2002 – 2008 HEALTH CHALLENGES

It has been said that old age is the metallic age.  You’ve got silver in your hair, gold in your teeth, and lead in your behind. One of the curses or blessings of aging is the fact that you sometimes end up on a first name basis with your doctor.  We got well acquainted with the Shreveport medical community during that six year span.

One day I was making a bereavement call and I got a call from Ann.  She asked me to come home as soon as I could because she thought she was having a heart attack.  Her tone of voice was so laid back that she might well have been asking me to stop by and pick up a loaf of bread on the way home.  Turns out it was another kind of problem, for which we are grateful.  The next year she severed her Achilles tendon.   Eyes created some problems, which involved a retinal tear and two cataract surgeries.

I had a couple of health episodes during that time.  I was hospitalized for several days with atrial fibrillation, but the attention getting episode sort of sneaked up on me.

The Bales’ have a family history of hereditary hemorrhagic telangictasia, a rare weakness in blood vessels that causes excessive bleeding and can be life threatening.  I’ve know I’ve had it since I was in my early forties, but I’ve always managed to cope with it.  A certain percentage of HHT patients have lesions in their brains that could precipitate a stroke.  I agreed to have brain MRI to determine if these lesions exist.

After I completed the MRI, my primary concern was getting breakfast.  While I used the restroom facilities, a lady came out from the imaging center and told Ann that I needed to see my doctor immediately.  His office was across the street, and he invited me to look at my MRI on his computer.  It’s never a good thing when your doctor invites you to look at his computer.  There were no HHT lesions, but there was a tumor at the base of my brain, and it was wrapped around my spinal chord.   I was referred to a neurosurgeon who didn’t want to touch it.

Jan Elkins was a member of the Southern Hills congregation and served for many years as a health reporter for a Shreveport television station.  She was a personal friend of Dr. Anil Nanda, one of the world’s finest brain surgeons, and his practice was located at LSU in Shreveport.  My family doctor could not get an appointment with him, but Jan had me an appointment within a week.

In September of 2007, Dr Nanda removed the brain tumor at LSU, and I did so well in recovery that I was out of the hospital within a week.  Around Thanksgiving things started going south.  I was admitted to the hospital with a severe infection. Actually there were several hospitalizations, one of which lasted 42 days.  At one point I told Ann that I thought I wasn’t going to make it.  She scolded me for even thinking that way, but she later admitted she was thinking the same thing.  It took about six months to get completely straightened out, but I have had no ill effects from the brain surgery since then.   Before they got me straightened out, I had so many doctors I couldn’t keep up with them all.  One day a doctor brought my medical records with him.  It was about as thick as an unabridged dictionary, but I’m still kickin’.  God has been good to me.