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AMPUTATION ONLINE MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER 15, 2001
Volume 6 Issue No.6
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AOLM is sponsored by
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Please visit our sponsors web sites
CONTENTS
4th ANNUAL TOP TEN AWARDS
WEB SITE OF THE MONTH
NEWS ITEMS:
Appeal verdict due on charity man
Sources of amputee pain revealed
Fewer children dying from meningitis
How teenagers deal with cancer
Anger over diabetes delay
Flashback: When the Taleban took Kabul
Zanardi Released From Hospital
Afghanistan Back in the News; Land mines Never Left
Elephant Hurt by Mine Not Recovering
Advanced Tissue Sciences Gets FDA Approval For Artificial Skin
Agency Warns About Security Gates
Rights Group Condemns Nigeria Ruling
Who She Took With Her
Supreme Court Won't Review Violent Video Game Law
Snow Forces Disabled U.S. Climber From Everest
Sharing An Inspired Life - Carl Brashear
Synthes-Stratec sells European prosthetics business
Hanger Orthopedic names McHenry CFO
ANNUAL TOP TEN AWARDS RESULTS
BEST SUPPLEMENTAL PRODUCT
Farabloc - http://www.farabloc.com
An unique material that decreases pain in certain circumstances. Originally developed to reduce pain by the son of an amputee whose father experienced ongoing pain due to amputation.
BEST WEB PRESENCE
http://www.xavitorres.com/
Interesting web site dedicated to promoting Paralympic swimmer Xavi Torres
BEST UPPER LIMB DEVICES
Texas Assistive Devices
http://www.n-abler.org/
Third Year winning this award
Texas Assistive Devices prides itself in developing new tools and implements for the upper extremity amputee, and now for people with hand disabilities. The N¥Abler I and II terminal device is designed to secure tools and implements safely.
BEST SUPPORT SITE
Al Pike - Amputee Resource Foundation of America Inc http://www.usinternet.com/users/alpikecp/
Former President of the American Academy of Prosthetists and Orthotists, Al's long running site is dedicated to helping amputees with their prosthetic and non prosthetic needs. Previous award winner in 1997.
BEST TECHNICAL ADVANCE
TEC Harmony
http://www.tecinterface.com/products_volume.html
TEC® is excited to announce a prosthetic breakthrough! Intensive research exploring residual limb volume fluctuation evolved into a new technology called VASS™ &endash; Vacuum Assisted Socket System. This technology is available in the TEC Harmony™ products.
BEST NON-PROFIT
Barr Foundation
http://www.oandp.com/resources/organizations/barr/index2.htm
The Barr Foundation, a non-profit organization, is pleased to announce the establishment of the Barr United Amputee Assistance Fund (BUAAF) The purpose of the fund is to purchase prosthetic limbs for amputees who cannot otherwise afford them.
BEST LOWER LIMB
Foot: Flex Foot
http://www.ossur.com/template14.asp?PageID=305
Since the mid 80's Flex Foot have produced some of the most revolutionary lower limb prosthetics. 2001 saw Flex Foot bought out by Iceland's Ossur - every thing Flex Foot is still available.
Shock: Endolite TT Pylon
http://www.endolite.com/ttoptions.htm
The unit provides both axial compression and torque absorption and now incorporates our new torsion rod and compression buffer to ensure more comfort, more energy return and greater reliability than ever before.
A maximum movement of 13mm ensures smooth vertical deceleration at heel strike, an improved push-off and easy roll-over with any foot system.
Knee: Ultimate Knee
http://www.orthoeurope.co.uk/products/ultimate/overview.htm
The Ortho ULTIMATE knee is fabricated of strong titanium/aluminium alloy and will be suitable for patients up to 275 pounds (125 kg). It is a weight-activated knee, with swing and stance phase solely controlled with hydraulics.
The ULTIMATE Knee's unique features allow your patient the ability to walk with a variety of settings. It can be set as a manual locked knee, switched to a locked knee during stance phase only, before progressing to the mode which allowas the patient to descend slopes and stairs in a confident, controlled manner.
WEB SITE OF THE MONTH
FREE IAN STILLMAN
http://www.ianstillman.fsnet.co.uk/html/home.html
NEW ITEMS:
Tuesday, 23 October, 2001, 10:35 GMT 11:35 UK
Appeal verdict due on charity man
Ian Stillman should know the verdict within days
Campaigners fighting for the release of a deaf charity worker in India are now awaiting an appeal verdict.
Ian Stillman's hearing ended on Friday, and a decision on whether he will be released is expected within two weeks.
Mr Stillman has been in custody for more than a year, and was imprisoned for 10 years in June, on drugs charges.
His case has been described as the "worst miscarriage of justice I have dealt with", by Stephen Jakobi, director of charity Fair Trials Abroad.
The British Police have asked us to make clear that they have no record of any conviction in his [Ian Stillman's] name
British High Commission in India statement
A police chief in India has described Mr Stillman, from Berkshire, as a "wanted man in Britain".
Interpol and the British High Commission in India have rejected the claim.
In a statement on its website, the high commission confirms Mr Stillman, is not a wanted man.
It states: "The British Police have asked us to make clear that they have no record of any conviction in his name.
"Recent press reports alleging that he is a wanted criminal in the UK are entirely erroneous."
The 50-year-old charity worker, who has an artificial leg after a car accident, was arrested in August 2000, and charged with possessing 20 kilogrammes of cannabis.
On his website however, it states: "At his trial there was no credible evidence. He was refused a translator or sign language interpreter.
Drug networks
"Until recently he has been in cramped, insanitory conditions without medical care. The Kulu police have attacked him in the Indian press."
It was alleged Mr Stillman, who has advised the Indian government on charity issues, has close links with international drug networks.
There were also claims he had committed a "serious crime" in London.
Interpol has been reported as stating: "Interpol has never communicated to the Indian authorities on the said individual.
"We can confirm that there is no one under the name of Ian Stillman sought in the United Kingdom for criminal matters."
Tuesday, 16 October, 2001, 23:25 GMT 00:25 UK
Sources of amputee pain revealed
Some amputees experience phantom pain
The pain that amputees experience in their stumps comes from a different source than the pain that some experience from phantom limbs, research suggests.
