KV Healthcare

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Stephanie Brown

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Stephanie Brown

She’s an active retiree who loves to travel, spend time with family, go RV camping and spend a month each year at Mariners spring training in Arizona. But when Stephanie Brown’s left knee kept going out and pain threatened to disrupt her step and her lifestyle, she knew she had to do something.

Brown, a Yakima resident, turned to Dr. Gary Bos of KVH Orthopedics in Ellensburg.

Bos may not have an organized fan club like the Mariners do, but if he did the 69-year-old Brown just might be at the helm. In 2015, Bos replaced her left knee. Duly impressed, two years later she had him do the other one.

That Brown turned to Bos was hardly accidental. After all, when her husband Ron needed knee replacement surgery in 2012, their oldest daughter – then a surgical tech in Yakima – insisted he have Bos do it. “She knew Dr. Bos. She’d watched him do surgery and she knew his reputation,” Brown says.

The rest is history.

With Ron readily sharing his experience, word spread. Ron’s best friend soon followed suit and had a knee replacement. Then came the best friend’s wife, who also happens to be Stephanie Brown’s best friend. Stephanie’s first surgery followed a week or so later.

“Another friend who’d had surgery done by someone else came up to see Dr. Bos and had some repairs done,” Brown says. “I have another girl friend who had her knee done six or eight weeks ago.”

But Brown is nothing but serious when she talks about Bos and her experience at KVH. Besides his professionalism, Bos was warm, personable and a good communicator who not only listened to her concerns – but heard them. “One of the nice things was that he did a local anesthesia so I didn’t have to recover from general anesthesia,” she says. “That was one of my big fears.”

And it isn’t just Bos who makes the KVH experience memorable, she says. It’s the atmosphere of warmth and caring she says permeates the KVH environment. “I don’t know who is responsible,” she says. “My husband raved about it when he had his surgery done. You see it everywhere in the hospital. The girls at the front desk are very friendly and helpful as are all the other people you meet in pre-op, radiology, everywhere. I absolutely cannot complain about anyone. Everyone takes great care of you.”

They also go above and beyond when they see a need, she says. Case in point: When her best friend’s husband began to feel badly while waiting for his wife during a pre-op appointment in Bos’s office. “He was not feeling good, not looking good,” Brown says. “One of Dr. Bos’s receptionists saw that and said, ‘I’m taking him over to the hospital’ and put him in a wheelchair and took him over to the Emergency Department,” Brown says. “They immediately got him in. Because it was a heart problem he was transferred to a hospital in Yakima.”

On the day the man’s wife had her knee surgery, he stopped by Bos’s office to personally deliver a bouquet of flowers and an appreciative “thank you” to the staff member who helped him. “He says she saved his life,” Brown says.

“If I could come here for everything I needed to go to a hospital for I would be here in a flash,” she adds with a smile. “ It’s that good.”

Alaric Hathaway

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Alaric Hathaway

Summer Hathaway was panicked.

Standing on the shoulder of Kittitas Highway holding her unconscious baby in one arm, she tossed things out of her van with the other in a desperate bid to attract attention.

Cars flew by, drivers seemingly unfazed by the scene unfolding on the side of the road. Then a stranger pulled over and uttered words Hathaway will never forget: “What can I do?”

The stranger was Kittitas Valley Healthcare’s Sarah Martin, patient service representative by occupation, Good Samaritan by inclination.

It happened late on the afternoon of March 3.

Hathaway, who lives in Kittitas, was driving her then 15-month-old son Alaric to the emergency room at KVH Hospital. That day Alaric had come down with a rash and fever, the same symptoms he’d had before suffering a seizure that shut down his airway during a visit to California six months earlier. Hathaway’s 19-year-old son, Triston McCowin, who has Down Syndrome, was riding in the back with Alaric when he told their mother Alaric was “sleeping.”

“I heard the baby gasping for breath,” Hathaway recalls. “I pulled over. I called 911.”

Enter Martin.

