News
ENLARGE
More than a month after the text message was sent, Lisa Burton still has it saved on her Blackberry.
“She's been on the phone with the radiologist for a long time, starting to get nervous.”
It was all Luke Burton could muster up to tell his wife of nearly five years. His emotions were running high, not knowing what it was that was about to punch him in the gut for the second time in under a year.
May 22, 2008, 11:30 a.m. —
Lisa, 31, was in her office at State Farm’s regional office in Greeley. She and her co-workers were getting regular updates. There was a severe storm headed right at them, coming out of the southeast from Gilcrest. Growing up in Eaton, Lisa, had been through many storms in her life, but something about this one was different. State Farm and all of its employees were undergoing a tornado drill.
She called her husband, Luke, who was at his business, Huston Graphics, in Windsor. When she hung up, she went to the window and started taking pictures.
“I could see it coming,” Lisa said. “But all I could think was, ‘That can’t be a tornado. It has to be a wall of rain, a serious storm.’ ”
She called Luke again and asked him to look at it.
11:45 a.m. —
Luke, 30, and two employees pulled their vehicles around the building trying to shelter them from the impending hail. Luke grabbed his video camera and plugged his phone in to charge it. When the three men realized it was more serious than they first thought, they and Luke’s two dogs piled into a vehicle and headed for one of the employees’ home just down the street on Garden Drive.
“There was a traffic jam on Garden,” Luke said. “There were cars going every which direction. Tyler lived like six or seven blocks away, and on the way there his window on his car cracked. When we got there, I just remember running in the house. Leaves were everywhere, and two skylights were blown out.”
Luke continued to videotape everything.
Sometime shortly after noon —
After Luke and his employees left the safety of the basement, Luke turned the video camera back on and headed back toward his business, a business that he had bought in 2005 and nurtured for the past four years.
“I knew it was bad,” Luke said. “First we saw there were fences down, then trees; then I noticed roofs were missing and trailers and cars were blown over and sprinkler systems were uprooted. I heard someone say, ‘I don’t think we’re working anymore today.’ Then one of my guys said. ‘Oh my God! Huston Graphics is gone!’ ”
It was a day Luke and Lisa, who met in college at the University of Northern Colorado, will never forget. All their vehicles were destroyed in the tornado. But more importantly, the Greeley couple lost their business in the industrial park off Colo. 257.
“It was crazy,” Lisa said. “Some papers were still on the wall in their files where we left them, but every single computer we owned was blown off the desks.”
Like many tornado victims, the Burtons spent the next several months fighting with their insurance company — which was not State Farm. Even though much of their equipment sat outside in the rain over the following weekend waiting for an adjuster to come look at it, the insurance company wanted to fix it, while the Burtons insisted on it being replaced. And then there was a long debate over how much their loss of revenue rider would cover.
“It was draining,” Luke said. “It took until August to determine the total losses.”
“It was very difficult to deal with,” Lisa added. “We just had to wait because they wanted to fix a few pieces of key equipment that we were adamant they had to replace. We finally hired an attorney to send off a letter.”
Eventually, everybody fell into agreement, and the Burtons were on their way to recovery.
While they were rebuilding their old site, they moved into a smaller rental unit a few blocks away, but without full capabilities, they have only operated at about 60 percent.
But it’s 2009, and the Burtons will soon move back into their old location.
“All we could think of was, ‘It’s a new year and our run of bad luck is over.’ We were happy to say goodbye to 2008,” Luke said.
Another message —
“Something's on my chest that shouldn't be there.”
Feb. 20, 2009 —
With everything tornado-related seemingly behind him, Luke is at his shop printing shirts on one of his new presses. Sometimes while printing, Luke has to step in between platens to move the ink. He’s done it a thousand times.
But this press is new, and Luke doesn’t know it quite as well as the old one. It doesn’t pause right, and Luke is pinched between two printing plates. But it wasn’t disastrous, he said. It knocked the air out of him for a bit, short of that, Luke is fine and continues on with his job, even pulling an overnighter to get the job done.
“I wanted him to go to the doctor just to get checked,” Lisa said. “But he said he was fine.”
Within the next couple of days, Luke started to get sick. He felt like he was fighting off a cold or the flu. As the days progressed, night sweats started to consume him.
“His best friend at night was a beach towel,” Lisa said with a laugh about the degree of sweating Luke was doing during his sleep. “One morning, we woke up at 2:30 a.m. and had to switch it out; that’s how soaking wet it was. He just had water running off of him.”
