 Think of Don Ridgway as the “textbook overhaul king.”“I could do a series called, ‘This Old Book,’” said Ridgway, an
old hand in Grossmont’s Cardiovascular Technology (CVT) program
and coordinator of CVT’s Vascular Sonography (VS) specialty.
Ridgway’s discipline involves a medical story very much in the
news these days: clots that form in the legs that eventually
create very dangerous and often fatal embolisms.
“I teach my VS folks how to do diagnostic exams with ultrasound
to find problems in arteries and veins that could cause strokes
or problems with legs, clots in veins, that kind of thing,”
Ridgway said. “When I graduated from the Grossmont CVT program
in 1985, there were few useful textbooks in my specialty area.”
And so he became an “overhauler.”
He wrote “a crank letter” to a textbook publisher, “complaining
about the deficiencies of a text I was using in my class.”
Ridgway and the publisher, Mike Davies, met and not long after
Ridgway was expanding the old text into Introduction to Vascular
Scanning, published in 1991.
The text, with Ridgway’s unique spin-“a cross between Volkswagen
Repair for the Complete Idiot and the Peter Seeger Banjo Book,”
Ridgway said, was a hit in its field.
“The hanging judge of book reviewers in Journal of Vascular
Technology called it a major contribution to the field,” Ridgway
said, “and I am frequently gratified at conferences when users
of the book tell me the book made it much easier for them to
learn this exacting trade.”
Next came a long and comprehensive makeover of Vascular
Technology Review a book of multiple-choice questions for people
preparing for the clinical portion of the registry exam. The
fourth edition of this overhaul was published in 2002.
Now Ridgway is at work on another Davies rewrite, a
student-level text for vascular anatomy and physiology.
“I would like to use it as a text if it were better,” Ridgway
said, “So I’m going to make it so.”
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