Published: October 28, 2009 10:16 am      

Man with diabetes survives brush with death

“I’m on another chapter in my long life.”

Robert Hill, 61, has decided to look at his recent brush with death as a wake-up call, and a new beginning. “Before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I used to raise hell,” he said. “I’d go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted. Now, every other day, I come here.”

A diabetic with ailing kidneys, Hill has been on dialysis treatment at McAlester Regional Health Center for nearly three years. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday morning, Hill goes to the clinic for his treatments — usually. Occasionally, though, the roller coaster ride his health issues have put him on makes him sluggish, and leaves him wondering if it’s worth being confined to a chair in four-hour sentences, three days a week.

In the past three years, Hill missed a treatment every now and then, but he always called to say he wasn’t coming.

One day in mid-September, though, he didn’t come, and he didn’t call. Clinic Administrative Assistant Geneva Tidwell felt something was wrong.

“My hours are 8 in the morning until 4:30, but I always come in at about 7:20,” Tidwell said. “Robert is always here when I get here. That day he wasn’t here, and I went straight to the phone. I called him on both phones, but he didn’t answer.” Tidwell’s supervisor told her she was sure he was fine, Hill probably just didn’t feel like coming in that day.

“I had five charts in front of me, and I could not do my work,” Tidwell recalled. “I knew something was wrong.”

She just had a feeling. It was one she’d had before, and it had never steered her wrong.

As the wife of a McAlester policeman, she’d had some experience with welfare checks, so she called the police and asked them to do a check at Hill’s Parkway Village apartment.

Tidwell would make seven more phone calls to the police station and Lloyd London, the responding officer, over the next two and a half hours.

“Lloyd went to the apartment, but the police can’t go in until someone opens the door,” Tidwell said. “He finally got there, but no one answered the door, and he had to wait until they could find someone with a key. The office manager was not in the office.”

Between calls to London, Tidwell was on the phone with others in Hill’s life, gathering information that might help, such as the kind of car he drove, and whether or not there was anywhere else he should have been. Tidwell relayed the information to London, who used it to verify that he was at the right apartment, and that Hill was indeed home.

Through it all, Hill was inside in a diabetic coma. He has no memory of the events between the night before he passed out and the next morning, when Tidwell met him in the emergency room sometime after 10 a.m., several hours after she made her first phone call.

“He was in and out when he came into the emergency room,” Tidwell said. “His blood sugar was less than 20. If he’d have been there much longer, I don’t think he’d still be here.” Normal blood sugar levels should range between 80 and 120, though they may drop to around 60 early in the morning. Once they begin to dip into the 50s and below, they become dangerous, leading to tremors, impaired consciousness, rapid and shallow breathing, and, eventually, loss of consciousness.

Hill spent the next two weeks in the hospital, reflecting on the events leading up to his stay there.

“I live by myself, but now I see that it’s nice to have friends,” Hill added. “The apartment residents have made me aware that they are my friends. They call me, they come by, they bring me food.”

Hill, who worked for years at the McAlester News-Capital, has apparently touched a lot of lives in ways he hadn’t known, something he and Tidwell obviously share.

“He’s doing great now,” said Dr. Nancy Weddle, physician for both Hill and Tidwell. “He’s always been very very compliant with his dialysis and medical care, and that’s what saved him, ultimately.

“Geneva, she’s just one of the most caring people I’ve ever met. She knew something was wrong. She pushed so hard. Had she not pushed so hard, he would have died.”

Coincidentally, a few weeks after their life-altering experience, Hill and Tidwell ended up in Weddle’s office the same day, with consecutive appointments.

“He came in and told me his story,” Weddle continued. “She was my next patient that day. I asked her, ‘Do you realize he’d be dead if not for you?’ She just started to cry.”

Hill, most of all, appreciates his friendship with Tidwell.

“I’m sure glad she has that woman’s intuition,” Hill said of Tidwell’s insistence on following her gut feeling. “She was just like an angel. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have been there ‘til I woke up in the afterlife.”

The friendship, cultivated during long hours within the clinic walls, is one of mutual respect.

“It takes a lot of strength to deal with dialysis, it puts a major strain on their lives,” Tidwell, who started as a technician at the clinic six years ago, said. “But Robert, he’s always got a smile. He wants everybody to be happy when he’s around.”

Hill has been on the transplant list for nearly a year. He doesn’t miss treatments anymore.

“Since I passed out in that house, I’m just scared of anything out of the ordinary,” Hill said. “I’m afraid to miss dialysis now.

“Besides, I guess I still got a lot to do. I wonder what God’s got in store for me now?”