By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
This column is an update on Don, the birdhouse guy. Some of you may remember that he is the parolee who came to live in a little trailer on my place, and who, with my friend Carl’s financial support, set up a sawmill here with a plan to mill cedar logs and make cedar chests and such from them.
In case you didn’t follow the story when I was writing about him, I’ll recap: Don has a tracheotomy and has to feed himself through a g-tube, the results of prison doctors curing him of throat cancer but frying his throat in the process. It also left him in constant need of pain medicine. Through bureaucratic missteps, he was released with no support of any kind, and no prescription for the pain medicine that is a basic daily need for him. Luckily, Dr. Sawtelle, who was retiring in less than a month, could read his records and see he needed it, so he wrote the prescription for a month. That saved him while we scrambled to find some doctor who would accept him with some cash from me and the promise of getting him on government assistance programs. He made it through all that, began making cedar chests, and even started building an apartment in the end of my workshop so he could work more hours.Then the parole people decided this was not the place for him, and made him move. He ended up in an apartment in Tyler with another ex-inmate. That is where we helped him set up shop to build birdhouses.
