Cardiologist Dr. Jordan Blackwood, from Jamaica to Glens Falls

Dr. Jordan Blackwood was raised in Jamaica; educated in Atlanta; lived in Manhattan and Westchester for his residency, commuting for some of that for a fellowship in Connecticut, and then — came here to Adirondack Cardiology and Glens Falls Hospital.

“I’m enjoying it,” he says, in the North Country. “As I always tell the guys, if I wasn’t enjoying it, I’d be gone for sure.

“When you don’t necessarily have ties to the area, you stay because it means something to you, not because you have to, right?”

Is it the outdoors, we asked?

“Growing up in Jamaica,” he said, “we do a lot more organized activities, lots more sports, things like that.

“You won’t find anybody hiking as a general rule. It’s not a thing, the way it is here. People saying, I’m getting out of town this weekend and I’m gonna hike? That does not happen.”

“Time pressures often mean for me, if I only have an hour, I can’t really go on a hike anyway. But, I can certainly grab a fishing rod and, you know, pretend to catch a fish.”

Dr. Blackwood says, “Cardiology was always the area I liked the most. For me, it has the most balance. I see people, from those who are completely well who don’t have anything but risk, to people who are dying of advanced cardiac disease, and everything in between.

“That means it’s not boring.

“I get to make management decisions all the way from before they ever have anything wrong, management of high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, weight and exercise, the primary colors of medicine. We get to have a say in all of that, just like a primary doctor would.

“But then, when things exceed that level, I get to do diagnoses. I get to do physical testing, functional testing, putting people on treadmills.

“I get to read radiographic studies, cardiac CTS, echocardiograms, nuclear cardiology. There’s radiation medicine involved, ultrasound medicine, there’s cardiothoracic CT involved.

“For those of my partners who do interventions, we do stents, catheterizations, we have pacemakers, defibrillators that we implant…

“Then, when we get to the end, when people are questioning what to do and we don’t have reasonable options for them, then I get to help them make those decisions, to talk about what is possible and reasonable, and what they want to do as well.” — Cathy DeDe

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