A little bit of breathing room

T. Frank Box stands in his home near a painted portrait of him made during healthier times. Box is recovering from the removal of a brain tumor and needs help with home gutter replacement, bathroom repairs and floor repairs.

A brain tumor? When Prudhoe Bay ironworker and welder T. Frank Box got the diagnosis, he couldn't be lieve it.

"I take my vitamins. I eat my vegetables. I pray. I'm a good guy," he thought. How could he be sick?

But the magnetic resonance imaging scan the doctor displayed left no doubt, even to the untrained eye. Box had come in to find the cause of a mysterious 4 a.m. seizure. For the first time, he understood the reason behind a host of small symptoms, like a twitching eye, that he'd been blaming on a new home computer.

His problem wasn't eyestrain. It was a tumor, a chunk of tissue half the size of a small plum, lodged in the middle of his brain.

It had to come out.

Two surgeries, six weeks of radiation and a year of chemotherapy later, Box is on the way to full recovery. He looks so well, former co-workers have asked when he's coming back.

He won't be -- at least not as a welder.

The brain tumor, and the treatment required to rid him of it, have changed Box's life in ways that aren't immediately obvious. Sometimes it's like being a different person, he says.

"Gaps in thinking" slow Box down. He finds it especially hard to do two tasks at once, like talking and driving his car. And, in a symptom that speaks to the role of the part of the brain removed, he has trouble using his left hand unless he looks at it. Once, he tried to screw a cable into the back of a VCR but lost his grip every time his hand disappeared behind the machine.

Written reports from a speech pathologist and a neuropsychologist confirm the difficulties.

Box is making progress regaining his abilities and learning how to work around those he may never regain. But for a man accustomed to depending on his body at work and home, the losses have been hard.

Most difficult for Box has been falling behind on household maintenance. Over the past two years, as chemotherapy and radiation kept him frail and vulnerable, and medical and other bills drained his resources, Box hasn't been able to respond to problems he would usually repair himself. One example: the rain gutters torn from his house in a storm. Lack of gutters caused other problems, like heaving living-room floors and water damage in his bathroom.

"All I could do was just look at things that needed to be fixed," he says.

On the advice of his independent-living consultant, Box wrote to the Book of Dreams for help. Now on the mend, he said, it would be a comfort if he was able to stave off the deterioration of his home until he is in better shape to deal with it himself.

"This would take an enormous amount of worry off my little family," writes Box, who shares custody of a 16-year-old daughter, "giving us a more snug place to weather out this storm, to work on healing, schooling and rehabilitation."

"Just a little breathing room," he adds, "would make all the difference in the world."

T. Frank Box

N-1 New rain gutters, installed, $999