Hospice patient hopes for hot air

STAPLES, Texas (KXAN) - In his 83 years of life, Bill Carroll has been known to stand up for himself. Take the time he went fishing for a beer license for his brand new barbecue joint in Staples, Texas.

Carroll had moved to the tiny Guadalupe County hamlet after retiring from a half-century plumbing career in Houston and Austin. He started doing some barbecuing and selling the meat just off the main street in Stanley. People like it and suggested he open a little restaurant.

The business got off to a slow start and Carroll decided to kick it in the pants with a license to sell beer. At the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission office in nearby San Marcos, a clerk warned him his business was likely in a “dry” area where alcohol sales are prohibited.

So Carroll headed for the Guadalupe County Courthouse in Seguin. Sure enough, the people there delivered the bad news.

“They showed me a little ol' map that someone had of this area,” he said, “an aerial map, and they had taken a Crayola and marked from Cottonwood Creek to here to here to here: ‘This area is dry.’

“And I said, 'You know, that's about the prettiest little map I've ever seen but it don't tell me anything.’”

The clerk put the map away and Carroll got his beer license.

Out in the country, though, when trouble comes calling, the law is often far away. So when drunks suddenly showed up in the restaurant and started harassing Carroll’s customers, he solved the problem himself.

“I'd jerk 'em up by the 'stack and swivel' and take 'em outside and beat the hell out of 'em,” he said. “And I hurt one of 'em real bad; I mean bad, bad.”

A week later, arsonists burned the restaurant to the ground. Carroll took it in stride.

“He got his and I got mine,” he recalled.

With the business behind him, true retirement set in. Carroll put in a small mobile home and settled into the country life. Then more trouble arrived.

“I have beginning stages of dementia,” he said, “and I have the middle stages of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and second-stage lung cancer.

“I was in the hospital and I had already been diagnosed as having cancer. I'd heard of hospice before, but I always associated it with being a place to go to die.

“And these two people who I had never seen before, they came into my hospital and introduced themselves as being from hospice.

“I had just been diagnosed with having lung cancer and I thought, 'Man, man, man.' I mean, it startled me. But then I found out that hospice wasn't just a place to go and die, that they were there to help me.”

Now, virtually every day of the week, someone from the Central Texas Medical Center in San Marcos makes the half-hour drive to Carroll’s house. The CTMC operates the only nonprofit hospice in San Marcos. Without them, Carroll and many other patients would not be able to afford their help.

The employees and volunteers check their patient’s vital signs, make sure he is up-to-date on his medications and assess his emotional state. One volunteer even took the man fishing. In short, they take care of him.

One day, one of them told Carroll about “Dream-a-Dream,” the hospice program’s effort to make wishes come true for terminal patients. He glanced at the sky and said there was something he had always wanted to do; he dreamed of riding in a hot air balloon.

Back during his time in the Army Air Corps, precursor to the U.S. Air Force, Carroll often tagged along with pilots who took to the skies to keep their flight pay status intact. Once, he even hopped a glider at the old Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin.

“We just soared all around the Austin area and all around Bastrop and we came back and landed. I enjoyed that because I'd never been up in a glider before.

“I mean I just like to fly, you know. I'm no pilot or anything like that. I just went along as excess baggage. I enjoyed it," he said.

But Carroll has never had the chance to climb in a hot air balloon basket.

“I just want to see what the sensation would be to go up in a balloon.”

Now, the Dream-a-Dream folks love a challenge.

“We had one gentleman who was from Arkansas, I believe,” said volunteer coordinator Abby Hurst. “He wanted squirrel soup and our P[ublic] R[elations] coordinator found him some squirrel soup.”

With equal vigor, the staff tracked down a balloon pilot and scheduled a flight. Then the rains came. When they left, the same cold fronts that chased them away brought along winds too strong for safe ballooning.

The flight was canceled and rescheduled five times. Now with iffy weather for the foreseeable future, no new date is currently scheduled.

“Maybe we ought to cancel this balloon ride and go for a submarine dive because of all the rain and everything,” Carroll laughed.

The humor buys a respite from frustration.

“So many mornings,” said Hurst, who has become a friend, “I've called him and said, ‘I’m sorry, but we're going to have to cancel; the weather’s not good.’

“And then I hang up the phone and I'm almost in tears because I don't like to