Leonard and June are up early every morning and this is where they go. >>When we retired, I played
sports when I was in college, I'm used to working out every day so I started doing it and she said,
oh you know, I'll go up with you and now, and I told her, I said you get addicted. Now we go every
day. I'm talking about seven days a week. >>We do about an hour for myself and he's on usually the
treadmill. He can do the treadmill for about 30 - 40 minutes. >>Their morning routine had
to stop when Leonard developed gallbladder pain. >>I had really hard pain in my side, I went to the
emergency room and they said that my gallbladder was infected and the ducks were all plugged up.
>>They called in a surgeon but it wasn't anything that he could do locally. So, we ended up
more or less them taking him. They put him in an ambulance and drove him to Hershey and so
that's where they took over with the gallbladder. >>He developed cholecystitis which is an infection
in the gallbladder typically related to stones within the gallbladder blocking up the tube
that leads from the gallbladder downstream in the biolux. Most people when they have cholecystitis
they get a surgery, we remove the gallbladder laparoscopically. It's a relatively
straightforward and safe operation for most patients. >>But Leonard could not have surgery
because of a heart condition. So, doctors treated the infection. >>The type of procedure that he had
initially is called a cholecystostomy tube. That's just a medical term for a tube that's put into the
gallbladder. >>The only thing they said was we put the tube in you know and then you have a bag in
the outside of your body and the bowel goes into the end of the bag because it won't come through
the ducts in your intestine system. >>The problem was, he's kind of now stuck in this situation of
limbo where he still can't get a surgery, he still has stones in his gallbladder and now he is on
some level forced to live with this drain in place and many patients like him are told that this
drain is going to be a fixture for forever and that he'll need to have it changed every couple
of months. >>And I kind of figured, I'm going to be stuck with this thing for the rest of my life
and it was not a lot of fun. >>For seven months, he was on the chair sleeping and you know, what
and you can't turn in how these chairs are they're comfortable but you can't move around, you can't
go to your side, if you're driving you know, going from here to Hershey, I'm in Center County, it's
two hour drive, you know, and the seat belt sits right on that tube, hurts like a son-of-a-gun,
you can't eat, I lost like 40 pounds. I mean, you just don't get hungry. >> Dr. Pauli and the team
at Penn State Health developed a new cutting-edge procedure that could help Leonard. >>He called me
and said, I think I know how to come up with a solution. >>The name that we are using for
it is called PEBL, p-e-d-l., that stands for percutaneous, through the skin endoscopic,
small little camera biliary, gallstone lithectomy which is a removal of a stone.
>>At this point I was ready to try anything as long as it wasn't going to be too dangerous and
I figure ,with Hershey being a research hospital and they're to me one of the best in this area and
that's what they're for. >> I was just happy that somebody could do something you know so you know
he explained to me what he's going to do. >>We simply used the drain track that he had in place
to take a very very small camera and remove all of the many, many, many stones that he had in there.
The first time we did it, we took out more than a hundred stones. >>When he's taken the stones out
you know, we're talking and everything because I'm wide awake but when he gets a, he took out
a couple hundred the first day and he showed me the bottle of all of them in it and that's when
i was like, wow! You know, he just took all those out that's gotta help. >>He literally came down to
the waiting room and showed me a picture of them too on his iPhone as well as drawing me a picture
of what he did. Then they told Leonard we have to probably go in there one more time. A month later,
we went down there and he took out the rest of them. >>I think the second time we removed
five or six small stones. We confirmed that there were none left behind because we don't
want to leave any because even one is enough to block things up and once we were sure there were
none left we removed the drain. >>Immediately, Leonard felt better. I was just, wow! Just amazed
you know, driving back in a car without the seat belt hitting it. So far, everything you know,
he hasn't any pain in that area, so, we're just you know, hoping that this will be a solution
for him. >>Now I can sleep on my stomach and it's everything's just so much better. I got
the rest of my life so to speak where I won't have all that pain because it was, it was bad.