons with titanium rods.
In this circumference of curved corridors, nurses
pore over recovery from a battle of bodies and pain.
You pass a balcony of terrazzo and dark wood, brimmed
with light seeping in through sheer patterned glass.
A skybridge tethers the edifice like a ligament, as it squats
with its mysteries within textured patterns and glass
formations that twist away. The garbled
blare of an ambulance makes its way along
the half-empty street. Looking over, you see a nurse
on her break in the nature garden, the one who held
your arm that day when your arm needed to be touched
in a certain way. In the breeze, her coat rises like a cape.