“As I drove by I saw Summer just throw the stroller out,” she recalls. “She was moving really fast. I just knew something was wrong. It was a gut feeling. My mom has always told us, since we were little, trust your gut – it’s usually right.

“I knew there was no way I could drive by and keep going and be OK with it. It would have haunted me if I could have helped and didn’t.”

Alaric Hathaway

So Martin turned around at the No. 6 Road and came back around. Neither a nurse nor a doctor, Martin didn’t know what she could do. So she did what for her comes naturally: She opened her arms and her heart.

Standing on the side of that road as vehicles rushed by, she held Alaric and talked to him.

When the paramedics arrived to transport Alaric to KVH Hospital, she offered to drive Hathaway’s van, an offer a grateful Hathaway declined. “Once I handed him off to the paramedics I was calmer,” says Hathaway, who continued on to the hospital with Triston.

And Martin?

Calm and determined to do whatever was needed when she stopped, emotion overwhelmed her when she went back to her car. “I just broke down in tears. I just wanted to hug my boys,” says Martin, the mother of two young sons.

As for Alaric, he was treated in the KVH Emergency Department, then airlifted a couple of hours later to Children’s Hospital in Seattle.

“The KVH emergency department was amazing,” Hathaway says. “The staff communicated with us and really showed they cared. They were taking care of us as well as Alaric.”

Since that day Alaric, whose parents call him the “miracle baby” they were told they would never have, has been in and out of Children’s.

Diagnosed with Chiari malformation, a condition in which the brain tissue extends into the spinal column, he may be headed for surgery. He’s also been diagnosed with epilepsy after another seizure in early April while in Seattle.

In the midst of dealing with the challenges Alaric faces, Hathaway says she will never forget Martin’s kindness. “I had a half-naked, unconscious baby in my arms and everybody was just going by,” she says, her voice emotional. “I think I would have been out of my mind if Sarah hadn’t stopped.”

Bryce Hutton

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Bryce Hutton

He’s a 28-year-old single dad with a three-year-old daughter to raise and bills to pay.

But when pain in his right hip became so excruciating that even pulling on a sock was an agonizing exercise in pain tolerance, Bryce Hutton knew he had to do something.

Pain that had been off-and-on for several years had become a gnawing presence in his life. Hutton, who works as a fence builder and enjoys an active outdoor lifestyle, was desperate for help.

An image – a reminder of how much he battled pain – is etched in memory: His daughter Piper, then just two and a half, struggling to help him get his boots and socks off after a day at work.

“My work days were getting shorter because of it. I was working hurt and sore all the time,” he says. “I couldn’t bend over past a 45-degree angle. I couldn’t lay on my right side. I couldn’t play with my daughter. I was getting to the point where I couldn’t even pick her up for a hug.

“I felt like I was 65. I was miserable.”

Last fall, Hutton turned to Dr. Gary Bos of KVH Orthopedics.

X-rays revealed congenital hip dysplasia, a condition in which the hip has not formed properly, and something else. Somewhere along the line Hutton also had broken his hip.

“I didn’t realize that until I saw the X-rays,” says Hutton, who acknowledges that his body saw more than a little wear and tear in his younger years.  “It could have been anything – riding bulls, breaking horses, wrecking dirt bikes. I was kind of a wild child,” he says with an easy grin.

In November, Hutton underwent total hip replacement surgery at KVH Hospital. The results were life changing. “As soon as I woke up in recovery all that old pain that I’d lived with for years was gone,” he says. “It was amazing.”

After one night in the hospital he headed home the following afternoon. “It was all super easy,” says Hutton. “I went home with a walker and a cane. I went back one week after surgery and carried the walker into his office.”

Two weeks after surgery he began six weeks of physical therapy through KVH. “I was up and moving without a walker or a cane by my second physical therapy visit,” he says. “By the fourth week I felt like nothing had happened. Now I’m pretty much 100 percent. It’s like I never had a problem. I feel wonderful.”

Hutton says he’s been told his new hip should last 20 to 30 years though his “wild child” days are definitely over. “The new hip won’t stand up to that,” he says.

