Hospitals I have known and loved

Honda CB175K3 Super-Sport

I was born January 8, 1950, at Florence Nightingale Maternity Hospital (now Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas), on Gaston Avenue, not far from my parents’ first apartment, and where my mother learned to drive a car. I have no recollection of that hospital visit.

Over the next five years I regularly was taken to the emergency rooms at various hospitals, once for a benign brain tumor, and at least three times after falling and cracking my skull. Those were part and parcel of my being a free-range child. When I was about four, I was diagnosed with bilateral cryptorchidism, the absence of both testes from the scrotum, which according to Wikipedia is the most common birth defect of the male genitalia. I had to visit a doctor for hormone therapy – twice weekly injections over six months. When that failed, during the summer I was six I was taken to Baylor Dallas on Gaston for two surgeries. I went through the same surgical procedures when I was fifteen, also at Baylor Dallas.

Just before my senior year at East Texas State University, I purchased a motorcycle from my friend Ronnie England, one of the trumpeters in Los Caballeros de Canción. It was a 175-cc Honda Super-Sport, that I had no idea how to ride. Five minutes after I left his house, headed to pick Jean up for lunch, I failed to negotiate a turn from Audelia Rd. onto North West Highway, flew over the handle bars and broke my jaw. The ambulance driver asked me to which hospital I wanted to be taken, and I just said, “Whatever is closest.” He took me to Presbyterian, where I spent four or five days while I got my jaw reset and wired shut. Fortunately it was a clean break between two teeth, so I had not broken any teeth, but I could not open my mouth for the next eight weeks. I ate only what I could suck through a straw. For the first four weeks I was still living at home, and Mom fed me so well I did not lose any weight. The last four weeks were spent in the frat house in Commerce, and fending for myself, I lost about twenty pounds!

The wires were removed on September 17, 1971, and my first meal – pizza – was picked up on mine and Jean’s way to see a Billy Graham crusade, which was the first event held at the newly-constructed Texas Stadium. I could barely open my mouth wide enough to eat.

It was thirty-two years before I would need to be in another hospital. In 2003 I took a job at the Tulsa County Jail to learn to become a Corrections Officer. As a part of that training I had to get some vaccine injections for tuberculosis, tetanus, and hepatitis. About that time I contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rapid-onset weakness of the limbs as a result of an acute polyneuropathy, a disorder affecting the peripheral nervous system. In my case I had no use of my legs and body from my shoulders down. Evan and I had gone to a billiard hall to play pool, but the next morning I had trouble standing up. Evan took me to the doctor’s office. My family practice physician was on a trip to China, and his substitute just told me to rest. The next morning I could no longer walk or even stand up. I called my sister Sande – a registered nurse – and described my symptoms, and she told me to get to the hospital immediately.

After spending a couple of hours waiting in the emergency room at St Francis Hospital, I discovered that even bathrooms designed for the handicapped were not able to handle patients in wheelchairs. Even with some help from Evan, I still ended up peeing all over myself. They finally asked me a few questions – I could not stand or walk – and put me in a room and helped me climb into bed. I spent exactly one month in St Francis, and left in a wheelchair, but able to walk a little bit.

Of course my most recent hospital visit was November 1, 2012, when I was hit by a car. After receiving CPR, which certainly saved my life, I was taken by ambulance to Parkland Hospital. At first the doctors told us – not me, I cannot remember anything until a few days before Christmas of that year – that I could probably go home in a couple of days. Then they realized that my brain was swelling too much and that I needed immediate surgery to remove a part of my skull, about the size of my fist. They stored that section of my skull in a refrigerator for a few weeks, when they decided my brain had ceased swelling enough and replaced that piece of my skull. I spent about seven weeks in Parkland followed by a couple of weeks at the adjacent Zale Lipshy University Hospital. I was then moved to the Centre for Neural Skills, where I lived for another seven months.

I have decided that as much as I like the attention I get in hospitals and other such rehabilitation centers, I think I have done enough of that and hope I can stay out of them for the future.

It’s a wonderful wife

My beautiful wife!

When I was a sophomore in college at East Texas State University in late 1969, the university changed the way the semesters were scheduled by moving fall semester finals to before Christmas rather than right after. That gave us nearly a month between the end of fall and the beginning of the spring semester. Not wanting to be idle for that time, I wanted to get a job to make a little money. My sister Sande, a sophomore at South Garland High School, and I headed out to Northpark Center which had opened just four years earlier. She immediately found a job as a waitress at Kip’s Big Boy Restaurant, but I did not want to work waiting tables so I applied at all every other non-food shop in the mall – over 150 at that time – and got nothing, even though it was just three weeks before Christmas. Not finding what I wanted, I went back to Kip’s where they hired me to buss tables.

