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Savoring the Country Life

Rollie Stedman is back to his old haunts and hobbies—and thankful for the coiling procedure that paved the way.

If you knock on Rollyn “Rollie” Stedman’s door and there’s no answer, he might have packed up his fishing pole and headed off to the Mississippi River. If you don’t spot him there, you might find him in Branson, Missouri, tapping his foot to the rhythms of a live band. “They call Branson ‘Little Nashville,’” Stedman says. “I really love country and western, and golden oldies—music from the ’50s and ’60s.”

Though he typically spends his days with music in his heart, it was the pounding in his head that Stedman remembers most from Fall of 2002. Without warning, the John Deere quality-assurance investigator began experiencing severe headaches and double vision. A CAT scan revealed the culprit—a potentially life-threatening, 9 mm aneurysm. The next thing Stedman knew, he was on his way from his Oelwein, Iowa, home for further testing and to see a neurologist in Waterloo. The neurologist consulted with John C. Chaloupka, M.D., of the University of Iowa, then informed Stedman that the aneurysm couldn’t be operated on but could be treated with coiling.

Stedman says he’d never heard of the procedure. “I was told that if my aneurysm burst, I’d experience a stroke and hemorrhaging in the brain, and life expectancy in that case was pretty low,” he says. “I was in a serious situation and, being that cranial surgery was out of the question, I was thrilled that there was a way they could get at it.”

On Jan. 14, 2003, Stedman arrived at the University of Iowa Hospital for his coiling. His mother, brother, 30-year-old daughter, and girlfriend Becky came in to provide comfort and moral support. Dr. Chaloupka and his team worked for three hours to locate and fill Stedman’s aneurysm, using detachable platinum coils coated with bioactive polymer—which Stedman jokingly calls WD-40. When he awoke, his doctors asked him how he was feeling. “I must have been smiling, because I felt great,” Stedman says. “They had gone into a part of the brain where few other men have gone, and I was very impressed.”

Follow-up angiograms also have shown everything’s fine, including a second smaller aneurysm that was coiled and stented six months after the first procedure. With his coilings behind him, Stedman is back in action—and seems to be savoring every moment. “I’m so grateful that I’m living in a time when a procedure like this is available,” he adds. “I just want to say thank you to everybody who made it possible."