Now back to an active outdoor lifestyle that often includes Piper at his side, Hutton knows firsthand that joint replacement surgery, as common as it is, can seem daunting.

His advice? If you’re in pain and considering joint replacement find a surgeon you trust and feel comfortable with because it makes the whole experience “ten times better,” he says.

“That’s what I did. I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Bos. He was friendly, matter-of-fact with a good bedside manner. He made sure I was fully informed and totally comfortable.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. He was phenomenal.”

Benny Wenz

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Benny Wenz

Eight-year-old Benny Wenz knows a good thing when he sees it – and he’s not shy about saying as much.

So when his 18-month-old sister Stella ended up at Kittitas Valley Healthcare’s Urgent Care clinic in Cle Elum this past October with an ear infection, Benny made a point of telling staff just how good he thinks they are.

“You always cure us. You always cure me. I’ve never been here without being cured,” he said as they waited for Stella’s medicine.

His point made, the staff beamed. Benny, after all, is no stranger to Urgent Care.

For the Wenz family – Benny, Stella and their parents Matthew and Jennifer Wenz – the convenience and competency of KVH Urgent Care has been a lifesaver, figuratively if not necessarily literally, on more than one occasion. And the reassurance of having Urgent Care close by is priceless.

“It seems like my kids always get sick after hours,” Jennifer says.

“Usually it’s Saturday,” her husband offers.

There was the time Benny got diaper rash as an infant. “We were young parents. What did we know?” Matthew says, shrugging his shoulders and smiling.

There was the day Benny, then about Stella’s age now, came down with a high fever. “He was lethargic,” says Jennifer, who picked him up from day care and took him to Urgent Care where the medical staff checked him out, advised her to give him Tylenol and push fluids and told her she could take him home.

What happened later caught Jennifer, a psychiatric nurse who works in Yakima, by surprise. Before their shift ended and they headed home, clinic staff called to check up on Benny. “It really impressed me,” Jennifer says.

Once, Benny fell and hit his head on a hard surface while kicking his soccer ball outside. “I puked,” Benny says. “So they took me to Urgent Care to see if I had a concussion.” Jennifer says the medical staff, aware that Benny is a Star Wars enthusiast, determined that he didn’t have a concussion by “asking him things only a true Star Wars fan would know.”

When a fall while running an obstacle course in gym class landed him in the nurse’s office, his parents once again turned to Urgent Care. “I had a really bad headache. At Urgent Care, they said maybe I had a minor concussion,” he says. “Four days later I was better.”

Recently there was the day Benny woke up to find his arm swollen. At Urgent Care, staff diagnosed him with an infected spider bite and prescribed antibiotics.

“They’re very nice. They’re always helpful,” Benny says, with the air of someone who has seen a thing or two over his young life. “Like I said, I’ve never gone there without being cured.”

Mike Knutson

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He’d suffered life-threatening injuries in a crushing accident. When Mike Knutson woke up at Harborview Medical Center after ten hours of surgery and four days of being unconscious, he thanked the physician who saved his life – and got an unexpected answer.

Actually, the surgeon said, the first place that saved his life was the place he came from – the emergency room at KVH Hospital.

Flash back to the afternoon of February 6, 2017 when then 58-year-old Knutson, who lives in the Manastash, was injured. With a broken scapula and clavicle, a collapsed right lung and fifteen broken ribs, six of them broken at both ends so they weren’t attached in his chest, Knutson found himself reeling from pain and struggling to breathe.

“I couldn’t lay down,” he says. “I was on my hands and knees. It was the only way I could breathe.”

Medics from Kittitas Valley Fire and Rescue responded, treated him at the scene and rushed him to KVH Hospital where a real-life emergency room drama was about to unfold.

Notified en route of Knutson’s injuries, the hospital activated a full trauma response, summoning a coordinated trauma response team – including a respiratory therapist, additional nursing staff, and staff from laboratory, radiology and pharmacy– to the emergency department.

Dr. Frank Smith, the on-call surgeon that day, was waiting when Knutson arrived. Dede Utley, director of emergency services at KVH, was in the emergency department giving a tour to two board members, and witnessed what came next.