On my first afternoon I managed to drop and shatter a full tray of dishes, relegating me to the kitchen where I spent the next month washing dishes. On the up side, I met one of the best-looking girls I had ever met – Jean Caskey. I asked her out to a concert by Dionne Warwick, but since that was not until February I also took her to see Midnight Cowboy, which had opened that past summer. After we saw the movie I asked if she was REALLY hungry, and when she said yes, I took her to Phil’s Delicatessen, where their burgers were huge.

Since I came home from Commerce every weekend to help my mother with her interior decorating business, I was able to take Jean out those weekends. We dated for two-and-a-half years, getting married August 4, 1972, less than three months after I graduated from ETSU. We moved to Carrollton where I had gotten my first job and eventually bought our first house there five years later. We also were able to do a good bit of travelling. When I worked at Lone Star Gas in downtown Dallas I was able to attend job-related events all over the United States, often taking her with me – Washington, DC; Boca Raton, FL; New Orleans; New York City; Anaheim, CA; Las Vegas; and Colorado Springs. We also made trips on our own to Corpus Christi and Rockport (on our honeymoon), to visit her sister Sue in Charleston, SC; skiing in Colorado; and many other places all over Texas, the US and even Guadalajara, St Thomas, the Bahamas, Canada and Britain.

We both loved to eat, so we have done that both at home and everywhere we traveled. We’ve had Chicago-style pizza in Chicago, muffulettas and beignets in New Orleans, Katz’s Delicatession and Carnegie Deli in New York City, and many great dining experiences everywhere we went.

Jean has been with me through thick and thin. About a year before we were married, I decided to buy a motorcycle and pick her up for lunch at Zuider Zee restaurant, where she worked. On the way there I wrecked the bike, breaking my jaw. Of course she wonedred why I never showed up for lunch – I was in the hospital! Then in Tulsa the summer of 2003 I spent a month in the hospital, along with nearly a year in rehab, from Guillain-Barre syndrome. And, of course, most recently on November 1, 2012, I ended up at Parkland Hospital after being hit by a car, suffering a traumatic brain injury.

Jean has been there to help and support me ;every step along the way. With the TBI keeping me from being able to take care of the bills, for the first time in her life Jean had to take over those chores. I hadn’t meant to keep her in the dark about our finances, she just did not have any interest. Two years ago she and Evan had to dig through my stuff – mostly online because I received and paid bills online whenever possible – to figure out who we owed and how to pay for everything. Jean worked miracles getting me organized and taking care, not only with the bills we already had, but also the new ones resulting from my injury, from medical bills to long term disability and Social Security Disability Income.

I always knew how wonderful she was, but after the past two years, I am truly amazed at what she is capable of doing, for me and with me.

Jeannie, I admire and love you, beyond belief!

Seeing Whoopi in New York

Whoopi with Jean and I

Over the years I worked at several jobs where I had to live somewhere far from home.

In 1994 after I left Lone Star Gas Company in Dallas, Jean and I moved to Wichita, KS, because I took a job there with USF&G Insurance, which was based in Baltimore, MD. After working there for sixteen months they closed that office and offered me a position with their life insurance division F&G Life in Baltimore. They moved me to Towson to live in a campus apartment at Towson University. After leaving F&G Life I took a job working for IBM in White Planes, New York. There I rented a small bedroom from a Jewish lady in Scarsdale.

In 2003 when I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome and was in recovery for nine months. I then got a job in Tampa, FL, with Neilsen Media Research, the company that measures what people watch on television (ratings) so the networks can determine how much they can charge marketers for advertising. There I found an apartment where I could walk just 200 yards to the nearest bus that would take me to Neilsen.

Whoopi Goldberg grew up in the Chelsea area of Manhatten New York, but moved to California before she was twenty, where she worked at the San Diego Repertory Theater, and with various groups developing her skills as a stand-up performer. This was also when she adopted her name “Whoopi.” In 1984 under the direction of Mike Nichols they created Whoopi Goldberg, her one-woman show, which opened October 24, 1984 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

For that highly successful show’s twentieth anniversary, she and Nichols decided to do it again with a brand new show based on the original creation – a one-woman show featuring several of her character creations: Live on Broadway: The 20th Anniversary Show. Because I had worked for her a few years earlier, she offered Jean and I free seats if and when we could get to New York. So we planned a trip to meet there – Jean from Tulsa and me from Tampa – the weekend of December 3 – 5, 2004 to see Whoopi at the Lyceum Theatre! You can see the photos I took here. Also check out my Whoopi web site.

