Ex-Marine Now Fights Battle Against Heat : Health: Heat injuries that Jeff Ward of Fallbrook suffered in the service control what he does and how he lives.

Former Marine Jeff Ward was hoping that autumn would bring cool breezes to his Fallbrook mobile home, allowing him to live a normal life, if only temporarily. Instead, Santa Ana winds blew the mercury up to the high 80s most of last week, just enough to make his life very uncomfortable.

In better times, Ward would lift weights, go on evening runs and practice karate, but now the only exercise he can bear is to pedal a stationary bicycle in an air-conditioned room for a few minutes at a time.

In 1983, then-Staff Sgt. Ward collapsed from an apparent heat stroke during a routine physical-training exercise in Okinawa, Japan. That incident has caused permanent damage to Ward, and his medical records show he cannot tolerate heat of any kind, even that generated by his own body during exercises.

Now, in a case medical experts say may be the first of its kind, if the temperature rises above 80 degrees, Ward cannot walk out of his house without suffering episodes of dizziness, slurred speech, loss of motor skills, and, in at least one case, convulsions.

Normally, people release heat by sweating, keeping a stable internal temperature. Ward, however, said he almost never perspires; instead, his body builds up the heat during exercise or in hot weather.

His susceptibility to heat has changed his social habits, influenced what career he chose and discouraged him and his wife from having children.

He has found some relief in a special suit designed to keep his body cool in relatively warm temperatures, but the suit can only run, at most, six hours on its rechargeable batteries.

“Last Tuesday, I had to repair my sink and I had to do it with the suit on, because it was so hot,” Ward said.

Ward also faces a fight in trying to receive disability benefits from the Navy.

The Navy took the position that Ward had entered the Marine Corps with heat intolerance and gave him an honorable discharge with no benefits. Despite that ruling, the Veteran’s Administration declared Ward eligible for 30% disability payments, or $240 a month. Ward in now appealing the Navy decision, but a Marine official said that because Ward receives benefits from the VA, it is unlikely that the Navy will grant him further benefits.

“After I was discharged, I learned the hard facts of life,” said Ward, who lives in a mobile home park in Fallbrook, one of the county’s warmer spots. He would like to move, he says, but he and his wife cannot afford to.

“I was pretty naive. I figured I could go out and get a job, but it’s pretty hard for an electronic technician that supposedly has seizures to get a job,” said Ward, who went thousands of dollars into debt after being released from the corps. Ward now works as a computer programmer for a San Diego savings and loan.

In 1979, the 17-year-old Ward joined the Marine Corps, following in the footsteps of his father, who had recently retired from the Navy after serving in Vietnam.

After boot camp in San Diego, Ward spent a year in Twentynine Palms, two years in Yuma, Ariz., and another year in Hawaii before his injury in Okinawa.

“At the end of a 5 1/2-mile run, I collapsed, and from what I’ve been told, I was taken and placed in the shower by one of my Marines for 10 or 15 minutes,” Ward said.

“They told me I was very loud and very punchy, sort of like a head injury where someone just doesn’t act right,” said Ward, who has no memory of his behavior.

Ward then began convulsing and was taken to sick bay where he was draped with cold towels until his temperature returned to normal, according to his military medical records.

“I had excruciating headaches for about four days after that, and it wasn’t until two weeks after that I could start training again,” Ward said. “I still have those headaches today, and when they get me, they get me bad and I can’t even stand up.”

Marine medical records show that Ward appeared to have recovered from the incident in Okinawa, and spent a year in Twentynine Palms in San Bernardino County’s upper desert and eight months at Camp Pendleton before his heat injury resurfaced.

“During the afternoon runs, I would experience a flush and nausea and just general malaise,” Ward said.

The symptoms only intensified over time.

“It really hit in January, 1986,” Ward said. “We were on a 20-mile march and halfway through I was moving up a hill and I was pushing another young kid up the hill, and the next thing I know, my officers got me down on the ground, stripped my clothes off, and were pouring water all over me.”

After a half-an-hour break, Ward and the rest of the platoon completed the march.

But a month later, Ward again collapsed, this time during a morning run. His body went rigid, and that, he said, is “when they first started talking seizure.”

Three months of medical testing and six months later, Ward was discharged for a “physical disability existing prior to entry,” thus denying him Navy benefits.

But even Navy medical officers are unsure if Ward’s condition was something he had when he entered the Marines or if it was a service-related injury.

“I don’t know whether he was born with it or if he acquired it,” said Dr. Gregory Kirkorowicz, a neurologist at Camp Pendleton who treated and ran tests on Ward.

And Kirkorowicz is not optimistic about Ward’s chances for recovery. If anything, Ward’s condition could get worse, Kirkorowicz said.