With Knutson sedated, tests and x-rays were done and a tube was placed in his chest to remove blood pooling around his collapsed lung. Immediately recognizing that Knutson needed a higher level of care than KVH could offer, staff began coordinating his transfer to Harborview, the only Level I trauma center in Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. Other staff were busy notifying and updating Knutson’s family.

When Knutson continued to struggle to breathe, a decision was made to intubate him and put him on a ventilator for the transfer to Harborview. Utley said one of the paramedics did the intubation under the supervision of a doctor.

Two days after he was crushed, Knutson underwent surgery at Harborview to have titanium straps placed on his ribs to hold them in place. Two weeks later he came home to Ellensburg where a friend spent several weeks caring for him.

Mike Knutson

Knutson is not a man who takes gratitude lightly. Two weeks after he got home, he stopped by KVFR to thank the paramedics who saved him. “Oh,” one of them said, “I didn’t expect to see you again.” Then, Knutson went to the KVH emergency department to say thank you there. How close he came to death isn’t lost on him.

“It’s a miracle,” he says. “I have to believe the Lord had a hand in this. There’s a couple or three times I could have cashed ‘er in. Things had to happen in the right way for me to survive.

“There’s the EMTs who knew exactly how to handle me. There’s the emergency room where they knew exactly what they were doing, placed the tube in my lung and got me to exactly where I needed to be. There’s the docs at Harborview who did the surgery on my ribs.

“The right people where there at the right time.”

Knutson, who worked as a tugboat builder and designer for 24 years and now owns a crane company in Kittitas County, hopes to return to work soon but says doctors have told him he may never fully recover.

While no one likes to see a serious trauma injury, Utley says what transpired in the KVH emergency department that day showcased how good it is. “I’m proud of how this event went,” she says. “We stabilized him and got him ready to go to Harborview. It worked exactly the way it was supposed to work.”

As for Knutson, he’s impressed. “KVH might be a small hospital but it’s a good hospital,” he says. “People don’t understand how good it is. They did a good job – and I’m alive because of it.”

Larry Petry

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Larry Petry

He’s a retired Yakima School District superintendent who went on to serve four years as an administrator at Heritage College followed by a stint as CEO of the American Red Cross in King and Kitsap Counties.

He’s also a gifted artist whose work includes metal sculpture, wood carving and “wood-dyed” landscapes and portraits.

An active 72-year-old whose hobbies include riding his three-wheel Harley, Larry Petry is also no stranger to urgent care medical clinics.

“My wife says it seems like I have to hurt myself at least once a year,” he says with a laugh.

Flash back to October 2016.

His wife Nita was in Bellevue where the couple still owns a condo. Petry was in the garage of their Cle Elum home using a hand-held grinder to cut off a piece of steel sticking up from the floor.

Suddenly the tool bounced up, striking him just above his left wrist.

“The strangest thing is it didn’t cut my sweatshirt,” says Petry who tried unsuccessfully to use a butterfly bandage to close the wound. “It wouldn’t hold,” he says. “The gash was too deep and ragged.”

Petry turned to KVH Urgent Care – Cle Elum. Operated by Kittitas Valley Healthcare with support from Kittitas County Public Hospital District No. 2, the clinic provides non-emergency medical care daily from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m.

“I’ve been in those kinds of places a lot,” says Petry who believes it doesn’t make sense – either time or money-wise – to go to the emergency room for a non-serious situation.

“I got into urgent care pretty fast,” he says, calling what came next “a very good experience and far better than what you normally get in a medical facility like that. I found the staff unusually patient-centered. The whole place had a kind of calming effect – you could feel it.”

The nurse who cleaned his wound “was very thorough but she also had a sense of humor,” he says.

So did the provider.

“She was really down-to-earth with this great smile,” he recalls, smiling at the memory of how she “gave me a little bit of a bad time for being so clumsy. She was really good, competent and knew exactly what she was doing.”

Six or eight stitches later, Petry was out the door – and fully impressed.

