Though I tell people that I must have been the first hippy since I'm flashing a peace sign even in my baby picture, my life did not begin as a utopia. Before I was a year old, I had spent most of my little life in the hospital, suffering from jaundice and a host of other illnesses and ailments. I had a cough that sounded like whooping cough that the doctors could not figure out. Even then, the doctors never expected me to live, but God had another plan for me. I know he's had his hand on me from before the womb.
Even when I did come home, it was a very frustrating time for my mother. Since I had bonded with the nurses while in the hospital, she could not hold me without crying. For some reason, my dad could hold me, but that just added to my mom's frustration. Included with all that was the great unknown of my future, and how many painful paths they would have to walk down....
By the time I was somewhere between one and two, as in the picture above, I had pretty much stabilized from being sick so much, and for a few years I was more like a normal child, albeit very quiet, organized, and in many ways still touched by innocence. I had one older brother who was three years older than me, and since my dad was in the air force (couldn't you tell from the above picture?), we moved around a lot. I was born in south eastern Texas, and by this time had moved twice more.
Unknown to anyone, I was born with a tumor. As I grew, so too did the tumor, which was a parasite on my life in many ways. By the time I was about halfway between six and seven, I began getting debilitating migraine headaches, followed by dizzyness and combined with periodic episodes of vomiting or losing consciousness. This was very puzzling to the doctors for over a year, who could find nothing wrong with me. Indeed, these "spells" as my mom called them could come at the drop of a hat, and then leave at the drop of a hat.
Of course, at that time, doctors didn't really know that much about the endocrine system or the head in general. For the next year, the doctors would throw up their hands at my symptoms, even going so far as to say that I was faking illness to get attention, which my mother enabled more fakery from me to get even more attention. The doctors were wrong, but it only proves that no doctor is perfect, or has the mind of God to know all things.
Finally, around the time I was eight, I got a new doctor wile we were living in Colorado Springs and my dad was stationed at Ent Air Force Base. The doctor finally did a skull series of x-rays which showed the tumor on my pituitary gland. By this time, the tumor was the size of a grape, which had grown to overlap the space where my pituitary gland is, which undoubtably caused the headaches. Since the pituitary is normally the size of a grape, approximately in the middle of the skull, the size of a pea-sized pituitary and a grape-sized tumor were competing for the space designed for something pea sized, which obviously was causing the symptoms I was having.
I was then referred to some specialists at the army hospital at Fitzsimmons Army base in Denver, Colorado. They gave my parents some grim and shocking news. In the United States at that time, the operation to remove this kind of pituitary tumor had only been performed about one hundred times. Of those operations, only two patients had lived, and both of them were operated on from the back of the head, so they were vegetables.
Although they had devised a new plan to operate through the right temporal area, they gave the chance of success of one in a million. My parents were told either to try for the surgery, or take me home where I'd die for sure within the next six months as the tumor continued to grow to the point where it would kill me.
Naturally, as you've guessed, my parents chose for me to have the surgery. In the pictures below, you can see my third grade picture, which was taken literally days before my surgery, and my fourth grade picture, where my scar is very prominent on the right side of my head.
I remember getting baptized before the surgery, and I remember waking up the night before surgery, probably around 3am.
I heard three people talking and sobbing, and it took me a little while to figure out that two of the people praying and talking were my folks. The other I've since found out was a chaplain.
The surgery that morning took a grueling six hours, and afterwards they didn't know how "scrambled" I would be,and so they cautioned my mother and father to act as if they did not know me to see if I responded.
My memory through the pain of the surgery is that when I awoke from the ether, I was in the hallway, and a lot of people were sitting in chairs on the opposite side of the hallway. In the corner near the double doors down by my side was a bucket filled with bloody gauze.
I looked at that plethora of blood, and then at my mom, and said, "Mom, is that my blood?" Her sobs of relief did not mask her resounding, "Yes."
Miraculously, my faculties were intact, though instead of being quiet and very organized, I had become a bit more loud and a bit more sloppy as I grew. But overall, I survived, and was getting well, but the doctors simply did not know how long that would last. Their prognosis to my parents was pretty grim, in that it was their belief that I would not live past my teens at the most.
The first immediate problem was the lifetime meds I would have to take to chemically simulate what my pituitary would have done, since the pituitary had to be taken out along with the tumor. Fortunately, the tumor was benign. Along with thyroid pills for my now non-functioning thyroid gland, and cortisone acetate pills for my now non-functioning adrenal gland, I had to take an anti-diuretic to hold my body water in.
Without the anti-diuretic, I was like a water vampire...drinking massive amounts of liquids, and then having it go literally right through me. Unfortunately, the anti-diuretic was in a shot form, known as Pitressin Tanate in oil. I had to take the shot roughly about every 48 hours or so, and my dad would give me the shots. In addition to the pain of the shots, the shot would sometimes run out at the worst time, like in school, or on a road trip. I have embarassing memories of lying on my stomach in the back of the station wagon on the side of the road while my dad gave me a shot in front of my family and any passing motorists who cared to look inside the car.
Of course, I was told I wouldn't grow anymore on my own, since the pituitary also regulated growth, but that hurdle was overcome when I was ten, in the picture above. But God provided, and I was the second person in the United States to take Human Growth Hormone (HGH) through the Veteran's Administration in Denver.
The process was like this...first an injection of procaine, a novacaine-like drug was given in the buttocks, and the needle was left in my bottom while the syringe was taken out. After a couple of minutes, the HGH was injected by putting the syringe onto the needle embedded into my body, and even with the procaine, it hurt a lot still. With the HGH, I got from about four feet tall to my present height of five foot, seven and one half inches tall. I count every half inch as a victory, because I could have been four feet for the rest of my life.
By this time, my dad had retired from the Air Force in Colorado Springs and we moved to the Kansas City, Missouri area, where I've pretty much lived since. Also, I got two more brothers along the way, one three years younger and my baby brother was born eight years younger than me, about two months before my surgery, so my parents had to juggle a lot during those difficult times.
For the next few years, I was a semi-celebrity, at least in medicine. I traveled and spoke at doctor's conferences held at the place where I originally had my surgery. I would travel to Denver four times a year for the next few years, till I was twelve, as in the picture above.
Being one of the few people to survive and be able to talk and think and tell doctors how I felt also made me the prime guinnea pig for new medicines. Most I tried were beneficial, but a few would have been detrimental to me, and I'm glad that I didn't like those and didn't want to take those before it was known they were detrimental.
Meanwhile, my anti-diuretic changed twice since I had my surgery, first to an eyedropper like form of medicine that I dropped into my nose, and then into a sinus medicine like spray. The eyedropper stuff came three years after the surgery when I was in sixth, and the nose spray medicine came about 8th Grade.
My junior high school years were alright, since I was basically normal except I looked a bit young and was shorter than the norm, but my high school years were awful. The doctors wanted to wait till I grew as much as possible on the HGH before switching me over to Testosterone, which would help me grow out instead of up, and where I would begin to sexually develop.
Looking back, I'm thankful I missed most of the high school peer pressure for sex and drugs, but gym class was a torment, as you can imagine. Finally, when I was 19, the doctors switched me over to Testosterone, and I began to go through puberty at that time.
No one expected me to live even this long, to reach my late teens, and so I was to them a living miracle. Although I was sick a lot, and had a wealth of other problems, I got by and survived. I only attended church till I was fourteen, and then left because I didn't have to go anymore. We didn't learn much in Sunday School, and church was really boring for a kid that age, so after my parents quit going to church when I was twelve, I stopped myself two years later.