I still go to therapy class

Lisa, graduate student at Callier Richardson

It has been over 22 months since I suffered a traumatic brain injury, being hit by a car as I walked across the street to work, November 1, 2012. After a couple of days in Parkland Memorial Hospital the doctors determined that my brain was swelling too much and needed immediate attention. During surgery a chunk of my scull, about the size of my hand, was sliced off and placed into a refrigerator for a couple of weeks to allow my brain to complete its swelling and return to normal size. During that time I was in an induced coma so I have no memory from the time I was walking across Inwood Road until I slowly started waking up seven weeks later in a hospital bed at Zale Lipshy, UT Southwestern Medical Center’s neurological diagnostic and treatment centers, adjacent to Parkland.

I was only at Zale Lipshy for a couple of weeks, where I started doing physical therapy (which was very similar to what I had been through nine years earlier, when I was learning to walk again while recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome). At the same time I received rehab classes with a speech therapist because I could not read – at all. I could not even remember the alphabet.

On the 2nd of January, 2013, I was moved to the Centre for Neuro Skills in Irving, Texas, for more intensive rehabilitation. CNS provides postacute therapeutic rehabilitation and disease management services for those of us recovering from acquired brain injury. I spent eleven months at CNS undergoing daily classes for educational therapy (speech, language, memory and reading), physical therapy, occupational therapy, social counseling and other problems resulting from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Much of my time and therapy was done at CNS’s apartments where I lived full-time for seven months before reaching a level of recovery where I could stay at home and ride their van each day to rehab.

At the apartments there were CNS employees – neuro rehabilitation specialists – who lived and worked around the clock seven days a week. In addition to helping us through our day-to-day activities – going to the bathroom, getting around on the wheelchairs, getting to the clinic and back each day for therapy – they helped prepare us for the essential knowledge of how to live on our own in the outside world – the world beyond rehab. That training included how to do my own laundry, make my bed, prepare meals, learn to make grocery lists for meal plans, and even how to do simple things like take a shower or use the toilet – not easy to do when you are in a wheelchair.

After I left CNS, I really needed to continue my rehab – I still have severe memory loss and can barely read – so I enrolled in classes at Baylor Garland, the nearest TBI therapy clinic to my home. I started there December 10, 2013, less than three weeks after leaving CNS. At CNS I was in the therapy clinic six hours a day, five days a week. At Baylor I was with a therapist two or three days a week for just an hour each visit. Quite a difference, but then I was recovering each say, little by little so that was sufficient.

Unfortunately I only got to stay at Baylor Garland for less than a month because my health plan – ObamaCare – started January 1st and I had to pay the full cost for my therapy until my deductible was fully payed. Fortunately, my therapist, Carey Hammond told me about a TBI therapy program at Callier Center – where I worked at the time I received my brain injury – that was not tied to insurance plans. As a university they only charged a small flat fee per semester because the program was designed to teach UTD graduate students to become therapists. In fact several of the therapists I’d had at CNS had graduated from this program at UTD Callier.

I started at Callier about a week after my last session at Baylor and have been attended their classes ever since. In fact the new fall semester started a couple of days ago. Last spring and this fall semester I am attending one day a week, on Fridays. Over the summer semester I went Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, just to see if I really needed that much therapy.

The rehab classes at each facility are quite different. At CNS there were six hour-long classes each day, similar to classes at high school or college, except for the group counseling sessions which consisted of a coundelor and three to six patients. We also had an hour at noon for lunch and we each brought our lunch from the apartments or from home. Most of the time while I was in the apartments I was not able to eat meals at all – I was restricted to a feeding tube because of my dysphagia (difficulty swallowing). I got off the g-tube about two weeks before I moved home, so that was the only time I had anything at the apartments with which to make lunches. After I moved home I made lunch before the van picked me up each morning.