“It was a good experience all around,” he says. “I was in and out of there fast and the whole thing went smooth. It’s a helluva service for a small community to have.”

Hunter Rogala

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Hunter Rogala

He greets a visitor with a smile, takes an imaginary call on a toy phone, joins his 7-year-old sister Presley for some forward rolls on the tumbling mat in his family’s living room, then hurries off to push a toy lawn mower across the floor.

At 2, Ellensburg’s Hunter Rogala, who weighed in at 9 pounds 10 ounces at birth, looks the picture of good health – and most of the time he is.

“He’s our chunky monkey. He’s got linebacker written all over him,” his father Josh Rogala says with a laugh.

That doesn’t mean Hunter hasn’t given Josh and his wife Sarah panicked moments along the way.

Hunter was three months old when he developed a serious respiratory infection and began struggling to breathe. “He was turning blue,” Josh says recalling how he and Sarah rushed Hunter to the emergency room at KVH Hospital where Hunter was diagnosed with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), the most common cause of lower respiratory infections in children less than one year old.

Given fluids and medication to reduce inflammation via IV, Hunter also got treatment to open his airways. But staff told the Rogalas that Hunter needed to be in a bigger facility – one that specialized in treating children – and he was transported to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“We appreciated that they immediately told us he needed to be in a larger hospital,” Sarah says. “There was absolutely no hesitation about sending him somewhere else.”

A few days later, Hunter was home for his first Christmas.

By late January, though, he was back in the emergency room, this time for pneumonia. Then came the day Josh, who works as a wildlife biologist, got a call from Hunter’s daycare saying Hunter had a fever. “I picked him up and immediately took him to the doctor,” Josh says. “I was holding him when he suddenly had a seizure. I’ve seen seizures before but seeing your baby have one is another thing.”

The pediatrician diagnosed Hunter with a febrile seizure caused by an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics. “After that,” Sarah says, “whenever he had a fever we worried.”

Fast forward to August 2016. Josh was just home from work, barefoot and cleaning out his vehicle. Sarah, a social services supervisor for DSHS, had picked Hunter up after work, noticed he felt a little warm, given him Tylenol and was holding him when he suddenly “flopped over” and began seizing.

“We were counting minutes. With febrile seizures, you’re supposed to go the emergency room if they last more than four minutes,” says Sarah, her emotions visible as she recalls that day.

Barefoot, Josh drove the family the short distance from the family’s home to the emergency room as Presley, terrified that Hunter would die, yelled questions.

Diagnosed with a febrile seizure and an ear infection, Hunter got medication to bring his fever down, started oral antibiotics and was happily coloring by the time he was discharged.

“They got us in immediately,” Sarah says. “The nurse was wonderful, totally calming, totally gentle. Everyone was wonderful.” That includes the male nurse who calmed Presley by taking her under wing and pretending that she was his helper.

There’s no question Hunter has given them “stress – and some medical bills,” the Rogalas say. He’s also given them something else: an appreciation for having an emergency department close to home that delivers high quality care and real compassion.

“I’m happy we live close by,” Sarah says. “I think we’ll stay where we are.”

Jerry Grebb

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From pizza and steak to homemade brownies, Jerry Grebb has an appetite for the good things in life.

But when eating led to unexplained abdominal pain, Grebb got a taste of something different – Kittitas Valley Healthcare.

A Washington State University grad who grew up in Quincy, Grebb, a CPA, fell in love with Ellensburg when he moved here 40 years ago. When his now 38-year-old daughter was born, Grebb also fell in love with KVH Hospital. This past September reminded him why.

For months, Grebb had experienced periodic pain after eating. The week before Labor Day he saw an internal medicine specialist who, suspecting gallstones, scheduled an ultrasound for the following Tuesday. But the Sunday before Labor Day, Grebb landed in the emergency room at KVH Hospital where a CT scan revealed a hiatal hernia.

The bottom of Grebb’s stomach, including the duodenum and beginning of his small intestines, had worked its way into the opening where the esophagus passes through the diaphragm to the stomach. “The opening was stretched or torn,” he says. “Two thirds of my stomach was up in the hernia above my diaphragm.” It was pressing on his heart and lungs and keeping him from normal eating.