Up to 80% of all amputees experience pain in their stumps or what feels like the missing limbs long after surgical wounds have healed.
Stump and phantom pain are quite possibly two very distinct things
Dr Cathy Stannard Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have carried out tests that show that the two types of pain have different sources.
Their work gives doctors clues as to what type of pain relief medication is best for amputee patients.
At present, the treatment of both stump and phantom pain is poor because little is known about the underlying mechanisms.
The researchers found that the powerful pain relief drug morphine significantly relieved both stump and phantom pain.
However, the local anaesthetic lidocaine relieved only the stump pain.
Nerve injuries
Stump pain is believed to arise from nerve injuries at the site of the amputation.
These result in the formation of neuromas, non-cancerous tumours that grow out of the injured nerve fibres. These tumours may fire off pain impulses in a random fashion, or may give off pain signals when trapped by other tissue, such as muscle.
Phantom pain is thought to reside in the brain. When the part of the brain that controlled the limb before it was amputated no longer has a function, other areas of the brain fill in.
The Hopkins data supports that theory, in that lidocaine, a drug that predominantly works on the peripheral nervous system, did not relieve phantom pain.
Morphine acts on the peripheral and central nervous systems.
The researchers studied 32 patients who had amputated limbs.
Twelve patients had pain in the region of the stump, while nine had pain in the missing part of the limb.
Eleven patients experienced both types of pain.
On three consecutive days, each patient was given an intravenous injection of either morphine, lidocaine or placebo.
Pain measures and patient satisfaction scores were recorded every five minutes from 30 minutes before the injection until 30 minutes after.
Patient satisfaction scores were similar and significantly higher for both lidocaine and morphine compared to placebo, which did not significantly reduce either type of pain.
Consensus
Dr Cathy Stannard, a consultant in pain medicine at the Frenchay Hospital, Bristol, told BBC News Online that the conclusions of the study were similar to the general consensus among experts.
She said: "Stump and phantom pain are quite possibly two very distinct things, but there is quite a strong relationship between the two - people who have stump pain are more likely to also experience phantom pain.
"It may be that although stump pain has a local pathology it feds into the general process that generating the phantom pain."
Dr Stannard said some patients were reluctant to admit to phantom pain, possibly because of embarrassment.
She also said that the strong emphasis on rehabilitation meant that some patients were not given sufficient information about the types of pain that they might experience.
The charity Action Research is currently funding research into whether administering the drug ketamine prior to amputation operations could be effective in preventing phantom pain.
Lead researcher Dr Alistair Nimmo, of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, agreed that stump and phantom limb pain could be very different.
But he stressed that the latter is particularly difficult to treat.
He said: "There is still no effective remedy for phantom limb pain, which can bother amputees for many years after their operation.
"Treatment is difficult and standard pain killers are often ineffective. It is hoped that our Action Research funded project will lead to treatment to be directed at preventing this disabling pain from developing."
The research was presented to a meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
Monday, 22 October, 2001, 05:32 GMT 06:32 UK
Fewer children dying from meningitis
The Alder Hey study tracked 123 children
There has been a sharp fall in the number of children dying from meningitis and septicaemia in two areas of the country, according to separate studies published on Monday.
Researchers from Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool found that death rates from meningococcal disease have dropped.
A separate study revealed that cases of fatal meningococcal disease have decreased in southern England by almost 60% within five years, after the establishment of a specialist unit.
One of the authors, Dr Paul Baines, a doctor at Alder Hey, said that awareness of the disease has heightened, resulting in earlier recognition and treatment.
'Aggressive' treatment
Researchers at Alder Hey tracked 123 children with meningococcal disease admitted to the paediatric intensive care unit at the hospital between 1995 and 1998.
Their ages ranged from two months to 16 years.
Eleven of the children died, giving a death rate of just under 9%.
Time is of the essence which is why our work has been key
A validated scoring system to assess the likely risk of death according to the severity of the disease indicated that the death rates should have been almost 25%.
Dr Baines said that "improved management in A&E departments" could also have helped along with increasing resources and "more aggressive" treatment regimes.
The fall in death rates in southern England was attributed to the establishment of the specialist unit at St Mary's Hospital, London.
It was opened in 1992 and includes the use of a mobile intensive care service.
Limb amputation
Michael Levin, Imperial College professor of Paediatrics at the hospital said the disease continues to affect around 2,000 children a year and claims over 100 lives in the UK.
"Time is of the essence which is why our work has been key.
"Real-time advice on immediate clinical management when the child first arrives at their local hospital means that resuscitation and stabilisation efforts can be started even before the arrival of our mobile intensive care team there."
One in 10 patients with meningitis will die, despite treatment with antibiotics - those who survive maybe permanently disabled as a result of limb amputation, extensive scarring, or neurological injury.
The two studies are published in the journal "Archives of Disease in Childhood".
Monday, 22 October, 2001, 00:27 GMT 01:27 UK
How teenagers deal with cancer
Sam had just started university when he was faced with a battle against cancer
Teenagers make up a tiny proportion of patients diagnosed with cancer but they need specially tailored care.
The BBC documentary 'Living With Cancer' looks at how some of them cope.
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Cancer is a hard word to hear at any age, but it can be especially difficult for the 600 teenagers who are diagnosed with the disease each year.
Their school and family life is disrupted, and they have to face side-effects ranging from hair loss to infertility or limb amputation.
Parents have to deal with both their own worries and the trauma their children are going through.
The Middlesex Hospital, part of the University College London Hospital NHS Trust, was the first in the UK to open a ward devoted to caring for teenagers for cancer.
Tom Dore: Diagnosed with leg cancer at 17
Sam Bennett, 19, is being treated there - he was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer in his arm just after he had started university.
It has now spread to his lungs and his pelvis.
He has had six cycles of chemotherapy to tackle his tumours
He says as he walks into the ward for treatment, he feels like a boxer: "You think, 'come on then, do your worst'.
"Going in for the first time, I remember a girl of 14 walking past me with a bald head and with a drip. And I just thought cancer victims looked like aliens. I couldn't believe I was going to be one of them.
I just thought cancer victims looked like aliens. I couldn't believe I was going to be one of them
Sam Bennett "Now they just look like normal people and they just happen to be having chemotherapy and have no hair."
