Tumor or No, Benny Looks to the Future

Benny Hernandez survived brain surgery last week. Now his real test begins.

The Anaheim school trustee was told of his chances for survival on Tuesday, four days after surgeons removed a large tumor from the back of his head. The roots of the malignancy went too deep, they said. They were unable to get it all out.

Benny has as little as six weeks to live. More, if he’s lucky.

But it was the doctor who was shocked, not the patient. Shocked that Benny took the bad news so calmly. He didn’t cry or get hysterical like other patients. He seemed to accept his fate in peace.

There was no trace of despair or self-pity when I arrived for a visit in his room at a Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles. Benny was wearing a bandage like a turban around his head, looking somewhat like a holy man. He leaned forward, smiled, shook my hand. Then he introduced me to his mother, Magdalena, who had come from Colorado to be with her youngest son.

His Santa Ana pastor, Jorge Ramirez, was there, too. So was his former youth leader from the church in East Los Angeles where Benny began singing hymns before he started kindergarten.

Benny was being released that day, much earlier than expected. He was recuperating rapidly, which is good news for a man who could have died on the operating table. The day after surgery, he was eating like a teenager.

“Benny, is there anything you need?” well-wishers offered.

“Yeah, go get me some Mexican food, man,” he’d say, prompting a quick run to a restaurant down the street.

His first postoperative meal was a combination cheese enchilada and chile relleno with rice and beans and a cup of champurrado, a thick chocolate drink. When a nurse spotted the trays of smuggled food in his recovery room, she made an impromptu diagnosis. “You don’t look sick,” she said.

Benny was quickly moved out of intensive care several days earlier than expected.

The story made me laugh. I took a seat next to Benny, who was propped up in bed so he could face visitors. On his feet were socks with treads on the bottom, provided to prevent a fall in the hallway. Fitting for a man who was always on the go, a guy with a mean tennis serve who also shot baskets and spiked volleyballs.

Benny won a seat on the board of the Anaheim Union High School District in November. He taught sixth-graders in Compton, participated in community groups such as LULAC and Los Amigos, and led the choir for the Seventh-day Adventist church on Broadway in Santa Ana.

Sorry, I used the past tense. Benny doesn’t intend to give any of that up, except his teaching job for the time being. He’s making plans as if the world still needs him.

Patients who expect to die usually dream about escaping the routines of daily life. Don’t they? They dream about traveling, living high and loving like never before.

Not Benny. He’s just 44, and still has serious goals. He wants to get a doctorate in education, run for mayor of Anaheim and become the first Latino superintendent of the Orange County Department of Education.

He also has a dream: to be free to work as a full-time community activist.

“Well, see, I enjoy doing that,” he explained. “I enjoy being active, talking to people, attending meetings, giving counsel. . . . You take that away from me, you’ve taken my life.”

There’s a Plan

Benny was born at White Memorial Medical Center in East L.A. So were his older brothers, Henry and David, all a year apart. Their little sister, Maggie, came two years after Benny.

At three months of age, Benny got pneumonia. Doctors said he had three days to live. His parents took him home, put him on a bed and prayed.

“God gave me life,” said Benny. “To remind me how he has a plan for me.”

Benny says his father, Enrique, was known as the Prayer Warrior because he prayed so much. He prayed with his family in the evening and alone before work. Sometimes, he prayed with three versions of the Bible, for comparison.

It was as if the old man had a direct line to God, Benny says.

Enrique Ramos Hernandez worked as a janitor at White Memorial. He would slip through the curtains to steal visits with his wife and their newborns, Magdalena recalled with a shy smile. Later, he became a supervisor of a plant that made aluminum windows and doors.

The elder Hernandez died in 1999. He had a stroke and went into a coma for a month, succumbing on his 46th wedding anniversary. Magdalena had prayed for her husband’s recovery, to no avail.

Such trials have taught her to accept God’s will. That’s how she deals with Benny’s destiny.

“It’s in the hands of God, and he will have the final word,” she said in Spanish. “If he has some purpose for my son to stay here, then he will heal him.”