Dr. Timothy O’Brien of KVH General Surgery arrived within minutes, ordered Grebb’s stomach evacuated and told Grebb he’d need surgery. But first Grebb would be hospitalized for treatment of a pancreatic inflammation. “I liked Dr. O’Brien’s style,” Grebb says. “He was very matter-of-fact. He’s a very bright man and so plain spoken. He doesn’t try to dazzle you.”

Two days later when Grebb had the previously scheduled ultrasound O’Brien was on hand. So was Dr. Ken Harris, a trusted friend of Grebb’s who runs a private practice out of the KVH General Surgery clinic. So was the newest partner in the KVH General Surgery clinic Dr. Tom Penoyar who is trained in laparoscopic surgery for hiatal hernias, a cutting edge procedure that is less invasive than conventional surgery and results in shorter hospital stays and quicker recovery. “With laparoscopic, it’s one day in the hospital. With conventional, it’s five,” Grebb says.

On Thursday, with Harris assisting, Penoyar operated on Grebb. Working through five small abdominal incisions, Penoyar pulled Grebb’s stomach down from his chest and into proper position and narrowed the hernia by sewing its two edges together. He then wrapped the upper part of Grebb’s stomach around and behind Grebb’s esophagus, sewing the stomach to itself to create a “collar” that will keep it from sliding up into Grebb’s chest.

Called the Nissen technique, Penoyar performed the procedure an estimated 30 times while training in the Boston area. That may not sound like a lot, he says, but the nationwide average during training is six.

On Friday, Grebb went home. On Saturday, he walked downtown. On Monday, he went to work. Not long after, he was eating pizza without problems and calling his experience a perfect collaboration between the old and new guard at KVH.

“Dr. Penoyar has done more hiatal surgeries than Dr. Harris because of where he trained, at a big hospital in Massachusetts,” Grebb says. “It was wonderful that he was able to perform the procedure here. And I was so impressed by the sageness of Dr. O’Brien and Dr. Harris.

“That’s what the punch line is here,” Grebb says. “We’ve got both – the sage older team and the new surgeon trained with the latest technology. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.”

Rogels

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Rogels

The moment she met him, Cori Rogel knew Dr. Mark Larson of KVH Family Medicine – Ellensburg was someone special.

It was December 2003. Cori and her husband Mike were expecting their first child, a daughter they would name Quinn. Friends recommended Larson, who as a family physician treats patients of all ages for chronic and acute conditions, performs health screenings and coordinates treatment for patients he refers on to other doctors.

“I just loved him instantly,” Cori recalls. “You could tell he wanted to know you as a person, not just a patient.” When Quinn arrived the following August, the couple liked Larson so much that instead of finding a pediatrician they made him their family doctor.

Eleven years later, the Rogels, now living on the west side, are so confident in him that they drive 280 miles round trip for appointments.

They say Larson, who has guided them through a myriad of health issues over the years, makes well-being a family affair with a personal touch.

Example: the birth of their second daughter Layne. When Cori’s pregnancy turned difficult, Larson didn’t hesitate to refer her on to a specialist and checked up on her even while on vacation with his family.

When Layne developed MRSA at 3, Larson was at their side. “It was such a scary time,” Cori says. “At first we heard from him every day. I always knew he was there – even at 3 a.m.”

Quinn broke her leg at 3 and her collarbone at 5. Anxious by nature, she “hates hospitals but loves Dr. Larson,” her mother says. Gentle and patient, he built rapport by taking an interest in her love of horses.

In 2013, Cori consulted Larson about a spot on her leg.  “Whether you want to hear it or not, he’s honest,” she says. “He said he’d do a biopsy but wanted me to know he thought it was melanoma.”

He was right. When he called to tell her, he’d already referred her to a specialist he respected in Seattle. “I had surgery to take a chunk out of my leg and they took lymph nodes from my groin to see if it had spread,” she says. Then came the nervous wait for results – and a moment quintessentially Larson.