Chemotherapy to tackle growing tumours in his lungs was successful, and the tumour in his arm was surgically removed.
His final stage of treatment was a course of higher dose chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant to replace his damaged immune system.
"It's like being told 'congratulations', you've reached the final fence. It might be the highest and the hardest but it's the last one and after that things can only get better," he said.
The treatment was successful, and Sam is now back at university.
'Waiting is worst'
Tom Dawe, 21, was diagnosed with leg cancer at the age of 17.
He had to have two operations and chemotherapy.
Tom, a builder from Chelmsford, said: "The remission is the worst part, because you're waiting for the cancer to come back."
It did come back in his lung, and he had to have a second operation.
Tom was distraught: "The life I'm having is a little bit longer than I should get, but isn't any better. I'm just passing time between hospital appointments."
But after counselling, Tom felt more positive.
He had the second operation and his cancer is in remission.
Decision to die
Fifteen-year-old Jonathan Wolfe was diagnosed with soft tissue cancer last year and had to have a foot amputated.
He recently discovered the cancer had returned in his lungs.
A religious person, he has decided not to go ahead with chemotherapy, which doctors said would only give him another couple of months of life.
"I said to myself, what's the good in feeling that bad with the chemotherapy on top of what I'm feeling, then dying anyway?
"I might as well go feeling as best as I can and in the best shape I can be."
His mother Vicky supported his decision, and both went to Lourdes seeking spiritual comfort.
"We accept this is God's will," she said.
Jonathan died in June.
Tuesday, 16 October, 2001, 14:03 GMT 15:03 UK
Anger over diabetes delay
Diabetics require regular shots of insulin
Campaigners have reacted angrily to a government decision to delay proposals for improvements to NHS diabetes services.
They say that it is unacceptable that the needs of people with diabetes are being put on hold.
This delay is a major blow
Paul Streets Health Minister Jacqui Smith revealed in an answer to a parliamentary question on Tuesday that publication of a National Service Framework for Diabetes is to be delayed for a year.
The framework will set out the standards of healthcare that people with diabetes should expect and how they will be implemented.
While the standards will be published later this year, the document stating how these standards will be made a reality will be delayed.
This means that the framework, due to be implemented from April 2002, will now be put off for a year.
At risk
A report published by the Audit Commission last year warned that some people with diabetes were at risk because of sub-standard NHS care.
The report highlighted the fact that diabetes care was very patchy across the UK, and that some patients did not get sufficient access to expert help and advice.
Paul Streets, Diabetes UK Chief Executive said: "We are extremely disappointed by this delay.
"It means that we will have to wait another year for standards of diabetes care to be systematically improved.
"This delay is a major blow. People with diabetes and healthcare professionals have been waiting patiently for the much vaunted framework for months."
Mr Streets said the charity would raise the matter with Ms Smith at a meeting next week.
In the meantime Diabetes UK wants to see:
* A confirmed date for when the final framework will be published * Open consultation with patients and health care professionals about how to make the standards work in practice * Building blocks put in place to ensure that when the final framework is published, it can be implemented straight away
Adrian Sanders MP (Lib Dem, Torbay), chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Diabetes, condemned the delay.
Adrian Sanders MP He said: "Today's announcement will be a severe disappointment to the 1.4 million people with diabetes, their families and health care professionals.
"People have been working towards the implementation of new standards in 2002. This has been put off for at least a year if not longer. It is an unnecessary wait.
"The government must clarify why the framework has been delayed and when it will be published."
A Department of Health spokesperson said that good progress had been made towards developing new national standards since final advice had been received earlier this year from a panel of experts.
"Deferring publication of the delivery strategy until next summer, with implementation to start from April 2003, will enable us to be sure what financial resources will be available to support implementation of the NSF, and also that the NSF will be deliverable in the context of the changing roles and responsibilities of NHS organisations."
Diabetes affects 1.4m people in the UK. Diabetes UK estimates that a further 1m people have the condition and don't know it.
Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the UK and significantly increases the risk of heart disease, kidney disease and stroke. It is also a leading cause of amputation.
Monday, 15 October, 2001, 11:25 GMT 12:25 UK
Flashback: When the Taleban took Kabul
The Taleban have been brutal to opponents
By Terence White, former AFP correspondent in Kabul
I was a journalist based in Kabul when the Taleban first marched into the capital and committed an atrocity that most people other than Afghans have probably now forgotten - the brutal murder of President Najibullah, the former communist leader of Afghanistan.
Kabul has suffered destruction and poverty for many years
It was shortly after 0100 on 27 September 1996, when I monitored nervous radio messages from Afghan guards at the United Nations compound.
Najibullah had been living there under UN protection for four and a half years, since his government fell in 1992.
The guards told their Western bosses, who were staying in another part of the city, that some people were knocking on the gates demanding to see their "special guest".
It didn't take a cryptologist's skill to understand that the Taleban had come for Najibullah.
Earlier that night the capital had been abandoned by the Afghan Government troops of Ahmed Shah Masood, many of them my neighbours.
I was lying in bed, fully clothed and fully awake, flush with adrenaline and uncertainty, pondering how we would be treated by the Taleban.
The UN guards were instructed not to resist and a squad of religious militants grabbed Najibullah and his brother, who was staying with him.
It wasn't until next morning that, along with tens of thousands of Afghans, I understood how Taleban rule would be.
The hapless pair were hanging lifeless from a traffic control box, but they didn't die that way.
Their bloodied and mutilated bodies were gruesome testimony to death by torture; Najibullah was said to have been castrated.
Punishment beatings
As self-described champions of Islamic reform the Taleban had set a highly questionable - and to many, repugnant - example of Muslim justice.
They also sent an imperious and sinister warning to the potentially rebellious population of Kabul.
Next, the religious police from the soon to be dreaded Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice appeared on the streets.
Their first victims were women, whom they beat with wire cables and hose-pipes when found on the street in violation of the Taleban's first decree, which stated that women could no longer work and must stay at home.
This decree illustrated the Taleban's ignorance and bigotry, being a reflection of their Pashtun tribal culture rather than Islam, which does not ban women from work or school.
The associated social haemorrhage caused by staff shortages in hospitals and government offices, where women could no longer work, underscored their abysmal lack of organisation and planning.
