Records Show the VA Failed to Treat a Father’s Common Infection. Now He’s Paying the Price.

Anthony Walker always liked to think of himself as “the man.” He always liked to think of himself as “tough Tony.”

That’s how he felt jumping out of planes while in the Army and stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He felt it later, too, as a small-business owner, husband and a father to six children.

“A provider,” said Walker, 49, trying to define what being “the man” meant to him.

“I might sound like a caveman,” he said in self-deprecation and, amid all the things he’d lost, at least he still had a sense of humor. “And, if I do, please forgive me.”

But caveman or not, he always aspired for his family “to depend on me. For me to be (a) macho man.”

“Tough Tony, is what I called myself at one point in time,” he said.

But that was before Walker, a Plainfield resident, began suffering from fatigue and swelling in his leg. It was before his admission to the Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital, and before doctors there missed a bacterial infection that a routine blood test revealed. It was before that infection lingered, for weeks, and triggered sepsis. And before the heart surgery that followed, and then the strokes, the tears, the slow assisted steps while he learned how to walk again.

“I feel like a baby,” he said recently as he sat in his attorney’s office in the Loop.

His wife, Rosemary, sat to his right, crying. It was the day after their lawyers filed a federal lawsuit accusing the VA of negligence that left Walker severely disabled and his wife to be his caretaker. Walker’s plight, one of his attorneys said, is reflective of a larger problem as health care for American military veterans has found itself in political crosshairs.

“This is a situation,” said Howard Ankin, of the Ankin Law Firm, “that shows what can happen with our veterans, at a time that we’re questioning our resolve for our giveback to people that have fought for our country.”

A Hines spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

As the Walkers spoke in their lawyers’ office, they held each other’s hands tightly. More than two years have passed since their ordeal began. The strokes after Tony Walker’s misdiagnosis — or nondiagnosis, as it turned out — cost him part of his vision. He hasn’t been able to work. He can’t drive, which means his career as a truck driver and owner of his own trucking company is over. He’s unable to leave home alone.

People try to tell him he’s still tough. Still the man.

“But it doesn’t feel that way,” he said.

‘Changed our whole life’

Words are more difficult for Walker these days. At times he has trouble thinking of them or understanding them. Memories come and go. Sometimes he finds himself forgetting the simplest of tasks, like closing the refrigerator door after opening it. It leads to a familiar sound — “Beep-beep, beep-beep,” Walker said, softly, mimicking the open door — but not the impulse to prevent it.

A neuropsychological evaluation he underwent a year ago, after two strokes, put it in simple terms:

“The test results showed major problems with thinking skills, which means that you have a major neurocognitive disorder,” the medical records show. “Your thinking skills will likely not fully return.”

It was his wife, though, who needed time to gather her words as they sat together, to find a way to accurately describe their ordeal.

“Heartbreaking,” she said, pausing. “Overwhelming.”

For about 10 seconds she sat in silence, sobbing. Walker finished her thought:

“Frustrating. Aggravating. Those are the words I can think of,” he said.

“It’s changed our whole life,” she said.

And now they’re left to wonder: How could something like this have happened? How could personnel they trusted at the VA miss something so obvious? The weeks that changed everything are detailed in their lawsuit, and supported by medical records and documentation they shared with the Tribune.

It all began on July 21, 2023, when Walker was admitted to Hines after suffering from fatigue, a cough and a swollen leg. Records show a blood test detected the presence of Streptococcus mutans, a common bacterial infection, and the next day the lab reported the discovery to Walker’s doctor. The diagnosis, though, never made it to Walker or his wife.

Not that day. Not the next day either when Walker was discharged.

Streptococcus mutans is treatable with antibiotics. Walker, though, wasn’t prescribed any.

His symptoms worsened. His condition deteriorated.

In the weeks after he left the hospital he had at least five conversations with doctors or nurses, either in person or by phone, and he never received word of his infection. On Aug. 11, 2023, Walker returned to the Hines VA emergency room. He had a fever of 103 degrees. He could barely walk. Medical staff read over his chart. It was all right there, an incomprehensible error:

Not only had Walker not been treated for Streptococcus mutans, he didn’t know he had it.

Unending compromises

When he awoke, Walker couldn’t see anything.

“Everything was like a black shadow,” he said.

This was after he suffered his first stroke, which came almost two weeks after the heart surgery he needed to repair the damage from the infection. Two years later, his vision has not recovered. What he sees out of the right side of both eyes will always be filtered through a blurry haze, an ever-present reminder of a crisis that he and everyone around him believes was entirely avoidable.

Life now is a series of unending compromises foisted upon hm. He tries to help where he can at home, where he and his wife are raising three children ages 2 to 15.  But by 8 a.m., after trying to help them get ready, Walker is often exhausted. Karina, their middle child, is 7 and has taken everything the hardest.

