PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED

Franks hospital room at St. Rose Dominican Siena After going to Dr. Snook in St. George UT and getting sent to a pain management center, Frank & I both decided we didn't like the run around we were getting. There was one comment that Dr. Snook had made that bothered me and that was "It may be better to just leave it alone." I thought to myself there is no way in H--- that Frank can live with this horrible pain.

The Pain Management doctor didn't ever know why we were there and that wasn't too impressive, and we had to explain to him what was going on. He didn't even have a report of the MRI or a copy of it. So Red Flags were starting to fly and kept flying higher. To this day we haven't heard a word from Dr. Snook's office about the Spine Test that was worthless as it didn't prove a thing. So Frank & I were just going to go through the motions of seeing what Dr. Snook had to say and then a wonderful answer to prayers happened.

We were at our church going in to see our Stake Presidency and bumped into a young couple we have known for years. When she came out and saw that Frank was having some serious back problems she told him that he needed to see a Neurologist and told him about her experience of the doctor working on her nerves that had been damaged in an accident years ago. Since many prayers had been said on Frank's behalf, I felt this was an answer to prayers. So we decided that we would try and get an appointment with the same doctor she had gone to.

On July 7th Frank couldn't stand the pain he was in so I tried to call several Neurosurgeons to see if I could get Frank in. The first available appointment was the middle of August. Renee had come out to Overton to see Bret as she was having neck pain. She asked if Sherry and I could meet her for lunch. So we met at the Inside Scoop, and I was in tears about Frank's pain situation and not being able to get him into a Neurosurgeon. Renee called her Aunt Rosie who works at Sunrise Hospital and asked for her advice which was to take him to the Emergency Room. I didn't want to do that as we wouldn't know who we would get for a doctor. So Sherry called Bret and had him come down to the Scoop and eat lunch with us and get his advice. I had the names of several Neurosurgeons and gave the names to Bret.

After lunch, I received a phone call from Bret. He had called Dr. Duke's office (one of the doctors I had tried to call) as he had worked with a doctor who was in the the same group. Bret had talked to one of the receptionists and questioned her about the hospitals that Dr. Duke was on call. When one of the hospitals was St. Rose, Bret said that is the one. He knew Sherry lived just a short distance from that hospital, and I would be able to stay with her. She told him to tell us to take Frank to the Emergency Room and she would have a record of him in their office as a new patient. So that is what we did. I have to say at this point Thank Heavens for my family.

As I have said before, it scares me to death to drive in Vegas and at this point my nerves were jumping all over the place. So Renee took the ball in hand and called her Dad and asked if he could drive us in, which he did. We arrived around 5PM. They had Frank come right up to the desk and started the process of checking him in. I had to be sure and tell them that I wanted to have Dr. Duke on the case and that arrangements had been made with his office and they were expecting Frank in the Emergency Room. We went through the process of getting Frank admitted to the hospital and he ended up in the overflow. It was a bunch of beds with the curtain that goes around the bed area. We used to call them Wards.

The first thing they did was to hook him up to an IV and then they gave Frank something to get him out of the horrible pain. Whatever the pain medicine was it knocked him right out, in fact he didn't even know that they had done an MRI on him. He was asleep through the whole thing. The next morning Dr. Kreun, Dr. Duke's PA came in and explained everything to us and even took Sherry and I out to an X-Ray viewer and showed us the problem.

Frank had a lamenectomy in 1977 and it had caused all of the problems. The vertebra above the old surgery had slid over and was pinching the nerves going down the spinal column. No wonder he had been in so much pain. Because Frank has been on pain meds of one kind or another since last October, the doctor wanted to run a liver test. Which I was glad of as I had been worried abut the same thing. Dr. Kerun was worried about Frank being off from his Plavix long enough to do surgery, but Frank had been off from it for the Spine Test he had done in St. George, and something had told him to stop taking it after going back on it for a couple of days. So after consulting with Dr. Duke, they decided to do the surgery on the 9th. Frank would be the last surgery of the day, somewhere around 5:30 PM. We were all relieved to finally get some answers and consequent surgery.