Prayers lift musician from nightmare of illness to new life

Tyrone Walker
The Post and Courier

Saylor says his brush with death changed his music and his life.

Tyrone Walker
The Post and Courier

Bart Saylor, who almost died three years ago from a ruptured bowel, plays with his band May 16 at Mark Clark Hall on the campus of The Citadel.

Bart Saylor has scribbled his story onto a bunch of brown paper bags. "My Life in Cartoons," he calls it.

It shows him when he was 4, how his pants fell down in the middle of the street in his small Oklahoma hometown, and how his mom started laughing. It shows him dressed as a bumblebee for a ballet recital, his stinger tangled with another kid's, the two stuck together on stage.

He wore glasses, braces and a bow tie. He started reading comics and sketching his own. He latched onto music and learned instruments.

He got his Ph.D. Fell in love with the girl of his dreams. Had three amazing kids, dogs, cats and a turtle named Bubba.

And he had a big ol' tumor. "But a lot of folks said prayers for me, and I never stopped rocking."

See, Saylor was sick, really sick. Only now he's not. He's better than ever. And he'd like to tell you about it.

It's his testimony, the story of a stomachache and a tumor, of how he danced back from the beyond, and the power of prayer — yes, the power of prayer! — and music, love and family.

He saw fireflies. Dozens of tiny, white lights.

They circled his hospital bed when he was sick, and made a giant web, cradling and protecting him.

"This was real," he insists.

Saylor has a wish. He wants you to listen.

Because he wants you to believe.

Because he wants you to know the joy in being alive.

"I kind of feel like my karma is very much in the red right now. I owe a lot of kindness out there. Probably more than I'll ever be able to return."

He danced all night before he got sick.

Saylor and his wife, Conway, had 20 kids in their driveway, showing them how to swing dance.

The couple, longtime lovers of old-time music, made perfect guides.

They were going to the Charleston County School of the Arts' annual "Jump, Jive and Wail" in late October 2005, so Saylor kept dancing, every dance, until midnight.

His stomach started to hurt on the way home. He shrugged it off. He was fit, 6-foot-6, black belt in tae kwon do, voice like Bill Walton's. What's a bellyache?

By morning, the pain hadn't stopped. Saylor and his wife thought he had appendicitis — they didn't know. So they went to East Cooper Regional Medical Center.

The diagnosis: A ruptured bowel.

An infection from diverticulitis had ripped his colon.

One of the surgeons had never seen that much bowel in an abdomen. With that much bowel, he told them, sepsis might follow. Everything in your body can get infected, and it probably will.

“This was completely like somebody else’s bad dream,” says Conway.

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But it was theirs.

They had separately moved to Conway’s hometown of Richmond, Va., in the late ’70s to continue graduate work at the Medical College of Virginia.

One day they met. She had just gotten her brown hair cut short after wearing it down to her waist, and she had on that red sundress, the one he came to adore.

They had a great group of friends who’d gather at Conway’s garage apartment at her parents’ house. It was one of life’s happy times.

They were married in her family’s backyard, Fourth of July weekend, 1982. It rained that day, the wind blew. Thunder and lightning came. Conway’s dad drove to the golf course and borrowed all the golf umbrellas so the guests wouldn’t be wet.

A fiddler, guitarist and hammer dulcimer player performed during the reception. It was a nice touch. The couple grew up in homes where everyone sang, danced or knew instruments. Bart got hooked early. He played in bands, learning the banjo, harmonica, hammer dulcimer, bluegrass and the old style.

The Saylors moved to Chicago, then Charleston, got a home on the Isle of Palms and worked as psychologists, he in the forensic field, she in academia.

Then they had those three amazing kids, Sara, Paul and Maggie Jo, and introduced them to theater, arts and music. They hosted potluck dinners and jam sessions. All their friends came.

And now, these doctors were telling Conway that her husband might be the sickest man in Charleston, and how they were going to keep fighting, and that maybe she should prepare for the worst and call the family and tell everyone to come home.

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He was dying. Saylor’s lungs, kidneys, every organ failed at some point. East Cooper’s staff worked ’round the clock to keep him alive, even tipping his bed at one point to help blood flow.

Doctors told them anything could happen in the first 48 hours. That continued for a month, Saylor unconscious the entire time.

On Halloween, a week after he became sick, doctors moved him to the Medical University. Saylor’s family put up pictures in the hospital room to make it feel like home.

Saylor’s oldest daughter, Sara, studying in Spain, came back. His son, Paul, drew artwork. Their pastor from the Isle of Palms First United Methodist Church stopped by. So did their church family, neighbors, musician friends and the folks Saylor had met through tae kwon do.

They gave the family money. They baked casseroles. They took the Saylors’ youngest daughter, Maggie Jo, to school. They walked their dogs. Conway even managed to take leave of her job as a Citadel professor.

