Imagine what it must be like to be going through the motions of a normal day, when, all of a sudden, your body is completely out of your control. You're wracked by a seizure. In a blur, you are rushed to the hospital, and within hours, you are diagnosed with a brain tumor.

It's an experience that became a fearful and unexpected reality for Kingsburg residents Donna Stucky and Jeff Jacox. The two are sharing their stories in honor of Brain Tumor Action Week, hoping to raise awareness about a condition that 190,000 people will be diagnosed with in the United States this year.

Donna Stucky, a wife, mother of two grown children, and an administrative assistant at the Selma-Kingsburg-Fowler County Sanitation District (SKF), was home for lunch last July 10. Then the kitchen where she had been preparing her lunch suddenly began spinning.

Unable to move enough to get to a phone, she remembers thinking, "I'm having a stroke. I'm going to die on my kitchen floor."

The next thing she recalls is waking up to her dog licking her face and realizing an hour and a half had passed. Her shoes had been kicked clear across the room, her glasses were broken and she had a knot the size of a softball on the top of her head.

She hadn't had a stoke. She'd had a seizure.

Crawling to the nearest phone, she knocked it off the table and called her husband, Robert. She was unable to speak, but when he saw his home number on the phone with no one on the other end, he rushed home and found his wife.

A former volunteer firefighter and EMT with the Kingsburg Fire Department, Robert called 911.

Stucky recalls what a relief it was when members of the Kingsburg ambulance crew came to her aid.

"Seeing Wayne Osborne made me know I was going to be okay," she said. "Seeing a familiar face is the joy of a small town department."

She was transported to St. Agnes, but not expecting to be told that anything terribly serious was wrong.

She was not prepared for the results of her CT scan.

The doctor told her she had a very large brain mass that was "most certainly cancerous" and there wasn't much they could do for her.

Feeling as though she'd been handed a death sentence, she underwent an MRI. Then they were told by a neurosurgeon that while the tumor was probably not cancerous after all, no one in Fresno had ever performed surgery on a tumor as large as hers.

The tumor was a meningioma, a type that does not grow from brain tissue, but rather arises from the meninges, three thin layers of tissue covering the brain and spinal cord. These tumors most commonly grow inward causing pressure on the brain and spinal cord. Most are benign and slow-growing.

Through contacts that her children, Lisa and Tim, had in Southern California, Stucky was put in touch with an Orange County brain surgeon who agreed to take her case.

She spent her 50th birthday at St. Agnes waiting to be transferred to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, wrestling with the uncertainty of what was ahead.

A week after her seizure, Stucky underwent five and a half hours of surgery to remove the golf-ball sized tumor that had been pressing against the front of her brain. As any woman would be, she was thankful that she only had to have small areas of her head shaved. She had 42 staples holding her skull together, and still has titanium screws in her head.

Jeff Jacox, the band director at Roosevelt Elementary and Rafer Johnson Junior High, was only 38 when a brain tumor diagnosis changed his life six years ago.

After a long struggle to have a child, he and his wife, Fresno Pacific band director Patricia DeBenedetto, were expecting a son. The couple was living in Minneapolis at the time, and the pregnancy was plagued with difficulties.

Jacox had been feeling tired and experiencing some minor memory loss, which he attributed to working too hard at his job as a band director. Two weeks before the baby was due, as he and a friend were assembling the crib, his friend noticed he was acting strangely. Jacox couldn't remember the name of the church they regularly attended or recall the name they had picked out for their son.

Moments later, he had a seizure. His wife called 911, and Jacox has no memory of being taken to the hospital in an ambulance or anything that happened in the 18 hours that followed.

Like Stucky, Jacox was diagnosed with a benign meningioma. Doctors put him on high doses of anti-seizure medication and decided to wait to perform surgery until after his son was born. He remembers thinking that doctors were holding off on the surgery so he could see his baby before he died.

Joshua was born via emergency cesarean-section on Aug. 19, 2000. Five days later, Jacox had a tumor the size of a small lemon removed from above his left ear. He and his wife were both in the hospital at the same time.

For both Stucky and Jacox, life after a brain tumor has not been without its pitfalls. Stucky was off work for seven months, but at least she had a job to go back to. Jacox was let go from a teaching position at which he had been very successful only a few months after returning from his five month medical leave.

"It was a pretty horrific year for us, and then to be let go from my job," Jacox said. "But that's what led us to Kingsburg."

Patricia grew up in Fresno, so through contacts she had here, Jacox secured an interview with Kingsburg Elementary and was hired just a week before the start of the 2001 school year.

"It's been a great gig, and the community has been wonderful," he said.

But he still gets emotional when he remembers the uncertainty he faced the night before his surgery, and the recovery he faced afterwards.

"The thing that chokes me up is that my son had just been born and my wife had been through a difficult pregnancy," he said. "I wasn't able to drive her home or carry her up the stairs. She was having to take care of me, and she didn't get the attention and support she needed."

Jacox has a great neurologist in Fresno, and has been off all medications for three years. Though he still has a hard time remembering peoples' names and deals with some occasional memory loss, he is nonetheless thankful for the completeness of his recovery.

For Stucky, who is at an early stage in her recovery, some days are better than others. She is plagued by constant fatigue, and after working all day, is usually in bed by 6 p.m. every night. She has a speech deficit that becomes more pronounced when she is tired.

"Whenever I get tired, I just stutter and stammer like crazy," she said.

She struggles with her short term memory, and sometimes can't remember names and faces of people she's known for years.

While she has moments of frustration with a recovery that she wishes would come quicker, she is doing remarkably well, considering what she's been through. She attributes much of that to the extensive physical therapy she underwent for eight months.

Doctors initially told her she would never drive again and wouldn't be able work for at least two years, but less than a year later, she is successfully doing both.

"Doctors call me the miracle girl," she said. "I feel like I've been given a second chance."

Stucky said that in spite of the fact that she looks healthy, does her best to maintain a positive outlook and seems like her old self, she often doesn't feel like the person she was before her surgery.

"Everyone thinks I'm just back to normal, but I'm really not," she said.

Both Stucky and Jacox said they can't imagine how they would have made it without their faith in God.

Stucky recalls how much the prayer and support from so many in the community meant to her when she was feeling like her situation was hopeless.

"That's when you're so thankful that you live in a small town," she said. "The power of prayer made all the difference."

Jacox said that for him, it has always been a certainty that God saw him through the hard times, and that there was good that came out of it.

"I feel so blessed to have my family and to be here to watch my son grow up," he said. "God obviously had more life for me to live."

It is not unusual for a meningioma to grow for years before they are diagnosed. Doctors believe that Stucky's tumor grew for 20 years before it was discovered, and Jacox likely had his for about 10 years.

At Stucky's request, the Kingsburg Library currently has educational materials about brain tumors on display for anyone interested in learning more.

Stucky has been so affected by her experience with a brain tumor that she wants to help educate anyone else who may be faced with a similar diagnosis. Every day, she makes the decision to be thankful and to make the best of the challenges she still faces.

"Rather than feeling sorry for yourself, you have to have the drive to force yourself to be active," she said.

May 2, 2007