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.

The Intolerance of the "Tolerant"

This past Sunday I was visiting friends celebrating their daughter's high school graduation with an informal "open house" party.  There I met a very nice woman who spoke glowingly about her daughter studying pre-med at college in Colorado.  The daughter, a vegetarian and confirmed social activist, mentioned that she was a bit disillusioned by the superficiality of the "tolerance" exhibited by many of the residents of the nation's most "tolerant" city: Boulder.  I should note that the family conforms to all of the requisites for a "green" and "progressive" categorization.

As an example of the daughter's concern, the woman mentioned a family ski vacation where in order to transport all the kids and equipment they rented an SUV.  Driving through Boulder, the family was confronted by a middle aged woman who stood on the curb as they passed and gave the family "the finger."  

It struck me that we are judged no so much by who we are but by "perceptions."  

In a fit of half seriousness and half humor I suggested that the woman may want to conduct a social experiment on the intolerance of the tolerant by sending her daughter a bumper sticker that simply said "GOP."  She laughted then got quiet as she contemplated the potential consequences of such an act.

In my opinion, the danger we all face is our inability to see and understand that to some degree or other we are all intolerant of those who differ from us.  And how that keeps us from becoming a truly "open" community on many levels.

While working at the National Rifle Association, I was shocked by the prejudice that differed in no way from the racial prejudice of the Jim Crow era of our nation's history showed to gun owners by many in the national media, by public policy shapers in Congress, and by non-gun owners in polite society. If you owned a gun, you had to be a low life, violent, a bigot, and no one who should be allowed to roam free in acceptable society.

That attitude was brought home by social workers, psychologists etc. at one public forum in Baltimore.  One PhD type pronounced that "if you own a gun you might not now be guilty of harming someone but you will someday." It was a pronouncement that stuck me as incredibily narrow in vision and purely intolerant.  

Similar prejudice aimed at individuals because they were non Christian, gay, Republican, hunters, poor, trappers, tree huggers, vegetarians, blessed with more skin color than the pigmentless sunburn set, mentally or physically challenged, or just non native language speakers all combined to erect barriers to acceptance.

I remember traveling to Texas to do a radio show in the early 1980s.  Outside the station, the streets were filled with bright lights and even more colorful characters.  It was the city's gay district and you would have thought it was Mardi Gras orCarnival in New Orleans or Rio.  Everyone was laughing and smiling, even the cops.  A year later, I ventured to the same station, walked outside and the streets were dark and quiet.  AIDS literally took away the life of the neighborhood.  Life seemed a little sadder.  

After NRA, I worked in my family's tiny restaurant on Capitol Hill.  My mother built a clientele that was half gay and half straight.  The food was better than good and the spirit of the place was great.  We even catered to the hookers next door who serviced Members of Congress and their oh so correct staff.  Again, the lights went out as the specter of AIDS visited the Hill.  


Later I looked around my suburban Maryland community and watched an influx of new neighbors arrive from Africa and Latin America.  I was roundly condemned for suggesting that if we had volunteer efforts to help folks get their citizenship and learn English the new residents would not feel so isolated, not to mention victimized because they did not understand what sleazy exploiters were doing to them.  Somehow my suggestion was deemed as "intolerant."

Recently I was asked to edit for publication a short manuscript about a young boy's journey to manhood guided in part by his Uncle who was "mentally defective" after some problem incurred shortly after birth.  It brought back distant memories of my childhood during the 1950s where adults would warn my sisters and me about avoiding an equally challenged person at the local carnival.  The individual in question always smiled, wore thick glasses and had no friends that we could see.  He just looked different.

As I progressed through the manuscript I was mesmerized by the care and compassion of the Uncle shown a young boy whose parents were certifiably cruel, abusive and just plain nasty.  It was and is a marvelous story I hope many will read when it is finally published.   I will post its publication date and availability. 


The story helped me recognize my own intolerance and reminded me to beware those who posture as "tolerant" to all save the folks who just might be a little different.