For Patients, <i> La Doctora</i> and Hospital Perform a Mission Too Vital to Lose

CALEXICO, Calif. —  To talk about Calexico Hospital is to talk about Dr. Amalia Katsigeanis, who for 37 years has treated the community’s poor and elderly.

“The hospital is Dr. Katsigeanis, and Dr. Katsigeanis is the hospital,” said board member Hildy Carrillo-Rivera.

When other doctors shunned the hospital, she stayed. In recent years, she has been one of only three doctors admitting patients, mostly the elderly dependent on Medicare. Her patients refer to her simply as la doctora.

“They cannot close our hospital,” said Luisa Guitierrez, 76, who was recently treated for diabetes. “ La doctora will not let them.”

Katsigeanis does not hide her disdain for the state health inspectors whose critical evaluations have pushed Calexico Hospital to the brink of closure and forced it to relinquish the right to treat Medicare and Medi-Cal patients.

“The people here need us,” she said defiantly. “For (40) years they’ve had a place to come in an emergency or when they’re sick. I don’t know what makes (the inspectors) think they can come in and sweep all that away.”

Born in Calexico and educated at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Katsigeanis is known as a fighter. She quit the Imperial Valley Medical Assn. in disgust some years ago.

“I found myself going to meetings and watching them all get drunk and assail the Clinica de Salud des los Campesinos , and socialized medicine, and I had no use for that,” she said. “To me, it was a waste of time and had nothing to do with being a good doctor.”

She refers to the El Centro Regional Medical Center, 12 miles from Calexico, as the El Centro Regional Morgue . “I don’t like the place,” she said. “I don’t like the doctors in there.”

She had a row with the medical center over a gallbladder operation. The operation was successful, but there were questions about whether she had gotten approval from the center’s surgical committee.

“I told them I’d bring the lady back in and put the gallbladder back inside her if they wanted,” she said. “We parted company after that.”

She has little patience with paperwork and bureaucracy. She fell behind in her taxes a couple of years ago and was sued for $26,000 by the federal government; she told a reporter she had no idea how it happened. The matter was settled when Katsigeanis agreed to a payment schedule to make good on the tax bill.

She admits to being too busy to keep the kind of records the state Department of Health Services demands. Along with maintaining a sizable practice and doing more than 120 surgeries a year, she serves on the Calexico City Council and as director of a methadone clinic she founded in 1974.

She lives with her cats in a small apartment near her office. Never married, her passions are art and USC football.

“Half the time I think she doesn’t bother to ask her patient’s name or whether they can pay,” said Mayor Pat Hashem. “All she cares about is getting people well.”

Not everyone is enamored of la doctora. The medical Establishment of Imperial County has been muted in its support of Katsigeanis and Calexico Hospital.

Dr. Benjamin Lehr, the county’s acting health officer, prefers not to discuss Katsigeanis and her maverick ways. “I’d rather not comment on her and leave it at that,” he said.

At 67, Katsigeanis does not know how much fight she has left. As she stands in the hospital’s closed intensive care unit, tears of frustration come to her eyes.

“I feel I’ve been letting down the people of Calexico,” she said. “We haven’t found a way to fight this stuff. We can’t operate without that damned government funding. The government controls everything and doesn’t give a ---- about people.”