Jenny Gardner shows off the first meal she made after losing her sight.
Jenny Gardner went on a paddleboat cruise earlier this year in Oregon and says the scenery that rolled by on both sides of the river was beautiful. She had no idea that within days her vision would go dark or that Intermountain caregivers miles away would be hard at work trying to help her through the ordeal that suddenly left her far from home without sight.
The boat she was on was nearing Astoria, Oregon, when Jenny felt what she thought was an ocular migraine coming on. When she woke up the next morning, her vision was worse. Eventually, she could only see through a tiny bit of her left eye and part of the vision in her right eye was blocked.
Cyndi Parkhouse, certified ophthalmic assistant, who works with Jenny’s ophthalmologist, Lyndon Tyler, MD, at Riverton Hospital, was called for help. Cyndi quickly found a retina specialist in Astoria, located just a five-minute walk from where Jenny’s boat was docked. With the help of another woman from the cruise, Jenny found her way to the office and they immediately started doing some tests. It wasn’t long before they insisted she go to the emergency department at a local hospital. She did and they treated her before transporting her to a hospital in Portland, which was two hours away. Mikaela Miler, RN, Jenny’s daughter, works for DaVita Dialysis. When she heard of her mother’s plight, she flew to Oregon to be with Jenny.
Lyndon Tyler, MD, and Cyndi Parkhouse, certified ophthalmic assistant, came to Jenny's aid.
“Cyndi worked with Mikaela and made sure I got to see everybody I needed to see,” Jenny says.
Eventually Jenny was diagnosed with “polymyalgia rheumitica” which caused “giant celled arteritis.”
“Apparently I’d been ill for maybe a couple of years, but I hadn’t known it,” Jenny says. “The symptoms were bizarre and didn’t seem to be related to each other.”
When Jenny got back home to Utah, she went to a neuro-ophthalmologist who agreed there was nothing else that could be done to save her vision.
“I’m not allowing myself to cry and feel sorry for myself,” Jenny says about her loss of sight. “I shouldn’t say that, a lot of people need to cry and it’s cathartic for them. The thing is it’s not something I can change, but I can make my life as easy as possible by learning how to deal with it.”
Jenny has two sons who work for Intermountain. Zac Gardner is a system support-senior at the Southridge Clinic in Riverton and David Felts is a client field support supervisor based at Logan Regional Hospital.
“My mum has had a hard life and has always been an inspiration with her attitude,” Dave says. “Not only is she positive but generally happy as well.”
“She’s got a positive attitude about everything,” Cyndi says of Jenny. “She’s my favorite patient.”
Zac says after Jenny got back, he called the Southridge Clinic where her doctor, Richard Lassere, MD, works so they’d be aware of her situation.
“I called to get her an appointment with a nurse care manager so they could help us through everything going forward,” Zac says. “I work out at Southridge so I know all of the people out there and the nurse care manager was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was your mom we were talking about last week?’ she said. ‘We’re already on top of it.’ And that made me so comfortable to know they already knew about her needs. I mean it was immediate. They heard from Dr. Tyler, so her line of care was just impeccable.”
Despite her good attitude, Jenny had lost her sight and Dr. Tyler had lost a patient. That’s why when she got a call from Dr. Tyler she was surprised.
“I got a call one day from Dr. Tyler who said he’d like to see me and I said, ‘Fine,’” she says. “Then he said, ‘I live so close. Instead of you coming in to see me, why don’t I just stop by to see you?’”
“At which point I think my jaw hit the floor. I wasn’t able to see it happening, but I’m pretty sure it did,” she says.
Jenny says he came and sat on the back doorstep with her for about an hour.
While Dr. Tyler was there, he got an unexpected opportunity to help Jenny.
“Strangely enough, as we were sitting there, a bug flew straight into my eye and it was painful,” she says. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I need a doctor.’
Dr. Tyler was there right next to her.
“And while I was thinking about that, Dr. Tyler was fishing the bug out of my eye,” Jenny says. “I don’t know why I thought that was so funny, but I did.”
Dr. Tyler was there for Jenny for more than just the bug accident and Zac was impressed with that.
“It wasn’t about furthering his business,” Zac says. “He was actually just caring about my mum. With our mum being irreversibly blind we know she won’t necessarily need Dr. Tyler’s care from this point on but for him to show such concern and care for our mum was absolutely wonderful and touching.”
Dr. Tyler says he visited Jenny because he was concerned about her.
“She went through a drastic change and had an unfortunate outcome,” he says. “Sometimes people can feel a lot of despair with that, but she’s actually quite upbeat. She’s got good support through her family and she has a social network to help her. I just wanted to make sure she was getting the care she needed and to see what sort of resources she may know about or not know about.”
The visit made a difference to Jenny.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but it made me feel like, yes, someone really did care about me,” she says. “He was obviously concerned about us, not just my eyes, but how the whole situation was going to affect my life. It was very special.”