If legitimately in public, to go shopping for instance, women had to be escorted by a male relative.
Decree after decree
"Violators have no right to complain," was the facile Taleban explanation, and when jobless war-widows bravely demanded how they could feed their children, they were told God would providee. (Foreign aid agencies donated their food.)
The Taleban soon started policing morals
The next decrees obliged men to grow a beard and for all transportation to stop at the time of enforced congregational prayers.
Music was banned and cinemas closed; children were not even allowed to fly kites or keep pigeons as pets.
Curiously, the first gamblers, thieves and homosexuals apprehended by the Taleban were not punished severely but paraded through town with blackened faces as a humiliation.
However, within a year, public executions, amputations and stonings were a regular Friday event in Kabul.
Rule from Kandahar
This suffocating litany of decrees was broadcast from Radio Sharia (formerly Radio Kabul), all in keeping with the Taleban's narrow interpretation of Islamic religious law.
This might have been acceptable to the people if they were included in the decision making.
But they were not.
All major decisions came from the Taleban's spiritual headquarters in Kandahar where their reclusive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar lived.
When I was expelled in 1997 on false charges of spying for Ahmed Shah Masood even the foreign ministry in Kabul was powerless to intervene.
When Kabul was under threat from Masood the Taleban became more draconian in the enforcement of their rules and they sent goon squads out each night, searching for hidden weapons and dragging ethnic Tajiks off to jail.
At these times they also prevented journalists from visiting the front lines.
Sometimes you could bluff your way through although I got beaten by angry mullahs for doing this.
As battlefield casualties mounted, popular support for the fight against the opposition United Front waned.
This obliged the Taleban to increasingly rely on Pakistani and Arab recruits, most of the latter being Osama bin Laden's followers.
Reportedly even Chechens and militants from Uzbekistan were among the foreign fighters.
These pan-Islamic fighters have committed many atrocities against minority Afghan communities which have further alienated the Taleban.
If the Taleban ever objected to Bin Laden's extremist ideology they have never said so.
They allowed the proliferation of training camps for Muslim militants from all over the world, which has precipitated the current attacks on Afghanistan by the United States and the UK.
I will not be sorry to see the Taleban vanquished, but given yet another war imposed on this poor country, I weep for Afghanistan and the continued price the Afghans must pay for before they can enjoy what many countries already take for granted: peace and prosperity and religious freedom.
Tuesday October 30 10:28 AM ET
Zanardi Released From Hospital
By DAVID RISING, Associated Press Writer
BERLIN (AP) - Alex Zanardi was released from the hospital Tuesday six weeks after his legs were amputated and spoke of possibly racing again.
``I feel I brought home the best and the most of myself,'' the two-time CART champion said. ``I didn't lose much. I got to know the importance of the love of family and friends. Sometimes in life we forget what we have.''
Zanardi, one of CART's most popular drivers, said his first priority is to walk using artificial legs. But he hopes that someday he may be able to get behind the wheel of a race car again.
``Motor racing has been a great passion of my life, not only my job, and maybe one day if I am able I will (race again),'' he said. ``But the reality is I don't know what I will be able to do right now.''
Zanardi was injured while leading the American Memorial 500, the first CART race held in Europe, with 12 laps left. As he pulled out of the pits, his Honda Reynard got away from him and he spun backward into the path of Alex Tagliani, who hit his car at 200 mph and sheared it in half.
Zanardi was airlifted to a hospital in Berlin that specializes in treating accident victims. Zanardi lost 70 percent of his blood and both legs were amputated halfway up his thighs.
``He was lucky to even reach the hospital,'' said Dr. Walter Schaffartzik, one of the physicians who worked on Zanardi as soon as he arrived at the Unfallkrankenhaus Berlin. ``It was a very critical situation.''
Schaffartzik said it most likely would be a year or two before Zanardi can walk again. But if therapy goes well, he added, Zanardi will be able to move about without crutches and will at least be able to drive a regular car.
Zanardi, who turned 35 in the hospital, said he has spoken with Tagliani and told him emphatically the accident was ``absolutely not his fault.''
He now returns to his home in Monaco. He plans to move back to his native Bologna, Italy, with his wife, Daniela, and 3-year-old son Niccolo.
Zanardi's right leg is completely healed, but he will have to wait until the left leg is ready before beginning to learn how to use prosthetic limbs.
``I hope I can start before Christmas,'' Zanardi said, then pausing and smiling. ``It would be nice, as we say in Italian, to celebrate Christmas with my legs under the table.''
Thursday October 4 2:17 AM ET
Afghanistan Back in the News; Land mines Never Left
By Peter Graff
GOLBAHAR, Afghanistan (news - web sites) (Reuters) - Abdul Jalal's mistake was to leap for the ball during a game of volleyball. A land mine destroyed his left leg, and he thought it would destroy him.
His fate could be that of any U.S. soldier who sets foot in Afghanistan in an offensive to hunt down Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), named by the United States as chief suspect behind the devastating September 11 attacks, and his protectors, the ruling Taliban.
The United Nations (news - web sites) estimates that this rugged land is littered with between five and 10 million land mines, all concentrated in approximately 11 percent of the country.
Unexploded ordnance also remains a grave danger to both Afghan civilians and any invading troops.
``These pose a threat to everyone,'' said Bob Karniol of Jane's Defense.
``Soldiers who don't know the terrain are more at risk than peasants,'' he aid. They would be well-served by local guides who know the areas.. There is no doubt that intelligence people will be constantly consulting on this.
``This is one of the many things that planners will have to think about,'' he said.
Abdul Jalal is one of between 100 and 300 Afghans who step on a land mine or unexploded ordnance each month. There are more, but no one hears about their cases because they die, officials say.
``I thought there was no possibility to work and no life for me,'' Jalal said. ``Then, little by little, when I got my prosthesis, and then I got married, I realized that life is not over, I could have a life.''
Today, he works as a physiotherapist in a Red Cross clinic helping to give artificial legs to other mine victims, about five or six new ones each week.
His gentle smile and air of kindness work as a balm on his patients. They see him walk and work, and know that they can too.
Right now he is helping shy 12-year-old Ato Mohammad, whose mistake, four months ago, was to walk to market.
His cousin found him, his leg ripped to bloody shreds. He remembers the fear and the pain. But it won't destroy him either.