“When he got the results he showed up on my doorstep at 7 p.m. because he was so thrilled it hadn’t spread,” Cori says. “What doctor does that?”

She calls Larson compassionate, brilliant but humble enough not to hesitate to refer patients on and “totally committed to our family’s well-being. He’s been with us as we walked through life,” she says. “But it’s not just us. I have many friends who say the same thing. It’s a unique gift he has.”

Stefan Ward

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Stefan Ward

Tall, athletic and active, Stefan Ward, PhD, an associate professor at Central Washington University, seemed the image of good health.

Then, fate tossed him a life-threatening curve – and a partnership between Kittitas Valley Healthcare and Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle helped him survive it.

In 2011, the fingers of his left hand began tingling, twitching and then going numb. “It felt like pins and needles,” Ward says.

Ward, whose doctorate is in sports and exercise, figured it for a pinched nerve – and ignored the problem for a year. In 2012, he mentioned it to his primary care provider. Over time, the frequency, intensity and the duration of the symptoms increased, recovery took longer and the symptoms had spread up his arm. Even after multiple referrals to specialists and extensive diagnostic testing, no one had an answer.

A neurologist he saw in Yakima suggested it might be the start of MS. A friend remarked that her grandfather, who had ALS, experienced similar symptoms.  

By 2013, Ward was desperate. Whatever was wrong had affected his proprioception, the ability to know where a limb is in terms of space. Simple tasks like closing his eyes and touching his nose with his left hand had become impossible.

“When it got to my face I knew we had to do something,” says Ward, who tried physical therapy, occupational therapy, acupuncture and chiropractics – “basically anything my insurance would cover.”

Still, nothing helped.

Enter Dr. Charles Nussbaum, a neurosurgeon with Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle. Through a partnership with Kittitas Valley Healthcare, Nussbaum averages two days a month in Ellensburg doing consultations – primarily for spine-related issues – at KVH Physical Therapy. In 2014, Ward’s doctor suggested Ward meet with Nussbaum. After the consultation, Nussbaum asked Ward to come to Virginia Mason for further evaluation.

“I had a bunch of appointments and tests,” Ward recalls. Doctors ruled out MS. But at the end of the day, there was still no answer. Nussbaum scheduled a brain MRI at KVH Hospital, prescribing valium to relax Ward’s muscles.

Ward came home from the hospital, took a nap and woke to find multiple calls from Nussbaum’s office.

The diagnosis? A baseball-sized tumor growing between his skull and his dura, the outermost lining of the brain and spinal cord, was compressing his brain. The result was myoclonic seizures that caused symptoms of numbness, tingling and twitching. The good news: the tumor, probably the result of full brain radiation Ward had as a child battling leukemia, was an atypical benign meningioma – and not malignant.

When Ward said he didn’t want to drive to travel to Seattle just to set up whatever came next, Nussbaum called back. “I said, ‘We’re going to do surgery, right?’” Ward says. “He said that would be his recommendation.” Ward asked Nussbaum to schedule the surgery.

“Within three weeks I was at Virginia Mason,” Ward says. On a Friday in April 2014 doctors performed an angiogram to cut off blood to the tumor. The following Monday, he had surgery to remove the tumor. On Wednesday he went home to Ellensburg.

Six months later, when an MRI showed that part of the tumor had begun to grow back, Ward underwent 32 radiation treatments. He continues to get an MRI every three months.

Although he still has some residual symptoms, Ward says the improvement after his surgery was dramatic and immediate. Grinning, he leans back in his chair and tosses a small ball against the wall of his office, deftly catching it with his left hand, a feat that had become impossible before his surgery.

Finally getting a diagnosis “was awesome,” Ward says. “I never thought I’d say “thank God I have a benign brain tumor.’ But it wasn’t MS or ALS.”

Nussbaum, he says, was a lifesaver.

“If I hadn’t seen Nussbaum or if I’d gone to someone less qualified I’d be dead or have more brain damage,” he says. “He gives you the straight facts, is super solid and has a great bedside manner. He’s awesome – a great guy.”