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Sarah Huckabee Sanders @SarahHuckabee - Powerful story of my parents early days together. With everything happening around the world it can be easy to get discouraged but God is good all the time and all the time God is good.
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Ambassador Mike Huckabee @GovMikeHuckabee
Today marks 50 yrs exactly when @janethuckabee & I faced an unexpected challenge. After getting married in May of 1974, I was in my final yr of college and Janet left college to work full-time with the plan for her to finish once I did. We couldn’t afford to both go at same time. In Spring of 1975, less than a year into our marriage, she started experiencing back trouble originally thought to be connected to her work as a dental assistant bending over patients. Months of various meds, therapies & doctors pointed to a disc problem. When it didn’t get better, an orthopedic surgeon recommended surgery to repair what he called a “textbook case” of a slipped disc. The surgery was scheduled for mid-September. The day before, a myelogram was performed to determine the exact location for the “textbook case” of the disc. I was retrieved from the general waiting room at the Little Rock Hospital and taken to a small private room. That is NEVER good news. Good news gets delivered in the big room; bad news is shared in the small private room. The doctor came and his face was as white as his lab coat. He told me that Janet wouldn’t be having the surgery because she didn’t have a disc problem. His “textbook case” was not accurate. He told us she had a tumor in the canal of her spine that was blocking her spinal cord. He couldn’t operate on it but had called a neurosurgeon to come and talk to us that night. That evening, Dr. Thomas Fletcher came to our room. He was kind, gentle, and honest. He saw 2 kids both barely 20 years old & married for barely a year. He spoke with candor but with genuine compassion. He assessed that the tumor was malignant and because it was in the canal of the spine, was likely inoperable. That meant terminal. He would try to make her as comfortable as possible but there might not be a medical option. The only alternative was to do surgery to see if the tumor could be reached, but attempting to remove it would most likely involve severing her spinal cord which would leave her permanently paraplegic. That was the best outcome we could hope for and that was a long shot. Hardly good options. We thought we had our whole lives in front of us. Now we were faced with the likelihood that there was little future for US ahead.
It was 50 yrs ago today, Sept 29, 1975 that Dr. Fletcher performed the surgery. When I saw him walk down the hall toward me, it was several hours before I expected him. I feared the worst. He told me that when he got the spinal canal open, he was able to remove the tumor but he wasn’t sure if she would have any movement or feeling from her lumbar area down. But she survived the surgery and we had to wait to see if she would be able to move legs, and toes. Hours passed as I watched and hoped to see sign of movement. It was evening when a small movement of her toes gave a glimmer of hope.
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