David Hoekstra was scanning the mail at his Canyon Lake, California home when something caught his eye. It was the latest issue of HealthNews, the quarterly publication from Southwest Healthcare System.

"I usually just look through the magazine but this time I read an article about a guy who had a story that sounded similar to mine," the 82-year old Hoekstra says. That story was about a Temecula man who saw his physician because of shoulder pain only to find that he had a brain tumor. (Read that story.) After reading the story, Hoekstra thought about the past several years of his life and some of the health issues he'd been through.

A former executive vice president of a cargo terminal in Long Beach, Hoekstra and his wife moved to Florida after he retired several years ago to enjoy the lower cost of living there. While in Florida, Hoekstra accidentally took an overdose of a prescription medication that made him dizzy and prompted a trip to a local emergency department.

"The doctor (in the emergency department) was about to inject me with Heparin when he decided to do a CT scan," Hoekstra explains. "When they looked at the scan, they found a 3 centimeter growth in my brain. The doctors told me not to worry about it and to have a follow up scan in a year or so to see if it had grown."

A year later, Hoekstra and his wife had moved back to California to escape the oppressive Florida heat. "I had another CT scan and the tumor had grown to 4 centimeters," he says. "I saw a surgeon. He wanted to do surgery right away but I waited."

In the months that followed, Hoesktra became more and more depressed. "I wrote that off as due to the passing of my son," he says. Then, he read the article in HealthNews and contacted a physician.

"I had an MRI and the tumor had grown to 8 centimeters," he says. "I saw the surgeon on Thursday and I was on the operating table at Inland Valley Medical Center on Tuesday," Hoekstra explains. During the procedure, a neurosurgeon at Inland Valley Medical Center removed most of the tumor, which had been applying pressure to a portion of Hoekstra's brain, causing depression.

While the surgeon was unable to remove the entire tumor because of its location in his brain, Hoekstra says he feels good now and encourages others to seek medical advice, even when they think they know the cause of their problem.

"When I woke up from the surgery, I felt like a new guy," Hoekstra says of the surgery. "I spent three days in the hospital and they treated me wonderfully. I am very glad to be rid of the depression."