“I don’t believe that he will recover, I think that Mr. Ward has an impairment of the temperature regulatory mechanism and that will stay with him,” Kirkorowicz said. “If he is exposed to recurrent episodes (of overheating), he will get more sensitive and is likely to develop more episodes.”

When Kirkorowicz and his staff first ran tests on Ward everything came out normal. But when Ward was put on a treadmill, after 90 minutes he began to get dizzy and faint.

“Little by little his temperature climbed, and he became dizzy and light-headed and he fell,” said Kirkorowicz. Ward’s temperature reached 103 degrees in that time on the treadmill, he added.

“If he gets warmed up, then he would progress, and he could potentially progress to a state of heat stroke, and that is a very serious condition,” Kirkorowicz said.

Fifty percent of heat-stroke patients die of their injuries, Kirkorowicz said.

Ward argues that if he had been heat intolerant before entering the corps, three years of service in the desert conditions of Twentynine Palms and Yuma would have brought his disability to light. And before becoming a Marine, Ward had participated in cross-country running in high school, his medical records show.

But even if Ward’s disability did occur while in the service, the Navy has declared that a person with heat intolerance is ineligible for disability benefits.

“I don’t think it’s right that the Secretary of the Navy can arbitrarily say that this is not a disability,” Ward said. He also wants to see the military treat heat injuries more seriously.

“There are a lot of heat injuries out there, and I don’t think the military protects well enough against them,” Ward said.

Ward said that the Marine’s “macho” ethic leads to unwarranted heat injuries.

“There’s an attitude of ‘We’re the Marines, we can take it,’ that only the weak ones fall, and I don’t always see that as true,” Ward said.

Ward said he has seen instances in which Marines were forced to continue training during unbearably hot conditions, even after several Marines had already collapsed due to the heat.

As for his own life, Ward has been slowly adjusting to his confines.

“Even going out to a movie during the summer, or to go anywhere during the summer, I have to have my suit’s batteries charged, I have to have my ice, I have to have an ice chest, and I have to have my suit with me,” Ward said.

The suit, manufactured by a Mountain View firm which is trying to sell its product to the military for use in the Persian Gulf, consists of a vest and cap with lining that a glycerin-based coolant is pumped through by a hand-held, battery-charged motor.

The suit means freedom to Ward, who exercised frequently before his injuries.

“I love the suit,” Ward said of the 15-pound gadget that cost $3,500, most of which he borrowed. “It allows me to do some exercises, and it lets me go places. It used to be that I didn’t go anywhere during the summer, I went to work and I came home. I always had the fear of what would happen if my car were to break down.”

Ward said that there were times during the summer when the air-conditioner in his mobile home couldn’t keep up with the heat, at which point he would plug his suit into a wall socket and relax until things cooled down.

The injury even has caused 29-year-old Ward and his wife, Marcy, to reconsider having children.

“We’re still deciding,” Marcy Ward said. “He’s kind of hesitated on having kids because he’s afraid that when they start sports or something he’s not going to be able to go out there and watch them. He doesn’t even know if he’s going to be alive.

“That really changes your life when you have to tell your son, ‘No, not today because it’s too warm,’ ” Marcy Ward said.

One of the Wards’ top priorities is to move away from Southern California, preferably to the Northwest.

“Maybe closer by the ocean,” Marcy Ward said. “I don’t want a lot of humidity, but just to where we have a little more freedom and we won’t constantly have to worry about the heat.”

To do so, however, requires a lot of advanced planning, such as having an appropriate job available and air-conditioned housing ready.

“If I move somewhere and I wasn’t set up with a good job and air-conditioning and it gets warm, I’m dead,” said Ward, adding that they are just now starting to save up money for the move. “There really is no room for error in my case.”

Military and civilian heat specialists are not sure what causes heat intolerance and say that not enough research has been done on the subject.

“It really is not known whether it’s a precondition or if a heat injury came about during service,” said Col. John Kark of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C.

“A lot of people who have heat injuries or repeated heat injuries don’t seem to be sick in terms of having an identifiable disease otherwise,” Kark said.

Otto Appenzeller, professor of neurology at the University of New Mexico, said some evidence supports the possibility that exposure to extreme colds, or hypothermia, may increase a person’s susceptibility to injuries from cold. But--despite Ward’s situation--similar evidence doesn’t exist on those suffering from heat injuries.

“There is some suggestion that once you seriously overwhelm your (body’s temperature regulatory system), that somehow it becomes more susceptible to repeated exposures, but that evidence comes from dogs, and dogs cool somewhat differently from the way humans do,” Appenzeller said.

“Human thermo regulation--and particularly recovery from heat stroke--has not been well studied.”