During my brief time in rehab at Baylor Garland I had therapy sessions for one hour a day two or three times each week. Like at CNS, these were one hour sessions one-on-one with a therapist, either Carey or Theresa Welch. At Callier I had Friday therapy class from 9am until 11:30am. The first hour was a group class with half a dozen patients and as many graduate students discussing current events gathered by the students during the week for which they collected news photos to show the class. After this segment we watch a brief portion (ten or fifteen minutes) of a movie or television documentary selected by the instructor – during the spring semester we watched the movie Remember the Titans with Denzel Washington, during the summer we watched Long Way Round, a documentary about two guys riding motorcycles from the UK across Asia and North America to New York City, starring Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman.

Finally we would spend 45 minutes one-on-one with one of the students. This would be things like having me read out-loud from a book or read a story and answer question. They would also give me some exercises to strengthen my memory and recall. But the parts I enjoyed the most were just talking about things like their educational goals or my writing of this blog. To me this is the best part of my therapy sessions.

Currently my memory is getting a little better every day, but my reading is not improving as much, if at all. I do not know how much longer I will need to continue therapy, but I will see what happens this semester and won’t have to decide until December.

I’ve had over 40 jobs

My first job was working for my mother. She had gone to college during World War II to receive an education in textiles. When I was in kindergarten she found a job at Sears as an interior decorator. She took what she’d learned there and started her own freelance decorating business which she called Vesta Spreng Interiors. She would design and make draperies for friends and neighbors, and found work for home builders at first to select exterior brick and paint colors along with interior carpet and kitchen cabinets. That work soon led to taking care of the designs for model homes. That would include designing and making draperies and sometimes adding furniture, art, towels and other items to make the homes look attractive and lived-in.

My mother would work with the builders and decide what needed to be done with the houses and she would make the draperies, purchase the furniture and equipment necessary for hanging the window treatments, and on Saturdays my father and I would load up our station wagon and we would take everything to the houses we were working at and handle the necessary installation. At first, I was only a “gopher” handing my parents the tools and materials they needed, but by the time I was 12 or so I could handle the same work they did, including hanging drapes, installing furniture and hanging pictures on the walls. We did this nearly every weekend until she retired when I was 35 years old! We used to tell people that I had 25 years of experience as a decorator!

Last week I mentioned my years as a musician with the Caballeros. During my four summers at college I worked for a motion picture shipping company in Dallas called Central Shipping and Inspection. We loaded film containers from our warehouse onto trucks for delivery to theaters across Texas. While I was in college at East Texas State University – now Texas A&M – Commerce – I was a teaching assistant. In 1969 ETSU changed their Christmas break schedule from a couple of weeks right before finals for the fall semester to four weeks after finals and before the start of the spring semester. That gave me the opportunity to work for a month and make some money. I went to work at NorthPark Mall at Kips, where I first met and began dating my wife Jean.

We got married  in 1972 after I’d graduated from ETSU, moved to Carrollton, TX, where I started my first “real” job at Rogersnap Business Forms. From there I went to TJM Corporation, another business forms company, where I worked as a forms salesman. After that I worked for Computer Language Research (aka “Fast-Tax”) where they trained me to program computer applications to process income tax returns for accounting forms. That gave me the skills to write software with PL/I, which would keep me working for the next 30 years. From there I went to work for a software consulting company, Cutler-Williams, Inc., who assigned me to work at Lone Star Gas, Dallas’s natural gas utility. Soon I was “hired away” from Cutler-Williams to work full-time at the utility, where I stayed for over 17 years, moving through two subsidiaries before returning to the “mother” company at the end.

Cutler-Williams was only the first of six or seven consulting/IT service companies that helped me find work using the computer skills I now had. These consulting firms helped me get jobs with IBM Credit Corporation in White Plains, NY, The Nordam Group in Tulsa, Nielson Media Research in Florida, State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL, and others.

After leaving Lone Star Gas, I moved us from Texas to Wichita, KS, to work for USF&G Insurance. After a couple of years they closed their Wichita office (on their way to eventually closing the entire company) and I moved to Baltimore, USF&G’s home office, to work for F&G Life, their life insurance office. Then I went to White Plains to contract at IBM; then Commercial Financial Services in Tulsa (to where we moved for ten years); American Airlines; The Nordam Group; Oklahoma Central Credit Union; Sabre, Inc./EDS Corporation; Decision One (Sprint); Domino’s Pizza; Tulsa County Jail (Corrections Corporation of America); Healthcare Administration Technologies; and Genesis10. During my time in Tulsa I also worked for Fellowship Bible Church Tulsa, Christ for Humanity, Carol Publishing (Everything Rosie), Whoopi Goldberg and writing for Network Magazine (CMP Media’s Data.com website).

