By:Jeff Lipton
Photo #11111 C: Patrick Donohue exams the capsule he swallowed, a device being used to help doctors diagnose disorders in the small intestines.
Patrick Donohue of Island Park has been suffering from internal bleeding for 18 months and has undergone about 25 transfusions to replace the lost blood.
But the cause of the bleeding has been largely a mystery, driving him and his wife, Barbara, to the brink of despair. I'm anemic and I was getting pretty low in my blood supply, with only a third of the amount of blood I'm supposed to have,said Donohue, 57, a retired senior instructor for Con Edison.
He was subjected to seven upper endoscopic exams, and six colonoscopies, angiograms and scans, but no problems could be detected. They did every test and couldn't find anything,Donohue said.
Recently, his physician, Dr. Larry Good, recommended that Donohue visit South Shore Gastroenterology, a group of doctors in Cedarhurst studying a capsule designed to diagnose disorders of the small intestine. The video color imaging capsule, called M2A, which recently won FDA-approval, is the size of a large pill and when swallowed could take up to 60,000 photographs of the hard-to-reach areas of the small intestines and the digestive tract in an eight-hour period. The photos, which are picked up by a transmitter worn on the patient's side, are downloaded to a special computer for viewing. Drs. Jay S. Fenster, Jonathan Zinberg and Steven L. Kadish, affiliated with South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, gave Donohue the video capsule to ingest on Tuesday morning, Aug. 21, and awaited the results. Donohue is believed to be the first person in the United States to take the capsule.
I feel great,said Donohue Friday afternoon from the doctors' Cedarhurst office, at 657 Central Ave. I didn't even know it was there. It's so simple. Just swallow it and away it goes.
Dr. Fenster called the capsule incredible,saying that medical science has reached a new frontier
