A long road back: Veteran survives difficult battle

Editor’s Note: Part One of this story appeared in last week’s paper.

When US Army veteran Sammy Owens came home to Spartanburg in 2005, his civilian life was a nightmare.  

As if the physical and mental toll of the Iraqi battlefield weren’t enough to endure, the veteran watched his mother and grandfather die of lung cancer within three months of one another.  To make matters worse, his marriage ended, and he found himself alone using alcohol and drugs to keep the ghosts of war at bay.  

Washing down four different opioids and three different benzodiazepines (all of which the Army had prescribed) with a liter of vodka every day, Owens couldn’t trust himself around his three children.

“It really wasn’t good for me to be around the kids,” he explains. “…Not that I’d hurt them or anything like that.  It’s just that I was messed up in the head.”

Indeed, there was no outlet for Owens’ despair.  Because he’d worked on special operations in Iraq, he was required to keep his knowledge and memories of the war classified. This meant he couldn’t vent about the tragedy in Ramadi and get it off his chest.  Even after his Purple Heart arrived in the mail, he was reluctant to discuss it with anyone.  

Frantic and unsure where to turn, he decided he’d try the old “geographical cure.”  In 2006, he moved to Pensacola, Florida to try to get clean and find some semblance of purpose for his life.  

But even after he finally sobered up in 2008, the hits just seemed to keep coming.

It Just Didn’t Add Up
Owens was still in Pensacola in 2009, working as the dairy manager at a Food Lion when he received a new health scare.  One day while outside the store on break, he began vomiting uncontrollably.  By the time he arrived at urgent care, he was throwing up blood.  He was immediately transported to Baptist Hospital, where he arrived to find Dr. Jeffrey Lords, an acclaimed surgeon and former Navy Seal.  Fearing Owens was close to bleeding to death, Lords rushed him into the operating room for emergency surgery.

“When I woke up, he came in and told me I’d had a perforated ulcer in the same spot (inside the abdomen) where the shrapnel had gone in,” Owens recalls.  

Though the operation saved his life that day, it provided little long-term relief for the chronic pain and nausea in Owens’ gut. 

“I was totally unhealthy,” he explains.  “I couldn’t keep any weight on.  I was sick to my stomach all the time.  I was passing blood.  But I’d go to the hospital and they’d just give me something for pain and send me home.”

Faced with a seemingly endless flood of physical and emotional agony, Owens decided to commit suicide.  He mixed 240 mgs of methadone with 90 mgs of Klonopin and waited for death to put him out of his misery. But even as he faded into unconsciousness, the survivor’s guilt from that grim morning in Iraq continued to chip away at him.  

“Before that (incident), I was on top of the world,” he says.  “But I lost my friends and I lost people who were better than me, and it just didn’t add up.”

Coming Home
Owens’ second shot at life began when his roommate woke him up in his apartment three days after his suicide attempt.  Miraculously, Owens never even had to go to the hospital for the intentional overdose.  What he did do was reach out to his uncle Jack Owens, the preacher at Friends of Faith Baptist Church in Pacolet, and admit that he needed help.  Jack urged his nephew to return to Spartanburg immediately, assuring him that he and Owens’ father would try their best to aid him on his long road to recovery.  

One night soon after he’d moved back to the Upstate, Owens went to the emergency room for his stomach condition.  Stangely, the doctor on call that night was an old Army buddy named Dr. Paul LePage, who’d performed knee surgery on Owens back at Bragg and was now working as a general surgeon in Greenville.  When Owens asked him what to do, the doctor offered not only to perform a series of operations on Owens but to pay for them himself. 

Over the course of several surgical procedures, LePage removed sections of his patient’s stomach and duodenum and repositioned his esophagus.

The series of operations were successful, eliminating Owen’s digestive pain and giving him a new lease on life.  He became active in his uncle’s church, reconnected with his children and abstained from booze and drugs.  He had a steady job at Waffle House, and, at long last, his family began to trust him again.  He was finally able to move on from the past and enjoy life in the present.  For the first time in years, he began doing occasional government advisory work for the military.  He even worked in Afghanistan for a period, and this time, returned home from the middle east healthy. Indeed, it seemed things were finally coming together for Owens.

Then came the Leukemia diagnosis.

In 2017, Owens dropped from his normal weight of 145 lbs to 105.  When he went to the V.A. Hospital  for answers, the doctors told him he had a blood disorder and sent him to a doctor at Greenville Memorial.  That’s where he first received word that he had Stage 4 Leukemia.

A Miracle Cure
The doctors here at home recommended a traditional course of medical treatment that included chemotherapy and bone marrow therapy.  But Owens would have none of it.

“I came home in July, 2017 and talked to my dad and I told him, ‘This is it.  It’s been a good life.  I’m not going to do this (chemo) because I saw mom go through that when she was dying from lung cancer,’” he remembers.  

But just when the Upstate veteran had resigned himself to an early death, an old friend from the Army Rangers reached out to him.  He told Owens about an alternative form of treatment offered by a cancer specialist up in New York that involved stem cell injections.  Owens was on board.  He didn’t know much about this controversial form of therapy but didn’t have much to lose.

There was one major problem – raising the money.  Stem cell therapy is absurdly expensive, and Owens lacked sufficient funds to pay for the treatment.  He had to buy civilian insurance, which came with a $5,000 deductible.  To meet the cost, he sold his truck and started a GoFundMe page.  Gradually, the money began to come in, thanks in large part to people he knew through Waffle House and the Army.

In the fall of 2017, he traveled to New York City to meet with renowned doctor Huimin Guo and come up with a treatment plan.  When he returned home, Owens changed his diet, started doing yoga and got his first of two scheduled rounds of stem cell injections.  It was the only round he’d need.  Miraculously, a few months after the first stem cell transplant, doctors could no longer detect even the faintest hint of Leukemia in his body.

“I did one round and went back to get tested and everything was fine,” Owens says.  “I’m a strong believer in stem cells.  I have some wear and tear on the body but I feel great.”

Tell Them You Love Them
Indeed, Owen’s has endured more physical suffering in the last two decades than most men who are still walking.  He’s had three concussions, both eardrums ruptured, three knee surgeries, a broken leg and two vertebrae dislodged.  In fact, he might have to have surgery to prevent those vertebrae from interfering with his spinal cord and restricting his mobility.  

But despite all the afflictions he’s endured, Owens remains stoic and hopeful about life today.  He’s been cancer-free now for over a year and has rediscovered his passion for martial arts.  Not long back, he had a chance reunion with Sanders when the Upstate grandmaster came to eat at a Waffle House he was working at in Spartanburg.  Now, he trains with Sanders every Friday afternoon at Inman Health and Fitness.

As for that tragic day in Iraq 14 years ago, Owens continues to struggle with survivor’s guilt.  The only other living member of his troop died last October.  Today, Owens wears the troop’s unit crest necklace to commemorate his 12 fallen brothers and the heroes that they were.  He wants to alert Americans to the high rates of veteran suicide and hopes his story brings comfort to the thousands struggling to readjust to life after war.  Even more urgent, however, may be the message he has for veterans’ families.

“If you think your veteran has a problem, go grab them and tell them you love them and that you’ll help them any way you can,” he says, his voice cracking, “because this is beyond anything they can do for themselves.”