Jodene Heider entered the large auditorium at Mt. Hood Community College on a sunny but chilly morning in September 1994. Inside, about 50 people waited in their seats, scattered loosely throughout the room. She chose her seat and waited.
Heider was anxious to take the state nursing exam, the culmination of two months of studying. She was ready to embark on her new career path. Heider got her Scantron and test instructions and pulled out her No. 2 pencil. She leaned over the desk top and tore into the four-hour test.
But about halfway into the test, something went wrong. She was having trouble seeing and marking answers on her sheet; her eyes were showing double images and she couldn’t get them to focus. She rubbed them, but they were still blurry. She put on her glasses, but that didn’t help either.
“I thought, ‘Why at this time?’” Heider said. “I could hear other people getting up after they had finished their tests.”
By noon, the first test was over and the test-takers cleared the auditorium for lunch. Heider went to Burger King, bought two Whoppers, ate one and relaxed. She had no idea what was wrong with her eyes, and she thought they would be better for the second test — the clinical segment — if she relaxed them.
They didn’t get better.
By the end of the day, Heider had miraculously completed the first and second tests with 99 and 100 percent scores.
Heider had her nursing license, but she had a new priority now. She had no idea her blurry vision was only the beginning of a long medical ordeal. An excess of cerebral spinal fluid had begun to pool in Heider’s brain, causing vision problems that doctors couldn’t fix or explain. She had no idea that it would get worse, eventually inflicting short-term memory loss, dyslexia, slow comprehension of speech and writing, and a swollen body.
The build-up of fluid, also referred to as a tumor, has resulted in surgeries, drugs, spinal taps,
Computerized tomography scans and Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans, endangering her health and often hindering her daily life.
Right now Heider, a 46-year-old University student, is in urgent need of surgery. Heider said Dr. Catherine Gallo, a neurosurgeon in Eugene, doesn’t think she’ll live another 10 years.
That’s why Heider wants her story told — to thank everyone who’s helped her through the tough times, to thank the people who have helped keep her alive.

The medical roller coaster
After the state nursing exam, Heider went home to Redmond and began searching for a good optometrist. She eventually found Dr. Michael Stauder.
A couple of weeks later she sat in his Bend office.
“He looked into my eyes and he wasn’t saying very much,” Heider said. “I knew from my experience that that wasn’t a good sign.”
Over the next few weeks, Stauder dilated Heider’s eyes and ordered diabetic and peripheral vision tests. Then, he ordered an MRI.
Heider received a message on her machine from his office at 5 p.m. on a Friday evening. He wanted her to go to St. Charles Medical Center immediately, but he didn’t tell her why, she said.
At the center, she met Dr. Gary Buchholz, who was first to tell her what was really going on in her head. He discovered that the pressure in her skull was more than twice that of a healthy person. Buchholz administered Heider’s first spinal tap — an operation where a 4-to-6-inch needle is inserted into the spinal column — and measured the pressure of her cerebral spinal fluid. He then removed about 15 cubic centimeters of it from her spine.
Next, she went to Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland for a second opinion. Experts at OHSU sent her back to Bend to neurosurgeon Dr. Norwin Newby, who gave her another spinal tap. It was an operation that she would become intimately familiar with; she estimates she’s had 90 spinal taps in the last 10 years.

Filling the void
In 1998, Heider started school at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, her second trip to college. Going back to school after 20 years in the workplace was a relief for Heider, who graduated from Portland’s Roosevelt High School with honors.
It was a way of filling a gaping void in her life after much of her family went away. Heider said her father, Howard, died of heart disease in 1995; her mother, Louise, suffers from dementia at home in Portland; and her older sister, Bev Clark, has all but abandoned Heider because she couldn’t handle her chronic medical condition.
Jan Steele, Heider’s younger sister, said their mother has disowned them both.
“She has more or less said she doesn’t have a daughter named Jody,” Steele said.
Despite these personal setbacks, Heider persevered academically. In 1999 she got her first degree, a two-year general associate of arts.
But Heider wasn’t finished. She wanted to get a four-year degree like her father had always wanted her to do.
In fall 2000, Heider became one of the first students to enroll in the University’s General Social Science program in Bend. For the next two terms, she buried herself in 12-credit course loads, laboring toward a four-year degree while working as a certified nursing assistant in home health care.
“She has gone through a tremendous amount of heartache,” Steele said. “Her journey has been quite incredible. I don’t know how she has persevered to keep going when she didn’t have anything left. How she picks up and keeps going, I don’t know.”