Sometimes she copes with gallows humor, mature beyond her years, asking her dad to put her hair in a ponytail only to say, in jest: “Oh, I forgot — you can’t see.” Other times not even the wisecracks get her through, and she’ll cry when Walker has to go to the doctor, her father said.

He tries in moments to provide normalcy. To provide, period. But then he’ll attempt to make dinner and the ground beef will come out too pink, undercooked, “because he can’t see the color,” his wife said.

“He tries as much as he can,” she said. “And a lot of times I end up having to calm him down, because he says he feels like he’s one of the kids.”

It’s a striking contrast to the Walker of just a few years ago, and to the Walker of his much younger years, especially. At home, there’s a wall of his military honors and certificates. In photos from his Army days, in the 1990s, he’s lean and looks strong, with the prototypical appearance of a soldier, stern and ready. He was honorably discharged in January 2003, spent years as a trucker and ventured out with his own small trucking business in 2019.

Life was good. He’d met his longtime goal and “worked hard to retire my wife, if that makes sense,” he said with a smile. Then everything came crashing down, in the blink of an overlooked detail — a critical detail — on a medical chart. Suddenly, at 47, Walker awoke in a hospital bed amid all the tubes and machinery and he couldn’t know the real nightmare was only beginning, of losing sight and cognition and, for awhile, the ability to walk.

In videos from those days, almost two years ago, Walker labors to remain steady on his feet. Medical personnel help guide his every move. In one video, Walker tries to follow basic instructions on how to take a step. A single step.

“This one forward,” an instructor tells him, reaching for his right foot. “Good. And then your left one? Bring your left one over, toward the right one.”

“Good, Tony,” a voice in the background says in support. “Good, Tony.”

Then, more instruction:

“Left foot back. Left foot back. And then right foot out, and back.”

Soon Walker sits down, looking exhausted.

A ‘delay in care’

Tony and Rosemary Walker have been together for 17 years and married since 2016 and, “I don’t know” Rosemary said recently, looking back at the first time they met, at work. “He caught my eye. So I approached him.”

“I saw him walking through the building,” she said.

“She said it was in slow-motion,” Tony said, hamming it up.

He was nine years older and had been married before, already a father of three. But from practically their first meeting, “we’ve been together ever since,” Rosemary Walker said. What they’ve endured the past two years has forever altered the future they thought they’d share. They had big plans.

But now they share a different kind of bond. A deeper one, perhaps, forged by everything Rosemary Walker has had to do for Tony and by Tony’s realization that she didn’t love him any less along the way — not even when she had to bathe him or help him go to the bathroom.

“That’s how you know your wife loves you, man,” he said.

What they want now is accountability. In two documents the family’s lawyers shared, the Hines staff acknowledged the hospital’s role in the failures that set everything in motion.

In a February 2024 letter from one of Tony’s doctors, she wrote that Tony “was not notified” of the positive lab result. In another document, labeled as an “institutional disclosure of adverse event,” the hospital’s “chief of staff apologised (sic) on behalf of the facility leadership and discussed the process failure for missing the lab result and delay in care which may have caused the harm of complications (Walker) has now.”

To Walker and his family, an apology isn’t good enough. To members of his legal team, Tony’s experience at the VA is perhaps representative of dysfunction wrought by the specter of funding cuts, at a time when the future of health care for military veterans has become another point of American political division.

“With the appropriate resources, systems work better,” said Ankin, the lawyer. “And in this particular situation, six different times, the Walkers didn’t get an answer.”

Those failures, Ankin said, are why the couple filed the lawsuit.

“Because the court system is all you have left when the system breaks,” he said.

Rosemary Walker has been too busy, she said, to follow the debate surrounding the VA and the possibility of cuts. She has the kids to take care of, and Tony, too.

But “it’s really concerning to me,” she said, after seeing up close everything that happened to her husband.

Sitting next to her, Tony listened, nodding.

“I wouldn’t want nobody else to go through this,” he said.

Moments later he told the story about the refrigerator and leaving the door open. He recited the noise: “beep-beep, beep-beep.” How many times had he heard it now? A small thing, he knew, but small things “can become colossal to some people.” Sometimes he wonders “if the shoe was on the other foot,” whether he could be there for Rosemary the way she has been for him. At times she has told him she wished she could trade places and it just blows him away, Tony Walker said.

“Because I don’t want you to deal with none of this stuff that I have to deal with,” he told her.

They looked at each other and continued to hold hands. One of their lawyers said theirs was “a beautiful love story, encompassed in an absolute horror movie,” and if nothing else they’d both learned a lot about the real meaning of love.

The meaning of toughness, too.

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