She kept a list of all the people who called. It covered four posterboards.

Everybody prayed. Especially her.

“Just bring him back to me.”

She struggled, imagining life without him, how she might raise three kids alone. She walked on the beach and prepared for goodbye.

She thought of Gethsemane. Her plea was the same: Take this cup from me. Take this poison.

“I’ll give up,” she prayed. “I’ll do what you need to do. Just help me do it.”

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Everyone visited — they still came by. Saylor’s three sisters gathered around his hospital bed. They told a doctor they had cleaned the house, moving some of their brother’s instruments.

Saylor’s vital signs rose. Was he listening?

It was the first clue. After four weeks, he woke up, disoriented and delusional. Then doctors removed his vent, and Saylor came around.

He couldn’t talk or eat for some time. Then one morning Conway got a call at home. The doctor was on the line, telling her someone wanted to speak with her.

It was him, struggling, barely audible. But it was him, all the same.

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One of Saylor’s therapists brought in a guitar. He was scared to touch it. A guitarist needs calluses to pick the strings, and Saylor’s had fallen away like reptilian skin.

“If I couldn’t play, then what would be left of me?” he recalls thinking.

But he managed, strumming the instrument, his fear fading.

Saylor left the hospital in December, two months after admittance. He made a business of getting better, practicing, using the same discipline that he had in music toward his rehabilitation. He tried swallowing exercises and leg exercises, at first breaking a sweat just sitting up in bed.

But he got up and got moving, his abdomen still unsutured, as not to lock the infection. They cleaned his wound twice a day, unwrapping bandages, uncovering layers of tissues.

“It looked like the Grand Canyon,” Conway remembers. “It was so deep.”

But eventually it healed, gnarly scar tissue covering the sore, and Saylor went back to work. He started playing music again with his old bandmates, practicing in his studio at home.

He had a new approach, the mechanics, technical parts pushed aside.

“I had something to say,” Saylor explains.

He spent three more weeks in the hospital in July 2006, a voluntary measure to remove his ostomy bag. He took another break to get better, and he and Conway went back to work.

Until May, a year ago.

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He started hurting again. He couldn’t pass food, and he started throwing up.

The doctors figured Saylor had an obstruction. Sometimes it happens after abdominal surgery; the tissue cleaves.

They went into surgery. The doctor, an Irish fellow, played Saylor’s music — traditional, Irish folk compositions — during the operation.

Conway got another call. “We’ve got a situation here.”

They had found the obstruction: a cancerous desmoid tumor.

It’s very rare. They form in connective tissues, the arms, legs, abdomen, sometimes the chest. Maybe 900 of those tumor types are diagnosed every year in the U.S.

The surgeon removed it. Questions followed.

What’s next? Chemo? Therapy?

The Saylors visited the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston — sort of the Disney World of oncology centers, a place that provides services for all cancer patients.

The verdict: No chemo or therapy. Vigilance, instead.

If the tumor returns, they’ll operate. It hasn’t come back.

“So far, so good,” Saylor says.

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That first time he got sick — those fireflies — Saylor has it figured out.

They were prayers, lifting him up, embracing him. They came from all over, he says, here and abroad, from those he knows, those he never met.

One of Saylor’s sisters is Jewish; she married an Israeli and converted. She mentioned her brother in synagogue after his tumor surgery, asking the congregation to again place him on their prayer lists.

“I never took him off,” an older man told her.

“People say, ‘You’ll be in my prayers.’ It’s a courtesy, a way of saying they’re thinking about you,” says Saylor, who is 53. “But I really experienced being prayed for. I remember moments where it was like a vision. This was real. I could feel it.”

He was changed.

“Now, when I say to somebody you’ll be in my prayers,” he says and pauses. “I MEAN BUSINESS. That’s something serious. That’s something that’s really going to matter.”

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Months after he was first sick, Saylor gave a concert at his church.

He invited his friends, family and the medical staff that cared for him. On stage with his bandmates, he shared their music, his thoughts and gratitude:

“From time to time folks will say, ‘Gosh — looking at you — it’s just a miracle.’ I’m never quite sure how to take that.

“On the one hand, I feel something miraculous happened. But I’m not sure that I understand altogether what it was.

“When I was in the intensive-care unit, and when you have a family member in the unit, you get to know the other family members in the waiting room. My family got to know the family of another gentleman who was about my age, who was hurt about the same time I was.

“His family, members of his church, went through the same kind of vigil that I did. When I got moved out of the ICU to the regular floor, he didn’t make it. He didn’t survive. So I had a hard time with this — the thought that somehow my situation was a miracle.

“And I just decided that the real miracle to me is that there can be so many caring people in a community for a person. Kind of no matter how it turns out.”

Reach Rob Young at 937-5518 and ryoung@postandcourier.com.