A Doctor With Heart

Dr. George Hubert, the chief of cardiology at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, just plain likes hearts.

He spends a lot of time probing their innards with a tiny wire. And he’s so good at manipulating that catheter through the tunnels of coronary arteries that, when other cardiologists get their catheters stuck, they call Hubert to bail them out.

“He’s very skilled,” said Dr. Mohammad Gharavi, the chief cardiac surgeon at Los Robles. “He’s done so many of them that he’s very good at it.”

Hubert, 61, is the pioneer cardiologist of Ventura County and founding director of Los Robles’ heart center.

In 1970, he stuck a fine tube into a heart to investigate its condition--the county’s first cardiac catheterization. In 1980, he inflated a tiny balloon in a constricted blood vessel, clearing a blockage--the county’s first angioplasty.

And just two weeks ago he threaded a diamond-tipped drill through an artery, blasting away a blockage in the county’s first Rotablator procedure.

Hubert does everything short of open-heart surgery, which he leaves to Gharavi.

“We have a lot of fun,” Hubert said.

Born and reared on Long Island, N.Y., Hubert trained at UC Berkeley and in Kansas, then worked briefly as a government doctor in Alaska. He arrived in Thousand Oaks in 1968, three weeks before the new Los Robles hospital opened its doors.

When the hospital’s owners suggested that he open a cardiac catheterization lab, Hubert doubted there would be enough patients to support it. But the lab opened and was three times busier than he expected--proof, he said, that “business people are a lot smarter than the doctors.”

The business people might not be so happy with some of the other things Hubert has to say.

He wants Los Robles, and every other hospital in the country, to establish a charitable foundation to fund free medical care and other good deeds, such as bringing in sick patients from other countries, treating them, and sending them home.

“We’re not doing enough of it. I think we need to do more,” Hubert said. “We have the best time here at the hospital when everyone knows we’re doing something completely free.”

Hubert’s only son, a student at Pepperdine University who had hoped to follow his father’s footsteps into medicine, was killed in a motorcycle accident seven years ago.

Hubert responded by creating a scholarship fund at Pepperdine and by throwing himself even more furiously into work at the hospital that is a five-minute walk from his home.

In addition to Pepperdine, Hubert’s philanthropic interests include the local Boy Scout council and the American Heart Assn.

But his prime passion is being a doctor, a heart doctor.

He works weekends and all hours of the night.

“The heart doesn’t work 8 to 5. You rush in and you take care of the people,” Hubert said.

His family understands. His wife and two daughters are all nurses.

“I have one for each shift when I get sick,” Hubert said.

When Hubert is healthy, he has plenty of work. The heart center’s volume has grown from 175 procedures during its first year to 2,400 in 1994.

Patients are referred by their family doctors, or they are wheeled into the Los Robles emergency room after having a heart attack.

However the patient arrives, Hubert seems happy to see them.

“If he goes a couple days without getting a catheter in his hands, he goes into withdrawal,” said one technician in the catheterization lab.

Early Friday afternoon, Hubert thought he was done for the weekend. But a Simi Valley doctor with a patient on the table turned out to be going away for the weekend, and since Hubert was going to be nearby, the doctor asked him to assist.

Like Batman stepping into his costume, Hubert threw an operating gown and lead apron over his shirt and tie, and in a matter of seconds, he was in his element.

He joked with the patient, a woman with two clogged arteries in her heart. Requiring only local anesthesia for the operation, she was conscious and lucid even as Hubert poked around her heart with a wire inserted though a small hole in her skin.

He casually flipped a coiled tube over her body and into a trash can. In his voice still tinged with Long Island, he did a play-by-play worthy of Marv Albert.

“That’s beautiful. That’s wide open,” he told the patient and the entire operating room, while deflating a balloon that he used to clear a clogged heart artery.

Watching the image of the patient’s throbbing heart on monitors above her prone torso, and manipulating the tiny balloon through a maze of arteries, Hubert made it look easy.

Even the technicians were impressed.

“The guy’s been doing heart caths since the year I was born,” said one. “He’s the best.”