``I will go back to school, and then I will be a shopkeeper,'' says the boy.
LABORATORY FOR MODERN WAR
As the United States contemplates strikes to punish the ruling Taliban for sheltering bin Laden, the world is again looking at Afghanistan, a place many would rather forget.
So much is horribly wrong in what could be a laboratory for the plagues of modern war. There is hunger, homelessness, widowhood and children with guns.
But spare a thought if you can for land mines, the peculiarly modern weapon that keeps killing and maiming long after the war is gone.
Afghanistan is already the world's most heavily mined country. The United Nations says 10 Afghans are killed or wounded by mines every day.
The numbers will rise when war again sends refugees tramping across the countryside.
Surveys by demining organizations show that in some provinces as many as 12 percent of the population have been involved in a mine accident.
Many, if not most, of the victims are children, often struck by mines planted years before they were born. For them, mines are a part of childhood.
Schools teach pupils how to recognize them. A poster on a schoolroom wall in Ato Mohamad's home village describes them.
The famous little pill-shaped anti-personnel mines. The bigger, plate-sized anti-tank mines. The fragmentary grenades on sticks which explode in bursts of shrapnel. The green plastic butterflies, which look like children's toys, and which the Soviets scattered across the countryside by helicopter.
But even experts make mistakes.
QUIET CONSOLATION
The toll of mines is impossible to measure. The consequences ripple out well beyond the actual victims.
Thousands of acres of farmland and entire neighborhoods of some cities are completely off limits.
Each victim is a strain on families already brought to the brink of famine by the worst drought in memory. Each maimed child will need a new artificial leg every six months.
At the Red Cross clinic, Abdul Jalal takes quiet consolation in providing comfort and hope to others who suffer like he did.
``The doctors are wonderful. Without them, I don't think I could have made it,'' says his prize patient of the day, a 25-year-old woman named Freba.
Freba lost both legs four months ago when she stepped out of her house to visit a neighbor. She has three daughters to take care of, in a valley where many of the children of healthy parents are already diagnosed as malnourished. Her life, and those of her children, will be hard.
But Abdul Jalal is pleased.
``I checked this morning. She can walk. Soon she will walk without crutches.''
Thursday October 18 11:23 AM ET
Elephant Hurt by Mine Not Recovering
By BUSABA SIVASOMBOON, Associated Press Writer
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - Two years after a land mine maimed a Thai elephant, veterinarians have still not been able to fit the wounded animal with a prosthetic foot.
Motola, a logging elephant, drew worldwide attention when she underwent two surgical operations in 1999 to amputate part of her left front foot, which had been shredded by a mine.
Prosthetic specialists teamed up with the veterinarians to design and prepare an artificial foot for Motola, who would have been the first elephant ever to use one.
But two years on, doctors say her wounded leg still has not totally healed and they cannot fit her with the prosthesis.
``This is much slower than our first expectations,'' Terdchai Cheevaket, a top bone surgeon from nearby Chiang Mai University and chief of the surgery team, said Thursday.
Terdchai said Motola still has a wound four inches in diameter where her foot was amputated, because the skin has stopped growing to cover the injured area. He said the 40-year-old elephant has refused to eat protein-rich food, such as beans, that would help the healing process.
The Hang Chat Elephant Hospital, where Motola has been staying, will try to improve the quality of Motola's diet, the doctor said. The hospital is in Lampang, 315 miles north of Bangkok.
Motola stepped on a land mine while she was looking for food near a logging camp in the border area between northern Thailand and Myanmar, also called Burma. Her owner had to make the stricken elephant take a three-day trek out of the jungle before she could be bundled onto a truck and taken to the hospital.
Terdchai said Motola's overall condition Thursday was stable and that she was in good spirits. She weighs about three tons compared to less than 2.7 tons right after her operations.
Her case brought attention to the plight of Thailand's working elephants, which number about 2,000, down from some 10,000 in the 1970s. Thais donated more than $125,000 for her treatment and to support the hospital; foreign donations also flowed in.
Monday October 01 09:09 PM EDT
Advanced Tissue Sciences Gets FDA Approval For Artificial Skin
La Jolla-based Advanced Tissue Sciences Inc. has gained federal marketing approval for its artificial skin, designed to treat diabetic foot ulcers.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) decision is the first of its kind -- Advanced Tissue Sciences is reputedly the first company to gain FDA approval for a tissue-engineered, living skin substitute that is human-based, mass-produced and freezable.
Advanced Tissue Sciences' president, Gail Naughton, said Monday the product has taken longer to reach the market than anticipated. Together with development partner Smith and Nephew PLC of Britain, the local tissue engineering company filed its first Premarket Approval Application in 1996. Questions from the FDA prompted more clinical trials, and the partners again applied for marketing approval in August 2000.
Patience is a virtue. The approval means a $5 million milestone payment for Advanced Tissue Sciences from Smith and Nephew. Monday's announcement also meant some admiring glances from Wall Street, which pushed Advanced Tissue Sciences' stock up 58 cents, or 16.34 percent, to $4.13 at a volume of more than a million shares. The company's stock has traded between $2.87 and $8 this year.
Diabetic foot ulcers present a broad market, officials at both companies say. The future annual sales of Dermagraft have been estimated at $50 million. Advanced Tissue Sciences officials say that of the 16 million diabetics in the United States, 15 percent will develop a diabetic foot ulcer in their lifetime. Diabetics can develop chronic, nonhealing wounds that eventually lead to foot or leg amputation. According to the American Diabetes Association, 85 percent of lower extremity amputations began as diabetic foot ulcers.
"This is an excellent product and will, we believe, become a significant therapy to help many diabetic patients with hard-to-heal foot ulcers," according to Smith and Nephew CEO Chris O'Donnell.
While Dermagraft has obvious benefits, the application process isn't pretty. A doctor must first clean out the ulcer, which means clearing the wound of dead and dying tissue, Advanced Tissue Sciences spokeswoman Julie Reynolds said. The size of the ulcer is traced, and then the Dermagraft is applied. The patient must go back to the doctor for treatment once a week for the next two to three months, and wear special pressure-reducing footwear.
