Why am I still here? I should have been dead years ago. Well let us start on my amazing journey as an embryo in the belly of a 44-year-old woman who went to the doctor thinking that she was pregnant. Now this doctor was also a family friend. In fact, this woman’s mother had been influential in bringing this doctor to the Auburn, WV community. He now was in Glenville; WV and he knew how much this friend of his wanted to have a child. He told Ruth that he wanted her to go to Smithville, WV to the Cockley Center where they cared for pregnant women and their offspring once they were born. Dr. Vernon Hoeffer told Ruth Goff that he felt that she had a tumor, but that the Cockley Center would be able to diagnose the issue. At that point, my mother informed the doctor that in 9 months that tumor would be walking. Well, I was born smart, but not smart enough to be walking right out of the womb.
I believe that the Cockley Center was referred to as a “nursing home”, but not in the context of today’s nursing homes. It was a center which cared for pregnant women and their newborn babies. Well, fast forward 7 months or so and the woman began bleeding, and the fear was that she was going to have a miscarriage. She was sent to the nursing home and they were able to help her keep her baby until time for it to be born. Enter the world at 4 am a screaming 4-pound baby girl. Baby girl and mother were kept in the center for a while because of the low birth weight of the child and as was customary to watch the new mother and help her adjust to motherhood and feeding schedules and diaper changes. The baby girl was kept warm in an incubator until she began to gain weight.
Baby Caroline left the center with her mother and Cockey. Cockey was the name of the doll which Mrs. Cockley (affectionately called Granny Cockley by her young charges) gave to all her baby girls born at the center. I do not know what the boys took home with them, I am guessing a toy truck, but I do not know.
Dr. Vernon Hoeffer was designated as the doctor to help mother and child progress. This is the same Dr. Vernon Hoeffer who 18 years later would deliver a 5 lb. 6 oz baby boy to that little girl that he had delivered that morning 18 years prior.
One condition that the baby girl was left with was a hole in the diaphragm which is not uncommon for preemies. Though she was born full term her birth weight still qualified her as a premature baby.
The baby girl developed normally and was embarrassed by the fact that she had the biggest feet in her first-grade class. She loved to read and had read all the books in the little first grade library and was allowed to check out some books from the second-grade library which she read with some help from mom and dad.
When Caroline reached the old age of 12, she began having episodes of what were called “night terrors” in which she began doing strange things in her sleep like running in the hay field or yelling for cabbage to eat. These episodes seemed to morph into spells of passing out by the time she was 18. All the while she was seeing the doctor to try to determine the cause of these incidents as the night terrors had not completely ceased. She was sent to a diagnostician at a hospital in Clarksburg, WV and it was determined that she had low blood sugar. She was advised to eat a sugar cube when she felt that weird tingle in her arms or when she began to feel dizzy. This seemed to help for a while.
By her sophomore year in college the episodes had surfaced again, and she was admitted to a little hospital in Grantsville, WV where she was seen by a retired army doc who had come out of retirement to practice there. A series of blood tests were run along with a battery of other tests and it was determined that she was anemic. She was prescribed SerbexT which was a prescription B complex vitamin with a high dose of vitamin B 12.
Caroline progressed through adulthood as a healthy active person. She was to some standards a work-a-holic. She taught full time, sponsored the science club, the pep club and was the wrestling mother for the wrestling team. This schedule pretty much kept her out most nights especially since her husband also coached a junior high school team. Lack of sleep did not seem to slow her down in the least and she happily performed her duties for 13 years while gaining the status of WV Science Teacher of the Year. She also belonged to an education sorority and the local toastmistress club.
Tragedy struck the family and Caroline and her husband had to uproot and move to take care of his ailing grandparents. This period in her life lasted for 2 years and then it was off to find another job. She was the head teacher at head start for a short tenure and was then offered a job as biology and chemistry teacher in a small school in Raleigh County WV. Things went along swimmingly for a few years and then deep fatigue set in.
She found herself unable to work 5 days in a row and was constantly going to the doctor and doing testing to determine what the problem was. She was finally diagnosed with Graves Disease. At this point in her life, she was losing on the average of 1/2 pound per day. She had problems sleeping and woke often with severe hot flashes and heart palpitations that were so severe that her husband related to the doctor that they seemed to raise her up off the bed. She also noticed that it was difficult for her to help her students with dissection as her hands shook and she had flown off the handle and yelled at students waiting for her to open the door to her classroom. She was sent for blood work and that evening the clinic called and said that she had an emergency appointment with an endocrinologist.