March 8 —
Luke still wasn’t feeling well, but he ventured off to play nine holes of golf. When he returned home, he felt worse than ever. Lisa was leaving the next day for Grand Junction, and she made Luke promise her he would go to Urgent Care in Greeley and get checked out.
“We’re young and healthy, so we don’t have primary doctors, so I just made him promise me he would go see a doctor at the clinic,” Lisa said.
“And I didn’t want to,” Luke said with a laugh. “I thought sure he’d tell me just to toughen up and go home. All I was fighting off was a cold.”
A chest X-ray appeared to show pneumonia, but doctors wanted a CAT scan to be sure. When it was done, the nurse disappeared into the office and didn’t come out for more than an hour.
The messages keep coming —
“The doctors have told me to tell you to come home now.”
March 9 —
“They kept going in and out of the office,” Luke said. “They finally asked me if there was someone that could come and sit with me.”
But Lisa was hours away on business for State Farm.
“Then the nurse told me to have my wife come home right away,” Luke said. “That was kind of freaky.”
For Luke, it was like the tornado had struck all over. He’d been punched in the gut one more time.
“This was so far out of my hands,” Luke said. “The situation is going to go the way the situation goes. I work 80-90 hours a week. I’ve spent all my time working to build this business. First the tornado takes it away, and all of a sudden, it was gone again.”
One doctor thought it was blood clots, then they thought it was testicular cancer that had metastasized into his chest. Germ cell cancer was another option.
“He said to me, ‘There is too much on my plate right now. I don’t think I can add this to the plate,’ ” Lisa recalled.
But what was hard to swallow was even another possibility with implications that were even stranger. That possibility was mediastinal paraganglioma, a rare tumor that always presents itself as benign.
“The doctor actually said to us, ‘You may not want this to be benign,’ ” Lisa said. “What do you hope for? We were so conflicted.”
The problem with a mediastinal paraganglioma was it was located above Luke’s heart, very close to his lungs and next to an aorta. Doctors would have to break his sternum wall to remove it. If they didn’t operate, and it continued to grow, it could put pressure on that aorta, causing it to burst, and Luke would bleed to death.
But cancer? How could you hope for cancer?
“The doctors kept saying with Luke’s health, the cancer was ‘infinitely curable,’ ” Lisa said.
Doctors wanted to check Luke into North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley immediately to perform a needle biopsy to determine what the mass was. After going home to let the dogs out, Luke headed for NCMC and Lisa boarded the next flight out of Grand Junction.
March 10 —
Doctors performed the needle biopsy, and after another night in the hospital they sent Luke and Lisa home to wait.
There was nothing Luke could do but wait, so the workaholic he is, he went back to work on March 11. It was three more days before he would learn which direction he would have to take.
Friday, March 13 —
Mediastinal paraganglioma was a new diagnosis for Luke’s doctors. It’s a new diagnosis for most doctors. Over a 25-year study by the Mayo Clinic, mediastinal paraganglioma has been documented only 14 times. Very little is known about mediastinal paraganglioma, but doctors do know that some tumors secrete adrenaline or epinephrine, both substances that, at elevated levels, can cause high blood pressure. Luke had elevated blood pressure for many years, but never high enough to treat.
The slow-growing vascular tumor was the size of an orange. Doctors said it was likely in his chest for years, possibly decades. They believe the jolt Luke received by the press that day may have caused the secretion of substances into his system that made him sick.
April 30 —
Luke and a scar that runs from above his chest to the middle of his stomach are back at work at Huston Graphics and moving the business back to its original location.
After a March 27 surgery, the tumor is gone, and only a 10 percent chance of it returning remains. The only lasting affect of the surgery is a raspy voice that came from doctors having to sever a vocal cord nerve that was enveloped by the tumor. And that, too, can be fixed, which Luke plans to do at some point.
He’s on limited lifting duty, but should be cleared to return to work 100 percent by June 1, which is when he also plans to pick up his wake boarding sport.
“I need to get my business back to order,” Luke said. “I’d rather be stressing about getting work done than the economy, a tornado or my health.”
But one thing remains clear for the Burtons. Without that tornado, Luke may not have his health.
“It’s almost like it was meant to be,” Luke said. “But when I hear, ‘The good thing that came from the tornado …’ it makes me want to throw up.”
“But we may not have ever found the tumor without the tornado until they were doing an autopsy,” Lisa added. “We’re not thankful for the tornado, but it’s the silver lining to the storm. If the shop wouldn’t have been destroyed, we wouldn’t have a new press. If we didn’t have a new press, Luke wouldn't have been pinched. If Luke wouldn’t have been pinched, he may not have gotten sick.”
