Front and Center: Dr. Harrison Hicks
Published on Monday, August 26, 2024
By: Gary Pettus, gpettus@umc.edu
Photos By: Melanie Thortis/ UMMC Communications
On the second day of 2019, back when he was still a college student, Dr. Harrison Hicks somehow managed to walk into a hospital under his own power.
It was the last time he would be able to walk anywhere for many days to come.
His swift descent into a state of paralysis was the upshot of something that had occurred several days earlier and which would ultimately threaten his life.
Today, the consequences include, at least for now, muscles that tire slightly sooner, lips that won’t pucker to make a whistle, and a smile that won’t quite straighten out – but also a lingering awareness that is priceless, especially for someone in his line of work: a patient’s point of view.
“When I was in the hospital, I was stuck in my belly about 50 times in one week,” said Hicks, now an internal medicine resident at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, “and I had my blood drawn over and over, many times. It’s not something everyone in the health care profession has experienced.”
The ordeal began with a bout of food poisoning which degenerated into Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disease that weakens muscles and can cause paralysis. It can be triggered by a bacterial infection caused by eating raw or undercooked poultry.
Even while his battle brought him closer to death, it also brought him closer to his family – if that was possible – and most certainly to his father, whose quick action may have helped save his son’s health, even as it threatened to take a toll on his own.
“It is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” said Clark Hicks, an attorney in Hattiesburg, where Harrison Hicks grew up. “I know it was for my wife as well. Worse than dealing with your own illnesses. Worse than losing a parent.
“I don’t think there is anything worse than watching your own child suffer.”
At the tail end of 2018, that child, Harrison Hicks, then a junior at Millsaps College, had been trying to enjoy his December break while in Los Angeles with his family, including mom, Kathia Hicks, and his brother, Luke, when he his GI tract went haywire. He eventually lost weight and developed a fever, the result of food poisoning traceable something he had eaten at a Hattiesburg restaurant a day or two before: chicken.
Some days later, back home in Hattiesburg and feeling better, he was playing basketball on New Year’s Eve with some friends when his feet began to torment him.
“At first, I just thought my shoes were too tight,” he said. “So, I loosened them, but the feeling wouldn’t go away. It burned. And then it was like your foot is asleep, but it’s both feet.”
Later, that night, as he and his family rang in the New Year, he hugged his mom, who noticed he was sweating. Over the next few days, the symptoms piled on and the feeling, or lack of, in his legs only worsened. His father took him to the ER on January 1. No one there could pinpoint the problem, and they sent him home.
“But I was getting very alarmed,” Clark Hicks said, “so, I called Dr. Helveston.”
A Hattiesburg neurologist Clark Hicks knew, Dr. Wendell Helveston heard the words “undercooked chicken, numbness and gastrointestinal problems” and decided to see Harrison that day. He put him through some neurological tests, including one with a reflex hammer. He was convinced that Harrison Hicks was suffering nerve damage and ascending paralysis caused by Guillain-Barre.
“While Harrison was there in the office, one side of his face just dropped,” Clark Hicks said. “Dr. Helveston had him admitted immediately. He said, ‘And this is what’s going to happen,’ and then everything he said came true, including the fact that it would get worse.
“It did get worse. It was a nightmare, but we kept holding on to hope because of the doctor’s experience and knowledge.”
Guillain-Barre doesn’t affect the central nervous system, so the brain is left alone to ponder and be fully aware of the hastening damage.
In the ICU, Harrison struggled to breath. Paralysis crept up his body. “I couldn’t lift a finger off the bed,” he said. “I could still talk, but chewing and swallowing became difficult.” After a week in the ICU, he could barely talk.
When Clark Hicks leaned in close so he could hear his son speak, he heard only a whisper: “‘Daddy, I feel like I’m dying.’
“He’s always been a brave, courageous person,” Clark Hicks said. “When he said that, I knew that’s what it really felt like to him. That was the lowest point for me.”
Helveston and the ICU doctor agreed that Harrison should be transferred to Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans.
One other thing Helveston had said: Because Clark Hicks had acted so quickly, his son would get through this, and he would get better. And he did – slowly, over two or three weeks of blood draws and needle pokes.
“Whenever I think about that time in my life, I’m so grateful to be here now,” Harrison Hicks said. Grateful to able to chew his food without struggling, to drive a car and feel his feet touch the pedals. “Things you take for granted, everyday things that some people are not fortunate to be able to do.”
After rehabilitation, he re-enrolled in college following a semester layoff, graduated and entered medical school at UMMC. He graduated in May of this year.
Those weeks in a hospital bed, especially in New Orleans, had been frightening, but they would help him, in part, make an important decision about his future. “It was an internal medicine physician there who walked me through the diagnosis and illness and was so empathetic,” he said. “He exemplified the type of physician I want to be.”
He had decided by college that he wanted to be a doctor like his grandfather in McComb. “Even today I hear about the difference he made in the lives of people in a small town,” he said. And he didn’t forget the difference the doctor in New Orleans had made in his own life as he made his decision to train in internal medicine.
As he navigates his residency, he is guided by memories of his time as a patient, an experience that changed him and his father, or affirmed what was already there.
“It made me appreciate the medical community even more,” Clark Hicks said. “They save lives.”
As for Harrison Hicks: “I believe it has made me a better resident, a better physician,” he said. “In the clinic and hospital, we tend to think of it as just another day of work and lose sight of the fact that we’re seeing people who are at a low point in their lives. They’re sick and they’re scared.”
No one has to tell him what that’s like.