Sometimes, as they say, God works in mysterious ways. It must have been God’s will for Benny to win a seat on the high school board last year. Benny had tried twice before but lost. This time he barely campaigned, spent $8.13 on two bags of electrical ties and hung out old signs left over from his last campaign.

He not only won but beat the incumbent board president, who had big endorsements.

“God put me there [on the board],” said Benny, who served as an Anaheim elementary school trustee for four years. “He had a purpose. But I still don’t know what it is. If God put me there for four years, why is this happening to me now?”

The answer doesn’t matter. Benny is acting like he intends to live out his term, at minimum. His goals for the district haven’t changed since the operation: lower the dropout rate and raise the college admissions rate. His tactic will be different, though. Now that he’ll have more time, he plans to visit the schools personally.

“Most school board members don’t know anything about education,” he said. “Here we are, passing policy, and we don’t understand.”

Benny loves the classroom because he loves students. He learned that by chance after 13 years of being a social worker in Los Angeles, specializing in child abuse prevention. In 1996, he took time off to work on the first Loretta Sanchez congressional campaign. She had helped Benny win his first elected office on the board of the Anaheim City School District two years earlier, the same year Loretta lost for Anaheim City Council.

Benny was briefly caught up in the voter fraud hysteria stirred up by Loretta’s defeat of Republican Congressman Bob Dornan. Benny was subpoenaed and accused--falsely, of course--of encouraging noncitizens to vote.

What he remembers most now are the folks who publicly defended his integrity.

After the election, Benny used his remaining time off to try his hand at substitute teaching. He wanted that firsthand experience to bring back to the school board. Pretty soon, he recalls, high school students were giving him standing ovations. They’d clap at the end of some Spanish class and ask the sub, “Mr. Hernandez, are you coming back tomorrow?”

It wasn’t the Spanish lesson they loved so much. It was Benny’s motivational message, mingled with stories about his mother who walked to school, two miles each way, to learn English.

“Look around,” Benny would tell the kids. “How many Latino teachers do you see? Not many. And how many Latino janitors? Almost all. Why is that? Ask yourselves.”

Then came his pitch: “Don’t slack off. Study. Do your homework. Let’s not be the tail, but the head.”

Most recently, he has been teaching fourth-graders full time in Compton. In the week before his tumor was diagnosed, he started bumping into his students accidentally.

“Hey, Mr. Hernandez, you bumped into me,” they’d say.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he’d reply. “I didn’t see you.”

One day that same week, he also slightly sideswiped two cars in a heavy rain. The minor scrapes occurred 10 minutes apart, and each time he didn’t realize what had happened until the motorists honked for him to pull over his 1991 Ford Probe.

“I hit you?” Benny asked, disbelieving.

Then on Saturday at church, he was walking toward the organ and smacked into a large column. He hit it hard. It wasn’t until later that he recognized the symptom: He was losing his peripheral vision.

That same night, Benny got a crushing headache. That was strange. He had never had a headache in his life. This one felt like a vise squeezing his temples. When he sneezed, it felt like a spear piercing his nostrils.

He slept all through Sunday, and the pain wouldn’t go away. On Monday, doctors discovered the tumor. They still don’t know what caused it, Benny says, or how long he had it.

On the eve of his surgery, Benny was in good spirits. He played his keyboard and led a roomful of visitors in hymn, including seven ministers who laid their hands on his head.

He even harmonized a cappella with his brothers, like the old days when the Hernandez boys enjoyed celebrity as a church trio called the Little King Heralds, with all three on accordion.

Benny has always been easygoing, recalled his mother, who brought her son’s favorite home-baked applesauce bread to the hospital. Even as a child, he never complained when he got sick. He was “muy valiente.” Very brave. “Y tan tranquilo,” she added. Oh-so-calm.

After being released from the hospital Tuesday, Benny headed straight for Olvera Street. More Mexican food, of course. His vision was blurry and he still couldn’t walk a straight line without veering left. But reached Friday at his cousin’s home in Loma Linda, he said he felt great, offering his e-mail address (benher@jps.net) for people to contact him if they wish.

Today, Benny planned to be playing the piano at church, as usual.

“There’s a lot of unfinished business out there,” he said.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com