Unlike some skin grafts, Dermagraft isn't made up of a patient's own skin. Instead, Dermagraft is derived from neonatal foreskin, Reynolds said. It's a useful byproduct -- one foreskin sample can produce six football fields worth of tissue, she said.
The results have been promising. After 12 weeks of treatment, Dermagraft plus conventional therapy achieves 100 percent wound closure, as compared to an 18-percent success rate with conventional therapy alone.
And because the Advanced Tissue Sciences product is shipped frozen, it reportedly has a shelf life of six months. By comparison, a similar treatment by Canton, Mass.-based Organogenesis Inc. called Apligraf has a shelf life of just five days. Apligraf is considered a "fresh" product and is derived from bovine collagen.
Other companies working on treatments for diabetic foot ulcers include Emeryville, Calif.-based Chiron Corp. and Philadelphia-based Ortho McNeil Pharmaceutical Inc., which have developed a gel that patients can administer themselves. The difference, Advanced Tissue Sciences officials say, is that the gel Regranex is a single-cell growth factor. Dermagraft contains a version of the same factor, as well as cells that produce human collagen, skin proteins and other growth factors.
Advanced Tissue Sciences' core technology is being used to develop a range of tissue growth products. The company's joint venture with Smith and Nephew also includes co-development of TransCyte, for the temporary covering of second-and third-degree burns, and future uses for venous ulcers, pressure ulcers, burns and other non-aesthetic wound care treatments. The companies are also developing tissue-engineered orthopedic cartilage, initially to repair cartilage in knee joints.
Additionally, the local company has a deal with Inamed Corp. for the development and marketing of several human-based, tissue-engineered products, such as collagen for aesthetic and reconstructive applications. Skincare, cosmetics and cardiovascular products are also on the horizon, Reynolds said
Tuesday October 23 12:03 AM ET
Agency Warns About Security Gates
By DAVID HO, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government issued a warning to consumers about the dangers of automatic security gates that can trap, injure and kill people - especially children.
Since 1985, 32 people have died from accidents related to the sliding or swinging gates, including 20 children, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (news - web sites) said Tuesday.
From 1990 to 2000, the agency estimated that nearly 25,000 people suffered injuries related to automatic gates, including 9,000 children younger than 15. The injuries included cuts, broken bones and amputations.
In 1993, 8-year-old Marlow Santos was playing tag when he climbed through the bars of a sliding gate near his Gardena, Calif. apartment building, said Michelle Talbert, the boy's aunt. Someone from down the street activated the gate, which trapped the boy's chest, stopping his heart. After 17 days in the hospital, he died.
Chicago-based Underwriters Laboratories, which provides safety certifications, adopted a standard last year that requires a sensing device that will reverse the gate if it hits an obstruction when opening or closing. The voluntary standard also requires a secondary sensing mechanism, such as an electric eye or an edge sensor that will reverse the gate if it detects something in the way.
Many older gates, however, do not have sensing devices or reversing mechanisms to prevent accidents, the safety commission said.
Ann Brown, the agency's chairwoman, said that if a building has an older gate, consumers should ask the property manager to have it replaced with a new model that meets the safety standard.
Tuesday October 23 11:03 PM ET
Rights Group Condemns Nigeria Ruling
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - An international human rights group Tuesday condemned the decision of an Islamic court in Nigeria which sentenced a pregnant woman to death by stoning for having premarital sex.
LaShawn Jefferson, an official with New York-based Human Rights Watch, called the ruling against Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu a cruel infringement of women's ``basic right to control their sexual autonomy.''
The decision was imposed by an Islamic court in Gwadabawa, in northern Nigeria's Sokoto state. Tungar-Tudu, who according tocourt officials is pregnant, has until Nov. 8 to appeal.
The court's ruling is to be reviewed by the state governor before a stoning date is set. Tungar-Tudu's alleged sex partner was acquitted by the same court. Human Rights Watch said the court decided it had insufficient evidence against the man.
``Women have a basic right to control their sexual autonomy,'' said Jefferson. ``When a woman is punished so severely for having premarital sex, her right to make free decisions regarding her body is violated.''
The ruling is believed to be the second time in Nigeria that an Islamic court has sentenced someone to death by stoning. The first case last month involved a 35 year-old-man accused of sodomizing a seven-year-old boy. The man has appealed the ruling and remains in custody.
Last year, an Islamic court sentenced a teen-age girl to 180 lashes with a cane for premarital sex. The sentence was later reduced to 100 lashes, which were administered last January.
Islamic courts have also ordered the amputation of hands of several convicted thieves.
Thousands have been killed in religious fighting since a dozen predominantly Muslim northern states began imposing Shari'ah, or Islamic law, last year. Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, with 120 million people divided into an overwhelmingly Muslim north and mostly Christian south, frequently suffers violent religious, ethnic and regional disputes.
Friday October 26 08:36 PM EDT
Who She Took With Her
By Nancy Rommelmann LA Weekly Writer
ON DECEMBER 12, 1948, NANCY Schorn was born into privilege. Her father was the chief financial officer of the plumbing conglomerate American Standard, and her mother was active in charitable work. The family lived on a five-acre estate on Long Island's North Shore, in Cold Spring Harbor, a town not unlike Daisy Buchanan's West Egg: Nancy was a member of three yacht and country clubs, and, like Daisy, was considered by one admirer to have been "the most beautiful person I had ever seen . . . she had almost an aristocratic air of confidence and elegance." She attended the college-preparatory Westover School for Girls, and later enrolled at Boston University, where she met and married an MIT engineering student who would go on to an esteemed career at USC. She lived in Europe. She had a son. Upon her parents' deaths, she inherited a great deal of money.
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On December 29, 2000, Nancy was sleeping adjacent to a parking lot near the Santa Monica Pier, where she was run over by a first-time driver who claimed she swerved to miss a cat. Nancy suffered a compound fracture of the right leg, a crushed skull and the loss of an eye.
Nancy was sleeping by the beach because she's homeless, and she's homeless because she's a chronic alcoholic. For the better part of 20 years, she's been one of Santa Monica's indigent population, one of the thousands of panhandlers you might pass by and think, What a dirtbag or, if you are feeling charitable, There but for the grace of God. While even the ungenerous among us understand that people wind up on the streets for myriad reasons, we do tend to distinguish them, perhaps in a bid at self-protection, as organically different from ourselves. The filth, the aimlessness, allow us to objectify them as "other" at best, disposable at worst.
