Walking Upright

Twenty years ago, I thought nothing of jogging four to six miles in the morning.  Nine to pick up my car from the service bay at the dealership.  I was never into competitive running, just sightseeing through neighborhoods, parks etc.  It was a true joy.  Of course, at the speed I jogged I would say an eighty- year-old using a walker could lap me on any course.

Once after a six mile jog around Fort Shenandoah, the North-South Skirmish Association's range outside Winchester, VA, I was standing on a slight slope when I felt what I thought was an intense groin pull.  My Chiropractor, a wonder woman named Diane Rosello said my problem was that I had worked my pelvis out of place.  She did something and the pain disappeared.

About three years ago something happened to my back to the point where I could barely walk to my car.  It was partly pain and partly fear of pain.  

I watched young parents walking their children to grade school and envied them the use of their pain-free legs.  I couldn't throw a baseball to my son Tommy.  I could barely walk to the diamond. 

One day I toughed it out and visited a good friend at NRA headquarters in Fairfax VA.  

Jim Land is a man I've admired and whose friendship I enjoyed well before I realized he is something of a larger than life figure in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps and in terms of reviving our military interest in long-range precision shooting.  He was the force behind the creation of the Marine Scout Sniper School at Quantico and the commanding officer and often partner of famed sniper, the late Carlos Hathcock.

As I walked into Jim's office it was apparent that something was wrong.  He could barely stand and the two or three steps to a chair were excruciatingly painful.  

Not long afterwards, Jim visited a young surgeon in Woodbridge, VA.  His name is Dr. Paymaun Lotfi.  Dr. Lotfi operated on Jim's spine.  A few months after the operation, Jim was scouting a forty acre field for the best place to set up for deer season.  No limitation in movement.  No pain.

Nearly a year later I called Dr. Lotfi's office.  I brought him MRI films of my spine.  He pointed out what looked like a streak of white.  That, he said, is the correct opening within which my spinal cord lay.  Just below in the lumbar region the white disappeared into a dense dark black.  He pronounced the darkness as evidence of spinal stenosis, a constriction of the normal spinal canal.  He ordered more films to indicate the extent of the damage and sent me to two other nearby physicians, one a cardiologist and one an internist, to see if I was qualified for an operation.  

After a thorough vetting by Dr. Yazdani, the cardiologist, and Dr. Akrami, the internist, I was pronounced a candidate for Dr. Lotfi's talent.  Woodbridge's Potomac Hospital is as modern a facility as can be found anywhere in the metropolitan area and better than most.

Don't ask me what Dr. Lotfi did.  In fact the weeks that followed are but a dim blur.   I spent one night in the hospital and was heading home the next evening.  The entire next two weeks out of the hospital found me in the care of the world's most wonderful woman, Mary, her daughter Megan and my son Tommy.


Dr. Lofti said he found bone spurs at every vertebral junction, a bulging disc he trimmed and fragments of discs among the debri keeping my spine from working correctly. He trimmed the area between vertebrae to allow room for proper functioning.  

The operation was April 12, the day decades earlier when Franklin Roosevelt died (bless the History Channel).  Today, aside from a body weakened from three years of limited mobility, the pain and fear are gone.  I can walk upright yet again.  Will I start jogging?  Let you know in a few months.

Just let me say two things.  As American medicine has taken tremendous strides over the centuries due to each wave of immigrants coming to our shores and taking their place among our medical caregivers, today I thank the good Lord and three doctors practicing exceptional medicine in the area for continuing that tradition.  They are offspring of a wave of immigrants who came here barely a couple of decades ago from Iran.  And they are fabulous additions to our nation.  Just ask my spine.  

The second is, if you have or know someone who labors under tremendous back pain, get them to a qualified physician.  Mine was the least invasive of spinal operations with the highest rate of success.  His or hers could well be the same.  It's truly worth it.