“I guess the chain of events that came out of the tornado are a blessing in some ways,” Luke conceded.
“She's been on the phone with the radiologist for a long time, starting to get nervous.”
It was all Luke Burton could muster up to tell his wife of nearly five years. His emotions were running high, not knowing what it was that was about to punch him in the gut for the second time in under a year.
May 22, 2008, 11:30 a.m. —
Lisa, 31, was in her office at State Farm’s regional office in Greeley. She and her co-workers were getting regular updates. There was a severe storm headed right at them, coming out of the southeast from Gilcrest. Growing up in Eaton, Lisa, had been through many storms in her life, but something about this one was different. State Farm and all of its employees were undergoing a tornado drill.
She called her husband, Luke, who was at his business, Huston Graphics, in Windsor. When she hung up, she went to the window and started taking pictures.
“I could see it coming,” Lisa said. “But all I could think was, ‘That can’t be a tornado. It has to be a wall of rain, a serious storm.’ ”
She called Luke again and asked him to look at it.
11:45 a.m. —
Luke, 30, and two employees pulled their vehicles around the building trying to shelter them from the impending hail. Luke grabbed his video camera and plugged his phone in to charge it. When the three men realized it was more serious than they first thought, they and Luke’s two dogs piled into a vehicle and headed for one of the employees’ home just down the street on Garden Drive.
“There was a traffic jam on Garden,” Luke said. “There were cars going every which direction. Tyler lived like six or seven blocks away, and on the way there his window on his car cracked. When we got there, I just remember running in the house. Leaves were everywhere, and two skylights were blown out.”
Luke continued to videotape everything.
Sometime shortly after noon —
After Luke and his employees left the safety of the basement, Luke turned the video camera back on and headed back toward his business, a business that he had bought in 2005 and nurtured for the past four years.
“I knew it was bad,” Luke said. “First we saw there were fences down, then trees; then I noticed roofs were missing and trailers and cars were blown over and sprinkler systems were uprooted. I heard someone say, ‘I don’t think we’re working anymore today.’ Then one of my guys said. ‘Oh my God! Huston Graphics is gone!’ ”
It was a day Luke and Lisa, who met in college at the University of Northern Colorado, will never forget. All their vehicles were destroyed in the tornado. But more importantly, the Greeley couple lost their business in the industrial park off Colo. 257.
“It was crazy,” Lisa said. “Some papers were still on the wall in their files where we left them, but every single computer we owned was blown off the desks.”
Like many tornado victims, the Burtons spent the next several months fighting with their insurance company — which was not State Farm. Even though much of their equipment sat outside in the rain over the following weekend waiting for an adjuster to come look at it, the insurance company wanted to fix it, while the Burtons insisted on it being replaced. And then there was a long debate over how much their loss of revenue rider would cover.
“It was draining,” Luke said. “It took until August to determine the total losses.”
“It was very difficult to deal with,” Lisa added. “We just had to wait because they wanted to fix a few pieces of key equipment that we were adamant they had to replace. We finally hired an attorney to send off a letter.”
Eventually, everybody fell into agreement, and the Burtons were on their way to recovery.
While they were rebuilding their old site, they moved into a smaller rental unit a few blocks away, but without full capabilities, they have only operated at about 60 percent.
But it’s 2009, and the Burtons will soon move back into their old location.
“All we could think of was, ‘It’s a new year and our run of bad luck is over.’ We were happy to say goodbye to 2008,” Luke said.
Another message —
“Something's on my chest that shouldn't be there.”
Feb. 20, 2009 —
With everything tornado-related seemingly behind him, Luke is at his shop printing shirts on one of his new presses. Sometimes while printing, Luke has to step in between platens to move the ink. He’s done it a thousand times.
But this press is new, and Luke doesn’t know it quite as well as the old one. It doesn’t pause right, and Luke is pinched between two printing plates. But it wasn’t disastrous, he said. It knocked the air out of him for a bit, short of that, Luke is fine and continues on with his job, even pulling an overnighter to get the job done.
“I wanted him to go to the doctor just to get checked,” Lisa said. “But he said he was fine.”
Within the next couple of days, Luke started to get sick. He felt like he was fighting off a cold or the flu. As the days progressed, night sweats started to consume him.
“His best friend at night was a beach towel,” Lisa said with a laugh about the degree of sweating Luke was doing during his sleep. “One morning, we woke up at 2:30 a.m. and had to switch it out; that’s how soaking wet it was. He just had water running off of him.”
March 8 —
Luke still wasn’t feeling well, but he ventured off to play nine holes of golf. When he returned home, he felt worse than ever. Lisa was leaving the next day for Grand Junction, and she made Luke promise her he would go to Urgent Care in Greeley and get checked out.