To most passersby, Nancy is little more than a fleeting sidewalk annoyance -- toss her a quarter and forget about her. But what about those who don't have the luxury of forgetting? Those who live with an intimate awareness of her past as well as her present? Those who tried to save her from herself, and who were abandoned by her? The pain Nancy has visited upon herself is exceeded, perhaps, by what she's visited upon others.
"YOU DON'T HAVE A FEW BUCKS ON YOU, DO YOU?" Accepting a cigarette instead, Nancy tears off the filter while taking the summer sun in the concrete courtyard of Harbor Convalescent Hospital. At 100 pounds, she's a tiny thing, swimming in the only clothes she has, a pair of cut-off sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt with flowers on it. Seven months after the accident, she's still in a wheelchair, her leg immobilized by an external fixator, the bones held in place by steel pins driven directly into her shin and thigh. Through her lank gray hair, one can see a road map of stitches.
"My scalp is like the Rocky Mountains." She cackles lightly, her voice scorched with nicotine. "My cheekbones are supposed to be parallel. I don't really have much of a mouth left. I lost teeth."
Nancy's remaining eye, an intense ice-blue, is engaged and animated. When asked about the damaged eye, she lifts the black patch. It's a puckered hole.
"It's dead, there's nothing they can do about it," she says dismissively, waving her hand. "I don't need very much. The treatment for [the leg] is dumping hydrogen peroxide on it, that's it. I get a minimal amount of painkillers here, Tylenol 3s. Not enough." Nancy draws deeply on her cigarette, and her eye takes on the mischievous cast of a little girl who knows she's asking for something naughty. "What I want is Percocet."
What she really wants is a drink, preferably E&J brandy. "I drank for about two weeks here in the hospital. It was easy. Just ask someone, 'Are you going to the store?'" She cackles again. "But I got caught, and threatened with being outed, outsky, out, out, hmm. So I quit. Now I got about 54 days."
A spooky ululation comes from a corner room. Nancy shakes her head.
"That woman right there will make that sound if anyone touches her. She doesn't speak; she's fed through a tube. She's been here six years." Nancy glances at the only other people in the courtyard, two young men in wheelchairs, one with all his toes amputated, the other attached to a portable dialysis machine and a Walkman, which he listens to with his eyes closed. "The company here is bad. I have two roommates. One is Alzheimer's, and the other is a Mongoloid. It's impossible to communicate with them. It's hell."
While a place to sleep and regular meals in a fairly nice facility paid for by Medi-Cal might seem utopian compared to the streets, to Nancy, hell is being cooped up.
"I got used to living outside," she says with a shrug. "They say if you don't get your butt off the street in a year, it starts getting to you. It's true. I decided to do it for one more year, then one more year. You don't want to leave; you don't want to be under any restrictions; you're used to not having any bills to pay, and no real responsibilities. The weather of course you learn to deal with, and food and all that isn't a real problem unless you make it one. Clothing's easy. All that basic survival stuff is no big deal. The real problem is money, always money."
Something Nancy, before the age of 30, never had to trouble herself with. She married Michael Safonov in 1968, and was supported by him throughout his tenure in the Navy, during which time Nancy, and later their newborn son, traveled with him, until one day in 1975.
"We moved back to Jacksonville, where Mike was stationed, and it's weird, because that's when I started drinking," says Nancy, picking tobacco off her tongue and, since she has few remaining teeth, giving the lopsided grin of a stroke victim. "We had a garage apartment behind a house that was occupied by four or five different guys, and they were always drinking and partying and stuff, and here I am with a baby, and I said, 'Damn, it looks like they're having a lot of fun.' So I hired a baby sitter one day and bought a six-pack of Budweiser. Took me all day to drink it. And when I woke up the next morning I didn't have a hangover or nothing, but I decided beer wasn't very ladylike, so I bought a bottle of white wine, and drank half of it that night. Still no hangover. By the end of the month I was drinking a lot. Before then, I had drunk nothing to speak of. I was the kind of person who would hold a drink. Mike said, 'I didn't know you liked to drink so much.' He didn't say anything more than that. Then I got into hard liquor."
Mike accepted a teaching post at USC, and the family moved to Los Angeles. "We rented a house in Mar Vista, and then we bought it. We stayed there two or three years. I had gotten alcohol poisoning a couple of times. My husband put me in the hospital twice, and when the second hospitalization didn't take, he told me, 'I don't feel I have any other choice but to file for formal separation,' which in California is nine months, 'and if you haven't cleaned up your act and stuff, then we'll be divorced.' And that's what happened. Did I try to fight the divorce? Sort of, but I never stopped drinking, so it was hopeless. My mom had passed away, so I had enough money and assets and stuff like that, so it didn't faze me. I figured, I've got money, I've got a VW bus, I've got a boat, I've got everything that I need -- 'I can drink in peace' kind of thinking." She grins the lopsided grin. "That's as debauched as I was."
She got an apartment in Santa Monica, and began several years of steady drinking.
"I'm not what you call a social drinker. I didn't really have any friends. It would never occur to me to go to a bar and spend money on drink after drink after drink, when I could go buy a bottle and go somewhere and that's that. I drank at home. And . . . it just gave me a relief. Relief. I was a lot more relaxed, and happier. The hangovers were bad, though, very bad. I made the money last two years, and then I started to sell things. First the jewelry, then the silverware, the boat, the VW bus. It was scary, seeing all this stuff go, but I just couldn't deal with it. Then I started stealing. Stealing booze. I got evicted. I picked up a really bad boyfriend -- he was on PCP. We wound up living in his car. I was really badly beaten [by him], and one morning I decided, 'I'm not coming back to this car,' so I just kept walking away. Walking, walking, walking, through the alleys; some guy gave me five bucks, he was out gardening. Then the cops picked me up. I had no shoes, no ID, no money, and I'm drinking. And I was sitting on the storm drain across from the house I used to own in Mar Vista."
