here's an interesting sidebar to tusa's january 10th game with new mexico sate:
Henson tries another comeback
By Vahe Gregorian
Of the Post-Dispatch
12/26/2004
In the last moments Lou Henson can remember before three vanished weeks of his life, he had finished a round of golf and been out to dinner with some of his New Mexico State basketball staff and a recruit.
Suddenly, he didn't feel good. Maybe a touch of the flu, he thought. He excused himself and said he'd meet them in the morning for breakfast.
"Then my brain just blocked everything out," Henson recalled last week. "It's probably a good thing."
Before he was hospitalized a few days later on Sept. 28, Henson had headaches and nausea that not even wife Mary's "old standby" of poached eggs on toast could offset. He still was walking and talking, but the symptoms seemed inconsistent with the lymphoma that he had battled since 2003 and was in remission.
So no one was too alarmed. Yet.
"I started to know something was really wrong when that Saturday he didn't want to watch college football," said Mary Henson, who two nights later awoke to her husband "at an odd angle in bed with all the covers thrown off."
She hurried him to the hospital. By the time they arrived, Lou Henson had a temperature of 103. He had viral encephalitis, an acute inflammatory disease of the brain.
"He had been on some long-term chemo drugs to keep (the lymphoma) under suppression," said William Baker, the team doctor and Henson's physician. "That suppresses your immune system in general. With a normal person, (the virus) might have given us a cold. But his immune system wasn't" able to fight it off.
In the days to come, Henson would descend into what Mary Henson called "a mild coma" and later have steady hallucinations. He would lose 35 pounds from his 185-pound frame over the course of six weeks spent in a hospital and rehab center.
The immediate question wasn't if Henson would coach again.
It was whether he would live and, if so, have full function of his brain.
"A lot of people don't survive it," Henson said, "and if you do it can affect your mind."
Two months later, Henson expects to be back on the Aggies sideline coaching on or before his 73rd birthday, Jan. 10 against Tulsa. The former University of Illinois coach is second only to Texas Tech's Bob Knight among active Division I coaches with 778 career wins.
Never mind that he's likely to be in a wheelchair since his right leg remains partially paralyzed. Even thus encumbered, he has been coaching the last few weeks with the aid of a megaphone at most practices and has resumed duties such as watching film and meeting with the team.
"What I'm going to do is have (the wheelchair) between the (assistant) coaches, and I'll tell them, 'Hey, if you want to coach here, don't you let (players) hit me,'" said Henson, who intends to purchase tickets for anyone in a wheelchair who wishes to attend his first game back.
Baker has concerns of his own about Henson's return, and not just because the Pan American Center was built "before anyone ever heard of the Americans With Disabilities Act" and there is no simple way for Henson to get to the court from the locker room on the concourse.
"Since I sit on the bench ... I view this with great nervousness," Baker said. "If his routine in the wheelchair is the same while he was able to walk, I'm afraid he'll run over my toes."
An "astounding"
recovery
Regardless of what Henson's coaching future is, Baker said, his recovery to date is "astounding." Mary Henson is overwhelmed that he gradually returned to being himself after the weeks he was in the deepest fog.
"Lou could not speak, he could not move anything. He could do nothing for himself," she said. "This has been sort of a miraculous recovery at his age. It could have gone any way. ... It sounds bad, but you know what, when you see what could have been, just the loss of the use of a leg is not so great."
But no one is giving up on the leg yet.
"We're hoping - let's put it that way," Baker said.
Henson in the last few weeks has been able to move his toes and more recently has managed to wiggle his ankle. He goes to physical therapy four days a week and works at his rehabilitation three times a day at home. Nerve damage in the quadriceps muscle is the key obstacle now.
"If I'm lying flat, I can kind of raise my knee up a little bit, but I'm not making too much progress there," Henson said, though noting, "It was a brain disease, and it takes time for the brain to kick in."
Instrumental in Henson's recovery has been his optimistic nature and his practice of walking several miles a day before he fell ill.
Family support
pulls him through
But perhaps nothing has been more crucial than the outpouring of support he received from colleagues all over the country and the doting of his family, including his three daughters and brother Ken - each of whom came from out of town to make extended stays at the height of his illness.
When he was in the hospital in Las Cruces, N.M., Henson never was without a family member by his side, day or night. Even as the family agonized, it coped by staying close and maintaining its sense of humor.
For instance, when Lou was hallucinating, Mary said, laughing, he tended to be immersed in his vocation or avocation.
"He could not get settled down, and he could not sleep. And you would hear him talking as if he were on a golf course or in a huddle," said Mary, adding that the family often kept sports on television to try to spark his mind. "One time when golf was going on, Lou turned to (daughter) Lisa and said, 'Lisa, what club do you think I should use to get on the green here?'
"And Lisa, without missing a beat, said, 'Dad, how far out are you?' This was a conversation at bedside! We laughed (even) at that time. You can't help but laugh about that. Thank God. You'd go crazy if you didn't."
"Isn't that something?" Lou Henson said. "Of course, I don't remember any of that."
Going for 800 wins
To some degree, Mary Henson thinks her husband is crazy to want to coach again.
"I don't want him to do it. He knows that. But when did I ever have any influence on him?" she said, laughing. "The way I look at it, though, whatever makes him happy is fine."
New Mexico State is eager for him to return, at least to try to reach the 800-victory plateau before he retires. New Mexico State is Henson's alma mater and the school he took to the 1970 Final Four before later spending 21 seasons at Illinois. He also guided the Illini to the Final Four in 1989.
Mary Henson knows that at least part of her husband's zealous rehabilitation has been spurred by his desire to get back to the sideline - even if his team is 3-7.
"We're not very good this year," Lou Henson said, "but we didn't anticipate being really good."
He also didn't anticipate nearly dying two months ago and now finding himself on the verge of the comeback of the year.
All of it, acting head coach Tony Stubblefield said, "really makes you value life more" no matter what happens next.
"I would not count him out," said Mary Henson, whose 50th wedding anniversary celebration with the "entire, entire" family next week now will be all the more precious. "Such a blessing."