“We’re young and healthy, so we don’t have primary doctors, so I just made him promise me he would go see a doctor at the clinic,” Lisa said.
“And I didn’t want to,” Luke said with a laugh. “I thought sure he’d tell me just to toughen up and go home. All I was fighting off was a cold.”
A chest X-ray appeared to show pneumonia, but doctors wanted a CAT scan to be sure. When it was done, the nurse disappeared into the office and didn’t come out for more than an hour.
The messages keep coming —
“The doctors have told me to tell you to come home now.”
March 9 —
“They kept going in and out of the office,” Luke said. “They finally asked me if there was someone that could come and sit with me.”
But Lisa was hours away on business for State Farm.
“Then the nurse told me to have my wife come home right away,” Luke said. “That was kind of freaky.”
For Luke, it was like the tornado had struck all over. He’d been punched in the gut one more time.
“This was so far out of my hands,” Luke said. “The situation is going to go the way the situation goes. I work 80-90 hours a week. I’ve spent all my time working to build this business. First the tornado takes it away, and all of a sudden, it was gone again.”
One doctor thought it was blood clots, then they thought it was testicular cancer that had metastasized into his chest. Germ cell cancer was another option.
“He said to me, ‘There is too much on my plate right now. I don’t think I can add this to the plate,’ ” Lisa recalled.
But what was hard to swallow was even another possibility with implications that were even stranger. That possibility was mediastinal paraganglioma, a rare tumor that always presents itself as benign.
“The doctor actually said to us, ‘You may not want this to be benign,’ ” Lisa said. “What do you hope for? We were so conflicted.”
The problem with a mediastinal paraganglioma was it was located above Luke’s heart, very close to his lungs and next to an aorta. Doctors would have to break his sternum wall to remove it. If they didn’t operate, and it continued to grow, it could put pressure on that aorta, causing it to burst, and Luke would bleed to death.
But cancer? How could you hope for cancer?
“The doctors kept saying with Luke’s health, the cancer was ‘infinitely curable,’ ” Lisa said.
Doctors wanted to check Luke into North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley immediately to perform a needle biopsy to determine what the mass was. After going home to let the dogs out, Luke headed for NCMC and Lisa boarded the next flight out of Grand Junction.
March 10 —
Doctors performed the needle biopsy, and after another night in the hospital they sent Luke and Lisa home to wait.
There was nothing Luke could do but wait, so the workaholic he is, he went back to work on March 11. It was three more days before he would learn which direction he would have to take.
Friday, March 13 —
Mediastinal paraganglioma was a new diagnosis for Luke’s doctors. It’s a new diagnosis for most doctors. Over a 25-year study by the Mayo Clinic, mediastinal paraganglioma has been documented only 14 times. Very little is known about mediastinal paraganglioma, but doctors do know that some tumors secrete adrenaline or epinephrine, both substances that, at elevated levels, can cause high blood pressure. Luke had elevated blood pressure for many years, but never high enough to treat.
The slow-growing vascular tumor was the size of an orange. Doctors said it was likely in his chest for years, possibly decades. They believe the jolt Luke received by the press that day may have caused the secretion of substances into his system that made him sick.
April 30 —
Luke and a scar that runs from above his chest to the middle of his stomach are back at work at Huston Graphics and moving the business back to its original location.
After a March 27 surgery, the tumor is gone, and only a 10 percent chance of it returning remains. The only lasting affect of the surgery is a raspy voice that came from doctors having to sever a vocal cord nerve that was enveloped by the tumor. And that, too, can be fixed, which Luke plans to do at some point.
He’s on limited lifting duty, but should be cleared to return to work 100 percent by June 1, which is when he also plans to pick up his wake boarding sport.
“I need to get my business back to order,” Luke said. “I’d rather be stressing about getting work done than the economy, a tornado or my health.”
But one thing remains clear for the Burtons. Without that tornado, Luke may not have his health.
“It’s almost like it was meant to be,” Luke said. “But when I hear, ‘The good thing that came from the tornado …’ it makes me want to throw up.”
“But we may not have ever found the tumor without the tornado until they were doing an autopsy,” Lisa added. “We’re not thankful for the tornado, but it’s the silver lining to the storm. If the shop wouldn’t have been destroyed, we wouldn’t have a new press. If we didn’t have a new press, Luke wouldn't have been pinched. If Luke wouldn’t have been pinched, he may not have gotten sick.”
“I guess the chain of events that came out of the tornado are a blessing in some ways,” Luke conceded.
