Spring term in the University’s Central Oregon program brought the return of Jodene Heider’s old enemy — statistics and probability.
More than 20 years earlier, she took a class in the subject, passed it and thought she was forever free of it. But, after forgetting much of the material, she was forced to take it again.
Ironically, it was the statistics and probability class that helped launch a friendship that would later rescue Heider from homelessness and help her through the misery of her sickness.
One day, she introduced herself to Angie Gass — a woman she’d seen around campus — and asked for her help with the math classwork.
After that first day, the two women routinely helped each other during and after class. One day, during a break in class, Heider turned around in her front-row seat and handed Gass a slip of paper with her phone number written on it, she said. Gass did the same.
The friendship blossomed quickly. In only a couple of weeks they were calling each other once, sometimes twice a day. They quickly became inseparable. Gass, who was one year behind Heider in school, took enough credits to catch up with her new friend, just so she could take the same classes with her, Heider said.
With school ending, the two began eating ice cream and popcorn and drinking Big Gulps together while watching television shows that were funny and had complex plots to unravel. “Law & Order” and “The Practice” were, and still are, two of their favorites.

A wandering spirit
Heider knew she was getting older and was in poor health, and she wanted to see the world before it was too late.
Heider, who learned to speak French at Central Oregon Community College, wanted to put her language skills to use by traveling to France with one of the University’s study-abroad programs.
She drove to Eugene, applied and was accepted. She was going to live in the city of Angers, outside of Paris, and was scheduled to leave only weeks after Sept. 11.
Gass was terrified for Heider. The idea of flying to France on Sept. 29 seemed “loony” to her, Heider said.
Heider, on the other hand, was determined to leave the country.
“She couldn’t believe that I had the gall to go after this terrorist attack that was committed,” Heider said.
Heider went to France and lived with her host family and another English-speaking student for fall term. Coming back to Oregon was a shock, but not a culture shock.

Couch jumping
Although Heider returned from France three days before Christmas, it wasn’t a joyous holiday that awaited her. It was homelessness.
Her older sister, Bev Clark, sold the house Heider was living in after
taking control of their father’s properties following his death, Heider said. The house, which her father built with his own two hands, brought Clark a $30,000 profit that she is still using to take vacations, Heider said.
Heider’s younger sister, Jan Steele, said she thought Clark and their mother should have given Heider more time to move out before leaving her homeless.
“I don’t agree with the timing of what they did because they only gave her 30 days,” Steele said. ” They basically put her out on the street.”
Heider was forced to stay with friends for the next six months while she finished up the few remaining classes needed for her first University degree.
In June 2002, she and Gass walked in the University’s commencement ceremony. Heider had only seven credits left to finish in the fall before a degree was hers.
She moved to Seattle to stay with her cousins for the first part of the summer. From there, she planned to move to Idaho to stay with her other cousins until fall, but when she called for a plane ticket the airline representative told her about a cheap ticket to Berlin. She couldn’t resist. She bought it and was off again.
Once again, Gass objected to Heider leaving the country, but rather than fight with Gass in person, Heider decided to confront her friend’s objections through e-mail while she was in Berlin.
She broke the news to Gass in a special way.
“I wrote, ‘Close your eyes, click your heels, spin around three times and open your eyes and look, I’m in Berlin,’” Heider said. “Angie said I had completely gone off of the deep end. She just couldn’t believe it.”
This time, Heider’s luck ran out, and two weeks into her trip her sickness flared up. Her shunt, which automatically drains excess cerebral spinal fluid from her head, quit working and sent her spiraling though three German hospitals for emergency operations. On her flight back to the United States, the shunt again failed and she had to have a spinal tap in the Netherlands.
She faced more operations in the United States with her doctor, Mark Belza, and it was too late to attend fall term by the time the surgeries were completed. From her hospital bed, she called her professors and begged them to let her enroll in their classes, she said. All of them refused. They told her that by the time she got out of the hospital, it would be the fourth week of school and too late to register.
Winter term began, and her health started to look better. For three weeks she attended classes, taking 12 credits. But her good fortune didn’t last. In January 2003, a disk between the vertebrae in her back slipped out of place and she was forced to quit school. That left her with 12 incomplete credits. Even after she regained her health, those incomplete credits would come back to haunt her.