Sen. Barbara Mikulski praised Mercy Medical Center for creating a warm and welcoming environment Monday during the unveiling of a painting honoring the Maryland lawmaker?s commitment to women?s health.
Officials at the Weinberg Center for Women?s Health and Medicine unveiled a Sarah Waters painting depicting four generations of women ? titled “Charles Street in Summer.” Milkulski praised the artist for capturing every part of a woman?s life in the painting, which includes a mother with her toddler watching a young street musician playing her cello, while an older woman in the distance walks away.
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Mikulski led the effort to pass the National Mammography Quality Standards Act, that took effect in 1994, hospital CEO Thomas Mullen said.
The senator praised the hospital for providing $45 million in uncompensated care last year. A former social worker with Catholic Charities, Mikulski said she brought many children to Mercy for medical care. “I knew as a social worker when I took that child to Mercy they could get that early diagnosis and care,” she said. Congress provided funding under Mikulski?s leadership that has bettered women?s chances of surviving a breast cancer diagnosis by improving and standardizing technology used to detect tumors early, said Dr. Barbara Jaeger, director of women?s imaging at Mercy.
“We?re diagnosing breast cancers that are smaller and smaller due to improvements in mammography,” she said. Doctors are also discovering early stage heart disease by detecting calcium buildups in the arteries in women?s breasts.
One of Jaeger?s patients, Bunnie Gleiman, said an unexpected heart disease diagnosis may have saved her life.
“It turned out I had these vascular calcifications,” the 59-year-old said. She now takes prescriptions to lower her cholesterol and control her blood pressure.
Mikulski applauded the hospital?s record on hospitality and on providing care, including mammography screening, to the city?s uninsured and underinsured.
She also had several treatments done at Mercy, including spleen removal.
“When you walked in, you didn?t feel like you were walking into a sterile antiseptic environment in which you were a thing to be worked on,” she said.
