Jodene Heider can’t live the way she used to before her pseudotumor appeared in 1994. The pseudotumor often makes her daily routine difficult, obscuring appointments and responsibilities in a thick fog of short-term memory loss.
Friends help her with these things, but there are some battles they can’t help her fight.
For about a year, Heider has battled, unsuccessfully, to re-enroll at the University.
Her first hurdle has been the daunting task of paying for school. She can’t get financial aid and she can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket, she said.
Heider is still working on incompletes from when she had to quit school in winter 2003 due to a slipped disk between her vertebrae . Those incompletes are preventing her from getting financial aid, she said.
The second hurdle is her unstable health, which is one of the reasons financial aid won’t give her money, she said. Heider said she is considered a liability because if she were to get sick or die she would not be able to pay back the loans.
Jim Gilmour, associate director of the Office of Student Financial Aid, said that while he can’t speak about a specific student’s situation, his office can stop aid if a student is not able to consistently meet his or her academic requirements. Financial aid is strictly meant for school, and when a student can’t attend school, the financial aid office has no choice but to stop giving aid, he said.
“In some cases, students have to leave school for a term or two until they’re prepared to come back to school and continue their academic work,” Gilmour said.
Heider’s attorney, Alice Plymell, is helping Heider get financial aid so she can enroll in classes.
“They say they will not let her enroll until she gets her medical condition stabilized,” Plymell said. “That’s my understanding from (Heider). My understanding of reading about pseudotumors is the shunt only lasts about a year and then it has to be replaced, so I don’t know what kind of stability the University is looking for. I think we’re going to have to put some pressure on them.”
Director of Disability Services Steve Pickett has known Heider for two years. He said Disability Services is now helping Heider take care of her incompletes so she can continue toward her degree. In a Feb. 2 e-mail to Heider, Pickett said his department will help her with incompletes but is unable to assist her with the classes she’s currently sitting in on.
“She’s got a lot on her plate right now,” he said. “I admire her determination and her being able to be very goal-directed. She doesn’t let her challenges defeat her in any way.”
But Heider said she is getting depressed.
“I’ve tried to stay optimistic, but at this point I don’t know what else would work,” she said. “I’ve had hurdles to jump over while I’ve been trying to do these incompletes. I’ve gotten depressed. I’ve gotten discouraged.”
Heider said she’d like to graduate, get a job and become financially stable so she doesn’t ever have to be homeless again. She’d like to find work, and at the same time, she’d like to give back to the community by making a donation to the University as a sign of her school spirit.
But when, or if, that will ever happen, she doesn’t know.

In need of surgery
Heider waited impatiently in the emergency department of McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center on the evening of Feb. 10. The headaches and body pains had gotten too bad to ignore any longer, she said. She had to have another spinal tap.
Heider saw her first nurse, who took her blood pressure and determined that it was high. The nurse then asked her to rate her headache on a scale of one to 10. Heider said eight.
Then, Heider went into a cubicle in the lobby to register. After about 10 minutes, she came out and sat in one of the waiting chairs. She was crying, dreading the pain of the spinal tap, she said.
Heider went into the emergency room for treatment, but the doctors turned her away, saying she had received too many spinal taps and really needed surgery to revise her shunt, she said.
She agreed, but asked for a spinal tap anyway.
They still said no, Heider said.
Tom Hambly, clinical manager of emergency services for McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center, said the hospital refuses service to nobody, but that a physician may have decided it wasn’t appropriate or safe to perform a spinal tap at the time.
“I’m alarmed that she’s had 90 spinal taps,” Hambly said. “And I can understand why a physician wouldn’t want to do 91. Spinal taps carry with them their own inherent risks, and you have to weight the risks compared to the advantages of any given procedure.”
Right now the pressure of cerebral spinal fluid in Heider’s head is building. She started noticing it in September, and since then it’s gotten worse.
A letter from Dr. Mark Belza — her neurosurgeon in Bend — said Heider has suffered from chronic nausea, ear and eye pain and difficulty balancing since then.
In the past six months, Heider has been to the emergency room nine times for emergency spinal taps, she said. Each time they stick the needle in, they run the risk of hitting her spinal cord, which could paralyze or kill her.
“I’m left with no care,” Heider said. “I have a spinal tap about once every two weeks and I subject myself to infection, paralysis or death each time the needle goes in.”
Heider needs a shunt revision, according to the letter from Belza’s office.
Her shunt — which continually drains fluid out of her back by diverting it into her urine system — is not functioning because it is plugged, she said. Her vision is getting worse, her ears are aching and her body is swollen.
“This is like a pressure cooker,” she said. “I feel puffy like the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
Heider can’t have surgery in Eugene. There are nine neurosurgeons in the city, but all of them are booked and none will consider her case because her Oregon Health Plan coverage will only pay 75 percent of what it normally pays, Heider said.
She said the Governor’s Advocacy Office is investigating her case.
Heider can’t go to Bend to have Belza perform the surgery, either.
In the letter, Belza wrote that the best course of action would be to have a surgeon in Eugene take her case. The risk of her driving over the mountains after a surgery would be too great, he wrote.
Besides, Heider said she’s tired of bouncing back and forth like a tennis ball. She is resolute that one of the local surgeons here should take her case.
“It’s got to work,” she said. “It’s just something that’s got to work.”
Heider said sometimes it’s hard for her to accept the battle she’s fighting, hard to accept her chronic sickness.
“I hate to say that I’m not going to get better,” she said. “But there’s not a cure for the tumor. There’s not a cure for the asthma. It’s chronic. So, we just try to deal with it as best as we can. … I can’t believe it’s happening to me. It’s like you would read about it in the newspaper about another student, but it’s me.”