When Mark Hescott first began experiencing shoulder pain, he dismissed it as most likely a torn tendon caused by an over-enthusiastic workout at his local gym. He’d felt that kind of pain before. But once it started affecting his neck, making it impossible for him to sleep comfortably in his own bed, Hescott sought help from a series of doctors before finally seeing a neurologist who recommended an MRI scan.
“I thought, ‘That doesn’t sound good,’” Hescott recalled. As it turned out, he was right.
When Dr. Jackson first viewed the results of the scan, he was startled to see a mass extended down almost the entire length of Hescott’s cervical spine. The mass was compressing the spine and causing Hescott’s pain. “It was unusual because he was walking and didn’t have other likely symptoms,” said Dr. Jackson.
While his wife, Jana, was emotional, Hescott felt a sense of calm from the moment Dr. Jackson came into the room. “My wife wanted to ask him all sorts of questions and we were sold on him by the time he took answering them. The fact that he’s a Christian was good enough for me.”
The tumor on Hescott’s spine was a meningioma. Dr. Jackson had operated on this type of tumor before. Still, there “was a ‘wow’ factor before and after the surgical resection (removal), and I had to fuse portions of his spine so that it would be stable. Some physicians tend to send rare cases like this one to the University of Michigan Hospital, but we’re fully capable of doing them at Genesys.”
Hescott’s tumor was not malignant. His pain is gone and he’s resumed his normal life, including regular visits to the gym.
Although the surgery took longer than Dr. Jackson had anticipated because of the extent of the tumor, Hescott was touched when he later learned that “every hour during the surgery someone from Dr. Jackson’s surgical team took the time to come out and update my wife, putting her at ease.”