BR doctor finds his gifts of flowers, prayers returning to him since illness

Dr. Mike Hackler put in a rose garden when he moved into Santa Maria subdivision in 1999.
The roses are for sharing.
The cardiovascular surgeon regularly takes them in plastic bags hanging off each arm to First Presbyterian Church, where each woman who passes gets a rose to match her attire.
Now it’s the women’s turn to give to him.
Hackler, battling asbestos-caused cancer, goes each Sunday to a room set aside for prayer and before he enters receives a rose from a member of the Presbyterian Women.
Never mind that the effectiveness of prayer as a help in healing remains a source of debate in scientific circles.
And never mind that studies of the subject yield mixed results at best with a recently published study funded by Templeton Foundation and Harvard Medical School finding no discernible benefits for the 1,800-plus heart patients studies over nearly a decade.
Hackler, as doctor and man of faith, credits “the power of prayer and the grace of God” along with medicine for the life he continues to experience today.
“Only 20 percent of people with mesothelioma have a positive response to chemotherapy,” he said.
Nevertheless, after four rounds of chemotherapy and a CAT scan in early March, he was told that the large tumor on his liver is shrinking. “I ask friends to keep on praying,” he said.
Hackler, who is associated with CTV Surgical Center, grew up in Port Allen, a football star and award-winning honor student.
He always held jobs while attending school for 16 years, including LSU Medical School in Shreveport, the Medical School of South Carolina and School of Medicine in Tennessee.
It was while pursuing an engineering degree at LSU that he worked as a longshoreman at the Port of Baton Rouge, where he unloaded asbestos from ships coming from Africa.
“I diagnosed two friends/co-workers with the same cancer,” Hackler said. “Until a year ago, there was no hope. Now, there is one chance out of five for a positive response.”
His first symptom in mid-2005 was lassitude — a feeling of weariness.
Next came pain in the right shoulder radiating to the chest, then came pain in the right upper abdomen.
Not until he had a laparoscopy, a procedure where two holes are drilled in the abdomen and pictures taken, was the diagnosis made.
“I felt like a bomb had been dropped on me when the biopsy was confirmed,” he said. “I was dumbfounded.
“Here I was, age 59 and at the peak of my career.”
After conferring with Dr. Gerald Miletello, he learned that only two places in the country have experimental surgery for mesothelioma. “I knew medical statistics give a patient three to six months to live, if nothing is done. It took me about 20 seconds to say yes.”
On Dec. 29 at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md., he had his abdomen opened up, the intent being to remove as much of the tumor in the abdomen as possible. “It was a bloody mess, I lost four units of blood. They removed the omemtum (a veil of fat that hangs off the stomach and colon), and closed me back up,” he said. “The tumor was attached to the right diaphragm, and in trying to dislodge it, they put a hole in the diaphragm and saw that the cancer originated in the right chest.”
He returned to Baton Rouge for the chemotherapy — two successive days every three weeks.
He recently had his fifth round of treatment.
“I have two good weeks out of three,” he said. “The week after chemo, I am laid low, feel weak, tired and nauseated. I take a derivative of morphine to control pain.
“In good weeks, when I feel like it, I go to the office and do paperwork, and I visit in the hospitals.”
During Mardi Gras, he danced at the Karnival Krewe de Louisiane’s ball that benefits cancer patients. “I had no idea when I joined at its inception 15 years ago that I would be a cancer patient,” he said.
A lifelong Christian, reared in the West Baton Rouge Presbyterian Church, as a high school senior, he contemplated going to seminary.
He has traveled to Russia to help found a church.
Several years ago he taped some televised segments on Spirituality in Medicine for Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center.
He always offers to pray with a patient and the family prior to surgery, and 95 percent of them take him up on it, he said. While scrubbing, in preparation for his surgery, he prayed.
“Once I faced the cancer, I accepted the fact I have it, I quit worrying and turned it over to God,” he said. “I got ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’ that we read about in the Bible.” In thank-you notes to friends, he writes, “All is well with my soul.”
His roses, 40 varieties of hybrid tea roses, began blooming in late March and he has begun taking them again to the sick and to church. The difference now at First Presbyterian is that he receives one from a different woman every week, to let him know he is loved and in their prayers.
“I’ve been floored by the people who have called and written. I’m on prayer lists throughout the world. I had no idea that I had touched their lives.”
Irregardless of some studies showing that prayer has no impact on healing, Hackler is convinced otherwise.
“I recall a study in California years ago with one group of patients being the subject of prayer, without their knowledge, and the other group left alone. Those being prayed over did far better.
“I believe that we doctors are just a tool of the Lord’s will and the Lord is the Great Physician.”