A year ago this week, I almost died.
On Monday, June 24, 2024, my wife Sue and I were in Marshfield, for an appointment with a pulmonologist at the large clinic in that central Wisconsin city. I’d developed a persistent cough, and chest X-rays had looked suspicious, according to my doctor at the clinic in Rice Lake, near our home. Cancer was a possibility, he said; even though I’ve never smoked in my life, cancer could migrate into the lung from somewhere else.
In Marshfield, I underwent another CT scan and we were sitting in the waiting room, which was otherwise empty, waiting to see the doc and go over the results. Another doctor came into the room. “Are you the Tindells?” he asked. We replied that we indeed were.
He looked at me and said, “We need to get you to the ER, right now.”
I had a pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs, typically having migrated from a leg or the pelvis. Two months earlier, I’d undergone surgery to repair a torn tendon in my right foot. A few days after the surgery, I flew to Arizona to be with my mother in her final days. Undoubtedly, the flights caused the clotting. During the visit I also contracted what turned out to be a rather severe case of “valley fever,” a fungal infection of the lungs.
My mother’s funeral was scheduled for three days after our Marshfield visit, and we were booked to fly to Arizona just 48 hours after the appointment. If we hadn’t gone to see that specialist, the flight might very well have resulted in more severe clotting, which could have been fatal. A pulmonary embolism, left untreated, is going to get you, sooner or later.
I was prepped for surgery while Sue waited anxiously with me. We hadn’t planned an overnight stay, and a bad storm was due to hit our home area later in the evening. If she was going to drive home and beat the storm, she had to leave before I would go under. Against her better judgement, she gave me a (hopefully not final) hug and kiss and left the room. A few hours later, the doctor had removed the clots. There were a lot of them.
I stayed three nights in the hospital. On Tuesday, my son Jim came up from Milwaukee to spend the day with me. I underwent another procedure, this time with only a local anesthetic, to remove clots from the right leg. There weren’t quite as many down there, they said, but they weren’t able to get all of them; in the leg, clotting in the smallest capillaries often can’t be removed. Blood thinner medication and time is what’s needed for those.
Sue returned for Wednesday, as I had yet another procedure, this time a robotic dive into my lungs to examine the junk that was in there and extract samples for testing. The doctor was pretty sure it wasn’t cancerous, which was a rather huge relief. We went home on Thursday, and the next day the pulmonologist called and said tests had resulted in the diagnosis of coccidioidomycosis, which fortunately has a much simpler nickname: valley fever. I’d been going to Arizona once or twice a year for nearly 40 years and had never before picked it up. This latest time, unfortunately, was my time to get it.
A long haul back to wellness.
The lung infection has been cured by medication, although problems with the feet persist. I’ve described my various podiatry challenges in previous posts, so I won’t go into them again here. And, there was our trip to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, which ended prematurely with me being forbidden by the chief guide to attempt the summit due to my foot problems. An infected blister on the underside of my left big toe eventually resulted in the amputation of the digit in December. I’ve recovered nicely from that, fortunately, but both feet continue to experience some neuropathy, which has baffled my doctors, as there are no obvious causes present. The right foot hasn’t fully recovered from the surgery and I fear it never will, causing me to wear a brace most of the time. My long-range hiking days are pretty much done, as a result, although I plan a return to the martial arts dojo in August, and next January we’ll be doing a little hiking in the Patagonia region of southern Chile before we fly to Antarctica for a cruise along the shore of the frozen continent.
One thing that has helped has been red-light therapy. I heard about it from someone whose husband was getting that treatment for neuropathy in his fingers and seeing improvement, so I tried it out. After a dozen sessions at Point of Renewal Integrated Health in Rice Lake, which had helped my recovery the previous summer with acupuncture, my feet have both shown improvement, and some pain in my left shoulder and elbow, caused by overdoing it with bench presses at the gym, has gone away completely.
Sue joined the hospital parade in April with surgery to replace her right hip. She’s coming along very well in her recovery, returning to work full-time at Travel Designers Travel Leaders in Rice Lake only three weeks after the procedure. It was the first major surgery of her life, and she handled it like the champ she is.
Reflecting on a year of challenges.
So, here we are, a year after that nearly-tragic week in Marshfield. I owe a lot to all my doctors and nurses, both in Marshfield and Rice Lake, as well as to the therapists at Point of Renewal and especially at Optimum Therapies, where I received excellent physical therapy (and Sue did, too). I’m grateful to all my friends and family for their support. I even went back to work; seven months after retiring from radio in April, I was asked in November to step in for the regular announcer and call the final two games of Rice Lake High School’s football season, a win in the state Division 2 semifinals (at Marshfield High’s outstanding stadium) and then a tough one-point loss in the championship game at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison. I never expected to be back on the air again, much less calling another championship game (the 18th of my career), but there I was.
More radio work followed in December, and in January they asked me to pick up some basketball broadcasts. And fill in on the WJMC-FM morning show now and then. And visit clients to do remote broadcasts. It was, in many ways, like I’d never left.
So, here we are, late in June, and the contrast between this week and the same one a year ago is rather startling. Other than my feet, my health has recovered nicely. I’m well aware that there are people out there who are in much worse shape than I am. Sue and I have been blessed in many ways. Nothing has come easy for either of us, but we have found that faith in the Lord and in each other, hard work and, of course, our love for each other have combined to pull us through some difficult times.
And now, onward and upward. We’ll be cruising the Mediterranean in August with family. I have a pretty busy schedule of author events this summer, appearing at festivals and bookstores, and I’m continuing work on two projects: converting all my novels into audiobooks, and also writing the next entry in the Men of Honor series, The Dance We Shared. It’s a story of a lonely middle-aged man who lost the love of his life twenty years earlier due to a stupid mistake on his part. Then, cleaning out some old files at his office one day, he finds a postcard. In his old girlfriend’s handwriting are a phone number and the words, “Please help me.” The problem is, the card arrived five years ago…just before she quit her job, left her husband and vanished.
Get ready to Dance with Ben and Ronnie in the spring of ’26!
A Strenuous Writer's Life 