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liver411

Family struggles without power as husband combats liver disease

By Kate Andrews The Record Herald

WAYNESBORO - Timothy Mesner used to be one of those people who never got
sick.

Maybe a cold here or there, but nothing to worry about and certainly nothing to see a doctor about.

The one black mark on his otherwise perfect health record was a car crash in 1983.

Traveling down a windy hillside on a New Jersey road, the vehicle in front of Mesner suddenly swerved to avoid a construction area. Mesner couldn't avoid it, and his car flipped, ejecting him.

The accident left him with head injuries, broken ribs, covered in cuts and abrasions, in a coma and in need of two pints of blood.

After being hospitalized in New Jersey for 15 days, Mesner came home to Pennsylvania to recuperate. He recovered, went back to work and mostly forgot about the accident.

"I just was glad I was OK," he said.

More than 20 years later - when he started feeling tired all the time, had pains in his side and experienced a "crawling" feeling on his legs - Mesner never connected it to that long ago accident.

But that's what it was - those two pints of blood, it turned out, had been tainted with hepatitis.

Infected with both hepatitis B and C, Mesner is in the final stages of liver disease.

As if battling hepatitis isn't enough, Mesner and his family also are battling the power company, which turned off the electricity seven weeks ago.

'A big mess'

Mesner and his wife, Lisa, said they have always paid their electric bills on time.

After Timothy fell sick, they enrolled in Allegheny Power's Low Income Payment and Usage Reduction Plan (LIPURP), which allowed them to pay $40 a month toward their electric bill.

"I could afford that," Lisa said.

They enrolled in the program in May 2004, and Lisa said it worked out well. But in February 2005, the Antrim Township couple filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Chapter 13 bankruptcy allows a person to stop creditors' collection efforts while paying debts and maintaining property and assets. Lisa said they filed for that type of bankrupcty so they wouldn't lose their Marsh Road home.

Thinking it would take a little while to get the bankruptcy claim sorted out, the Mesners weren't too concerned when they didn't get an electric bill for a little while.

Then in May, they said they got a bill for $1,500 from Allegheny Power, telling them if they didn't pay up, their electricity would be shut off.

It turned out Lisa was required to renew with the LIPURP program each year, something she hadn't known.

What followed was a "big mess," Lisa said. She has spent weeks arguing with the power company.

Her correspondance with Allegheny Power, the Public Utilities Commission and state Rep. Pat Fleagle, who argued on the Mesners' behalf, fills several folders.

In the end - despite Timothy's disability and their bankruptcy filing - the power was turned off.

"They know they are violating my constitutional rights as a disabled person," Timothy said.

Allegheny's view

Allegheny Power spokesman Allen Staggers said the company didn't receive the required documentation that Timothy was disabled until after the power was shut off.

"A doctor actually has to sign a form, and that has to be submitted to us. That's the procedure," Staggers said.

Early on, the Mesners said they told Allegheny Power that Timothy was disabled and were never told they needed to present documentation, Lisa said.

"We don't want this to happen to anyone else," Lisa said.

When they did learn they needed to send a medical certificate, they promptly sent one.

By that point, Allegheny Power had discovered that several wires leading into the Mesners' home needed to be repaired, Staggers said.

"If it hadn't been for the unsafe condition, we would have reconnected within 24 hours of receiving the medical certificate," Staggers said.

They won't be able to turn the electricity back on until the repair is made - a repair the Mesners can't afford. Staggers said he understands the Mesners have been placed in a difficult situation.

"We don't want to appear unsympathetic to their situation," he said. "There's nothing we can do about the unsafe condition of their electrical connection."

As for the bankruptcy, Staggers said he could not discuss that specifically.

Using a hypothetical customer as an example, he said bankruptcy proceedings normally erase a customer's debt.

"But the customer does have to still get electricity from us so they sign up for essentially a new account. Then, if they get behind on their new account ... the bankruptcy doesn't really have anything to do with that," Staggers said.

Meanwhile, the Mesners have been running a gas-powered generator at a cost of about $20 a day to power a small refrigerator for Mesner's medication and the television. They have only cold water.

Some have encouraged the Mesners to sell their home, which they bought in 2002. Timothy can't stomach the thought.

"This is our children's home," he said.

Timothy's health

Before Timothy was diagnosed with hepatitis, the Mesners ran their own construction company, Mesner Construction.

They lived rather comfortably - earning, in the last year before Timothy got sick, around 100,000. They could easily afford electricity bills and the $798 mortgage on their home.

They even installed an above-ground pool in their backyard for their 9-year-old twin daughters, Tori and Tammy.

But then, Timothy began feeling tired.

He said he would start falling asleep in the car on the way home from work, at the dinner table and during conversations.

"He started snoring," Tori remembered.

He also started feeling like there were bugs crawling up his legs and had the house fumigated, thinking there was some sort of infestation.

It turned out that feeling is one of the symptoms of end stage liver disease - it is the feeling of the proteins your liver can no longer process attaching to your nerve endings.

Then came the hepatitis diagnosis and the news that Timothy only had two years left to live.

"We all cried," Lisa said.

Both forms of hepatitis cause the liver to become swollen until it can no longer function. Hepatitis can cause serious liver diseases like cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Hepatitis B is spread by bodily fluids, including blood and semen, while Hepatitis C usually is only spread through blood.

Doctors believe Timothy contracted the illnesses from those two pints of blood, which came from a clinic in Trenton, N.J., that was paying people $10 to donate blood.

His accident happened a year before donated blood started being screened for communicable diseases.

A liver specialist in Chambersburg told Timothy he was not a good candidate for a liver transplant and sent him home with a blood pressure pill.

A year later, unhappy with that diagnosis, Lisa got her husband an appointment with a doctor at Hershey Medical Center.

In that year, Timothy's health had deteriorated from stage three to stage four, the worst kind.

The new doctor said Timothy was an excellent candidate for a liver transplant. Except for enlarged veins running to his liver, Timothy was in excellent health and fairly young, only 43.

Now, Timothy is on nine medications. Doctors are hoping they can reduce the size of his veins with medication before going ahead with a transplant.

If he gets a new liver, Timothy wants to go back to work. It's having enough money to get to that point that is the problem.

"We're not the poorest people you've ever laid eyes on. We're just hoping we can keep going. ... I have a lot of work left in me," Timothy said.

Editor's note: Donations can be made to Tim Mesner's Liver Account at any Susquehanna Bank branch.



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