Friday, January 17, 2025
Jaimie Bodner has always excelled as a caretaker of others but never felt at ease being on the receiving end. His severe and sudden bout of health problems left him with no choice.
Bodner, 72, said it started sometime last February. “I’ve known my general practitioner for 40 years,” he said. “He had to sit down when he looked at what was in my brain.”
A brain scan revealed seven aneurysms — dangerous bulges in a blood vessel that could burst and cause life-threatening bleeding. In hospital, doctors also discovered he would need a heart ablation, a procedure to correct irregular heart rhythms that could lead to fatigue, shortness of breath, or even stroke if untreated.
Thanks to a heavy dose of radiation, the surgical procedure proved successful and a relieved Bodner thought he was clear of his medical problems.
Not long afterward, he was reeling on the floor from agonizing pain in his abdomen. He was ferried over to the hospital for treatment. Once discharged and a catheter removed, it wasn’t too long before severe bleeding and paralyzing pain would strike again, landing him back in emergency care.
“This went on back and forth for weeks,” he said. “There were nights in the ambulance I just wanted to quit.”
Medically, what he was suffering from was a condition known as radiation cystitis, according to Dr. Devendra Brahmbhatt, a vascular surgeon at Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital. The radiation therapy might have saved his life but not without causing severe, unintended collateral damage to the tissue around his bladder.
“The radiation affects your urinary bladder by damaging and breaking down the whole inside of the bladder lining,” said Brahmbhatt. “It’s not like a single point of bleeding that you can put a clamp and close. Imagine 100 different places it may bleed. The whole thing oozes blood.”
For over 40 years, generations of Valley Stream residents knew Bodner as their hometown dentist — a beloved fixture with a reputation for honoring his appointments and being quick to dote on his patients.
“The people of Valley Stream gave me my career,” said Bodner. “I really enjoyed my practice. It was an old-fashioned, old-school practice based on being kind to my patients.”
But his dental practice and the independence with which he firmly built his identity were now slipping away, hostage to his body’s relentless failures. As he watched his life shrink into that of a man heading in and out of ambulances, emergency rooms, and doctor’s offices, Bodner described himself sinking into a dark place. At every downward step, his wife, Candy, willed him to get better.
“My theory is that I wasn’t put on this earth to have other people worry about me,” he said. “It was so strange to see my wife give up her life to help me, and I started to get to the desire to get better so my wife can have her life back.”
Desperate for relief, Bodner’s doctor advised him of the promise of hyperbaric oxygen treatment and referred him to the Comprehensive Wound Care Center at LIJVS in Valley Stream. For two hours at a time, he lay inside a pressurized, capsule-like chamber, breathing pure oxygen at high pressure to jumpstart his body’s healing process. Healing would be slow-going and without guarantees. Bodner had been warned—the bleeding might come and go.
One day after finishing a hyperbaric session, which was also “the first day my wife let me drive behind the wheel of the car by myself,” Bodner recalled, the bleeding returned. After phoning his urologist, he was urged to go home and have his wife drive him to the ER. Instead, compelled to seek a comforting face, he trudged his way over to the wound care center and tried opening the door. It was locked.
“I was crushed,” he said.
Moments later, Kyle Field, the technician overseeing Bodner’s hyperbaric treatment, who had stayed past closing time to finish some paperwork, emerged. Upon seeing a visibly shaken Bodner with his clothes soaked in blood, he quickly took him in and phoned his wife.
“He sat me down and started to clean me up,” said Bodner who asked if Dr. Brahmbhatt, the wound care center’s medical director, could also come and see him. Upon learning of what happened, Brahmbhatt, who had clocked out for the day and was heading home, had turned his car around and did for Bodner what the dentist described as a rare gesture between healthcare workers and patients.
Brahmbhatt personally wheeled him to the emergency room. Both he and Field stayed with Bodner for the 45 minutes it took for his wife to arrive and implored him to keep going with his treatment.
It was the clearest confirmation for Bodner that he could entrust himself completely to the medical staff and finish his last leg of treatment.
“Everything that I feel about patient relationships, that’s what they feel,” said Bodner. By June of last year, after 60 so-called dives in the chamber, Bodner had fully recovered.
“Since then, he hasn’t bled,” said Brahmbhatt. “His catheter was taken out by his urologist. He is a new man.”
“When I first started the hyperbaric treatment, I couldn’t even walk,” said Bodner. “Now I’m walking four miles every morning. I’m a pretty small guy, and I have lost 20 pounds. I’ve gained all my weight back. Everybody tells me how good I look, and most of all, my wife’s care has brought me back to life.”
Bodner hasn’t returned to his practice but has found a newfound purpose as a volunteer at the wound care center. At first, Bodner felt awkwardly out of place. At orientation, the 72-year-old retiree was surrounded by aspiring volunteers who hadn’t even finished high school. Though four times their senior, Bodner has formed a big-brother bond with his fellow volunteers and is described by hospital officials as their biggest spokesperson.
“He’s actually kind of a point person where he’s put me in contact with different school districts and colleges to create new opportunities for young adults and high school students in showing them what it’s like to volunteer in a healthcare facility,” said Jaime Daniels, head of specialist, patient & customer experience at Northwell Health.
As a volunteer at the front desk and in the wound care department, Bodner is the “first person to greet patients, escort them, show them where they need to go,” said Daniels. “He even takes it to a different level where he’s walking them to the emergency room on the ground floor. He is a genuine man.”
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