As Caroline sat in Dr. Tahir’s office, she was quite apprehensive. Her husband had to help her get ready for the appointment. He had helped her dress and comb her hair. She seemed to be shaking more than usual and was not sure that she could walk out of the office and to the waiting room where her husband was waiting. When the doctor came in and introduced himself and began asking her questions, she felt relieved. Here was someone who totally understood what she was going through. He even asked her about some symptoms which were present but had gone unnoticed. One of those was her ankles being cold. She had though it was because we were into spring and she no longer was wearing the high boots.
She was scheduled for an iodine uptake and a colonoscopy and endoscopy the next day. She was treated for the hyperthyroidism and high heart rate and scheduled for ablation of the thyroid with radioactive iodine. She underwent two treatments with the radioactive iodine. She then presented with hypothyroidism and was put on Synthroid. Her doctor had been sent to Southern WV to establish an endocrinology department and had since returned to Johns Hopkins University Hospital. He returned on a regular basis to see Caroline for one year post treatment because as he told her on his last visit to the area that he thought that her prognosis was good. He told her that he had never treated anyone who had presented with symptoms as severe as hers who had lived for over a year.
He told her that she needed to start walking and doing light calisthenics to build up her strength. He told her that it would take about a year for her to return to her pre-hyperthyroid condition and that he was turning her over to one of the endocrinologists that he had brought in and trained.
Fast forward 10 years and the rapid and irregular heartrate returned with a vengeance. Caroline found herself in an ambulance on the way to the emergency room with a heartrate that the paramedics thought was impossible considering that she was still conscious. The ambulance made a stop to take on an EMT so that Tenormin could be injected in hopes of slowing the heart rate. This was not the first time that she had her heart race and her doctor had changed the dosage of the heart rhythm medication that she was on. This was the fist time that deep breathing and resting in a prone position did not work to slow the heart rate. She had also become nauseous this time.
Caroline remained in the hospital for several days and after a complete work-up it was concluded that she needed to have an atrioventricular node ablation. This was successfully completed at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, WV. Ruby is part of the West Virginia University Hospital System. The ablation was completed by using a laser to disable the node. She returned to work after an overnight stay in the hospital. The overnight stay was to make sure that bleeding did not start in her femoral artery.
Well things went along well until after a routine endoscopy she had Bell’s Palsy which was recognized by her physician and successfully treated so that no permanent damage was detected at the time. In the meantime, she had been diagnosed with Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD). A few months later she presented to her physician with severe pain in the left side of her stomach and in the middle of her back. Her physician diagnosed diverticulitis and she was placed on an increased dosage of the acid blocker and an antibiotic.
Things hummed right along until 2013 when reaching the top of the stairs it felt like her legs weighed a ton and she could not breathe. Her husband had passed away 12 years prior, so it was up to her to seek the medical attention that she needed. She found it difficult to remember how to use her cell phone as she was in a hypoxic state, but finally she figured it out and the ambulance arrived. She was taken to the emergency room and was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) awaiting the placement of a chest tube. She remained in ICU some 10 days and in the step-down unit another 3 days. She was sent home with appointments to a cardiologist and a pulmonologist. The cardiologist determined that no permanent damage had been done to the heart and released her after her follow-up visit.
The pulmonologist scheduled a 3 month visit after the follow up. She returned to work which was now the coordinator of jewelry services at a large department store. She had retired from teaching after 38 years. It had become too much for her to do her housework, tend the flower garden and teach. She was getting along fine with this new job, which was termed full time, but seemed part time to her due to the reduced number of hours that she spent on the job. There was no homework to grade, no tests to make up, and no lesson plans to make, so this seemed like a breeze.
On Christmas eve of 2013 Caroline was involved in an accident which totaled her car and left her with a badly stoved and wrenched ankle. She recovered from this and returned to work only to have her lung partially collapse and release the air interstitially. The rice-crispy skin was kind of fun to push on, but she knew that this demanded professional care. She spent over a week in the hospital with oxygen until most of the rice crispies were gone and the lung had reinflated.
Two years after that in March she had the third lung collapse with chest tube and spent her birthday in the hospital unable to get out of bed. The nurses brought her a cupcake with a candle on it and celebrated her birthday with friends. This time she was in intensive care for 14 days before the lung healed and reinflated. She was in the step-down unit another 3 days. She was assigned a physical therapist and a home healthcare nurse upon release. She was too weak to get up from a chair without help. She could not even open her medicine bottles by herself.
Caroline returned to work after 2 months of rehabilitation. She worked for another year and then faced the fact that she was unable to continue to work and perform her duties at home. In 2 years almost to the day she was back in the hospital with the 3rd lung collapse, or four if you include the partial collapse. Options were discussed as to how to prevent this from occurring again, but none seemed like a good fit for Caroline. She is on oxygen 24/7 and continues to do her housework and work in her flower garden. She has taken up raised bed vegetable gardening and canning as another hobby. She volunteers in “all things lung” as she calls it and enjoys doing crafty things like sewing and crochet.