Published: March 10, 2008 09:27 am      

Remarkable Recovery

Midwest City police sergeant back on the job

Midwest City police Sgt. Stephen Owens is back on the job after surgery and a bit of radiation cured him of a grade three brain tumor.

Doctors told him six months ago, he would be dead or severely impaired by Feb. 15. Instead Owens came back to work Feb. 3.

“So I got up on the 15th and said I’m supposed to be dead today,” Owens said.

Only five percent of people with grade three brain tumors recover, he was also told.

The police sergeant’s journey from doomed to remarkably recovered was marked by an outpouring of support from his fellow officers, his church family at Soldier Creek Baptist Church, the community and a number of other individuals.

Sometime before his surgery, police cars began to appear on his street every night. About 20 officers would be outside holding hands and praying for him.

“I started being invited to those and they would pray for me and I would pray for them,” Owens said.

And when he traveled to MD Anderson Hospital in Houston, Owens found another community that took them in as his own. Frank Nance, the brother of a woman from Jones, learned about him and set up an RV in a park near the hospital where Owens and his family could stay.

“He had just recently lost his wife to cancer,” Owens said.

On Oct. 5, the day Owens received his surgery, the pastor of Nance’s church celebrated the anniversary of his own son’s remarkable recovery. Owens attended the church’s services while he was in Houston.

“It was like we’d been at that church all our lives,” he said.

Oklahoma doctors had told Owens that his tumor was inoperable. At MD Anderson Hospital, surgeons were shown Owens case and one surgeon said he was confident that the tumor could be removed but that it would be a dangerous procedure. Owens could either suffer a stroke or die while in surgery, he was told.

Owens and his wife prayed about it and then he called his parents to announce that he was going to undergo an awake craniotomy.

In preparation for the surgery, Owens was given a functional magnetic resonance imaging, which consists of listening to stories while receiving the MRI, to see what parts of the brains are active.

Just before the imaging, an individual approached Owens and asked to pray with him.

When they were done, the individual introduced himself as the MRI technician. He told Owens that he was also a Baptist and the husband of a cop. He also told him that the MRI would be analyzed and the surgeons would be shown what areas of the brain to avoid during the surgery.

The awake craniotomy was performed during the OU-Texas weekend and Owens jokes that he was afraid that the surgeons would see it as an opportunity to get rid of an OU fan.

Owens was put under while surgeons opened up the skull on one side of his head and then reawakened after they got through the derma, first layer of the brain. According to what he was told after the surgery, Owens had to be held down because of the surprise that comes with waking up with an open head and seeing a surgeon with a scalpel. Owens noted that some time ago, when he got his tonsils removed, he hit the anaesthesiologist.

The surgery took 12 hours and Owens woke up with a headache. About 95 percent of the tumor had been removed. At St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City, radiation took care of the rest.

And when a neuropsychologist tested Owens at the end of January, he was told that his brain functions were improved even over what they had been prior to surgery — a surprising fact considering that about a softball-sized portion of his brain had been removed.

“It’s really just focused my faith. I know if I didn’t have God, I would not be here right now. I wouldn’t have made it,” Owens said.

The police sergeant’s relationship with his wife of five years has also grown stronger from the experience, he said.

“You talk about stregnthening a marriage,” Owens said.

After surgery, Owens was given steroids to help with brain swelling. He “ballooned” up to 260 pounds but was allowed to stop taking them in January and is now at “fighting weight” — 210 pounds.

After getting the doctor’s permission and taking the police department’s functional capacity and physical exams, he was scheduled to come back to work Feb. 4. He was called in the night before Feb. 4, when the department was short a supervisor.

Now Owens is just happy to be there for his family which includes a 16-year-old, twin 13-year-olds, an 11-year-old stepdaughter and a 2-year-old son.

And as for his fellow officers’ support, Owens is grateful.

“At this police department, it will always be like that, I think. I wouldn’t work anywhere else,” he said.