In April of 2004 after nearly a year recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome I moved to Tampa, Florida, to work for Nielson Media Research. This was another PL/I consulting position which ended in January 2006. I was able to quickly segue into working at State Farm in Bloonington, IL, but that only lasted about five months, after which I moved back to Tulsa. After a couple more failed attempts at consulting positions, I decided to move back “home” to Garland, Texas, and attend A+ Texas Teachers to obtain a Texas Teachers’ Alternative Certification Program classroom training which allowed me to take and pass the TExES Exam #131: English, Language Arts and Reading 8-12 and the TExES Exam #139  Technology Applications 8-12 teaching certifications. I am also “highly qualified” in Mathematics with 35 hours of college credits, 27 of which are upper level, which gives me the state’s teaching certification in Math. After teaching at DeSoto High School for a couple of weeks, I quickly learned that, as much as I wanted it, I was not cut out to be a teacher.

Looking for something else to do using that education, I got a job at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders. This is where I was working when I was hit by a car while walking across the street to work, November 1, 2012.

In all, I have had more than forty different jobs, in 13 cities over 55 years. Do they give out awards for that?

Guillain-Barré syndrome

I was out of work in 2003 when I took a job at the Tulsa County Jail, then operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), as a Corrections Officer. After going through a couple of weeks of training and then spending a few more weeks managing with a pod of about 80 inmates, I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). What that did was leave me totally paralyzed from my shoulders down, where I was unable to walk, stand up or even feed myself.

The syndrome took only a couple of days to progress from my having difficulty standing to my being completely unable to walk. The first day I went to my family doctor, who was out of the country and had been replaced with a substitute who told me just to stay home for a couple of days and it would pass. It did not. The next day I could not walk at all and my son Evan took me to the nearest hospital – St. Francis in Tulsa, at which my physician was not associated, where I was admitted. By going to the wrong hospital, I was fortunate that one of the doctors at St. Francis had seen GBS and figured that might be what I had.

After making a number of tests on me, the doctors at St. Francis began treating me with high-dose immunoglobulin therapy, a treatment that cost $30,000. Even after those treatments, I was told that I would need several months of rehabilitation to learn to walk and to train my arms to be able to feed myself and to write again. While this may sound similar to my brain injury in 2012, there were several differences. With GBS, I could not move my arms or legs, but I did have full use of my brain, including my memory.

Early in my stay at St. Francis, while I was being treated with immunoglobulin, a group of students or interns or something came to me wanting to help me exercise, apparently unaware that I could not stand up at all. They helped me out of the bed and I immediately fell onto the floor. The hospital then brought in a lift device to get me up and back into bed. As a result of this incident, I was taken to ICU for 24 hours. They never explained to me why this error in management happened to me.

After my treatments with immunoglobulin ended, I was moved into a hospital room at Broken Arrow Rehabilitation, which was within the same buildings as St. Francis Hospital. I was in rehab there for speech therapy, physical therapy and occupational therapy. At first, being confined to my bed, I was not able to get myself to the bathroom. I was dependent on the nursing staff to respond to the call-nurse device and come help me. Sometimes they were pretty prompt and it would only take two or three minutes for them to move me to one side of the bed while they stripped half the bed and replace those linens and then move me onto the other side while they replaced the other half of the bed linens. But they were not always so prompt. Several times I was unable to wait for them to come help me, so I devised a way to control that. I was strapped to a heart monitor to make sure it was still beating, so I learned that if I unfastened that, the nurses would immediately come running to see what was wrong.

During my first few days at Broken Arrow Rehabilitation, my OT therapist would came in each morning to get me dressed. At some point I’d pretty much decided that I kinda liked being cared for so well and would like to just stay in that condition. So my therapist came in, tossed some clothes on my bed, and told me to either learn to dress myself, or resign myself to being a vegetable for the rest of my life. I was astonished. I could not sit up and could not even reach the clothes he had left me. I flayed around for a day or two, but eventually managed to get some of my clothes on. Within a week, I could dress myself and was exceedingly grateful to that therapist for forcing me to get real.

When my OT therapist made me learn to start taking care of myself, I was listed on the schedule as probably being confined to BAR for another two months. After his influence I began really working hard to get better and was able to leave the hospital in just under a month. I still had several more months of rehab ahead of me, but I left Broken Arrow Rehab with my head held high.