The police picked her up and sent her to Camarillo State Hospital. "I was penniless at this point, and my husband was on sabbatical in England. He met a woman over there, a divorcée with two kids, and they got married and had another child. My son was about 7 at the time. It was . . . okay. I knew I wasn't really able to . . . I didn't really want him. I didn't want to be a full-time mom, so I didn't see him very much. And I disrespected the fact that [Mike] remarried, and they had a child together. I didn't feel comfortable at all about trying to call or anything. It just seemed the more appropriate way, you know. I needed to be on my own two feet, anyway."
Nancy's third trip through rehab was the charm. For nine years, she stayed sober, kept an apartment, began sporadic contact with her son, and had a series of low-paying jobs, the last of which was at a flower shop.
"And then one night, I was waiting to close up the flower shop. I was looking through a magazine, and there was a full-page ad for Martini & Rossi vermouth, and I thought, 'I'm gettin' some.'" She decapitates another cigarette. "I bought a half a bottle, and the next night I bought a full bottle. Finally, the manager gave me a leave of absence to sober up, and that didn't work, and that was that."
P.O.V.: THE HUSBAND
"I HAD NO IDEA WHERE SHE WAS UNTIL I HEARD from her social worker," says Nancy's former husband, Michael Safonov, a professor of electrical engineering at USC. His office is on the third floor of the Hughes Aircraft Building of Electrical Engineering, a stark warren whose walls are affixed with Dilbert and Gary Larson cartoons. Michael is a tall, soft-spoken man who emits patience; when discussing Nancy, whom he visited on Mother's Day, his chest caves.
"It was the first time I'd seen her in many years," he says. "It was really a shock to see, not only the injuries, but also other things that have transpired in between. She looks as bad as I could imagine."
He laughs lightly, almost apologetically. "She was ä living on the edge all the time. I realize that . . . I understand that I can't help her, you know. She can be helped, but she won't. She defies help."
Asked when he first met Nancy, Michael is silent for a very long time. When he does speak, it's as though a wound he's been stanching for many years has hemorrhaged.
"I was just 17 years old when I met Nancy, and she was, too. I thought she was wonderful. She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. You wouldn't believe from [seeing] the person she is now how beautiful she was then . . . She had led an incredibly privileged life. I was raised in Pacific Palisades, so I knew a lot of people who were well-off, but Nancy had that sort of New York, Eastern panache about her. I wasn't interested in the fact that she was wealthy at all, but I was very impressed with the way she carried herself, she was quite elegant. And so, it became my obsession to make her my girlfriend."
He clears his throat, and continues in a tone both sad and astonished. "All the time she was at B.U., projecting an air of confidence, it turned out that she wasn't doing anything in school. She was turning in no homework assignments, skipping classes. We were staying up all night, you know, just to be together, and then I would work all day on my homework and she'd go home and sleep."
He laughs lightly again. "She flunked out at the end of the first year, which was a total surprise to me, because I had no idea, you know? Within a year after that, we married, over the objections of her father, who was always trying to prevent it. I think he probably felt, you know, that I wasn't aristocratic enough for his daughter. To him, it was very important that somebody should come from a family with money. He didn't see that in a kid on a scholarship at MIT, which was what I was, so he fought it all the way.
"In Boston, Nancy worked as an office assistant at various places, and eventually she got a job as a secretary at MIT, in the biology department, working with a Nobel laureate and a Nobel laureate-to-be -- Salvador Luria and David Baltimore, who is now the president of Caltech -- so she had some interesting company in those days. But it was the time of the Vietnam War, and they were very radical over there, especially in the biology department. Over in the electrical-engineering side of the university, where I worked, people didn't worry so much about those kinds of things -- they were more concerned with research and mathematics and things like that -- so it began to build a little bit of tension between us. I didn't feel that way about the war. I felt sort of neutral. And when it came time and I got a very low draft number, I didn't run away to Canada, I didn't declare myself a conscientious objector, I signed up to join the Navy as an officer, so that was kind of a blow to Nancy. She stuck by me; she traveled around the Mediterranean while I was on an aircraft carrier there. Then our son, Alex, was born, and she traveled around Europe to be with me, but she had a seething anger about the Navy. It became a crutch, a focal point, a 'You're away from me and I hate you for that,' and she began drinking to help ease the pain when we were separated.
"She made up her mind, she just wasn't going to travel around anymore. She was going to stay in Jacksonville, where I'd been stationed. And apparently she began drinking because she got courage, it made it easy for her to go out and meet people."
Michael looks out his office window for a bit. "Anyway, she met people, and she took a number of lovers and so forth when I was away. This was the '70s, free-love time, sort of these utopian ideas. Instinctively it didn't feel right, but somehow you're supposed to do that, because it's modern times or something, or seems like it, so I didn't make that much of a fuss about it. But she got involved with the most awful people, people in motorcycle gangs and . . . She was caring for our infant son, who while she was off doing things was on his own, and he shouldn't have been. He was quite neglected, I'm afraid, while I was off at sea."
He pauses, and when he begins speaking again, does not stop for 40 minutes.
"Anyway, I didn't want to see my marriage wrecked, so we got back together again. I had two more years at MIT to finish my Ph.D., so we moved up to Boston, into university campus housing for married students. It was a nice little apartment complex with a playground in the middle for the small children. It should have been really a good place for us to be at the time, but at that point it became clear that she was really having a problem drinking. She would drink almost a bottle of liquor a day. Usually hiding it, you know, because we didn't have that much money and the expense would be obvious. She would sell things, my books and silverware and stuff like that, hoping I wouldn't notice, and she'd buy herself alcohol. I gather that our son was . . . somewhat neglected. At one point some social workers came around and complained that he'd been left outside in the icy weather without a jacket and so forth. Our son spent some time at a preschool, and they noticed that he was a bit slow learning to speak. I suspect it's because he was left alone so much of the time, he just didn't have anyone to talk to, because he was always locked in his room. Well, not locked in, there was a door open, but he was off by himself most of the time.
"By the way, Nancy's father was an alcoholic in a sense. Not a debilitative alcoholic, he just couldn't keep away from drinking in the evening; if he didn't drink, he just became unbearable, nervous and angry. So he was always drinking, but he was always under control, too. In most respects, Nancy was a functioning alcoholic at that point, too, except she didn't have any function to do. She stayed at home, she didn't have to work, she was supported.
"Anyway, when we came to California, over the next few years things really began deteriorating rapidly. She would just consume enormous amounts of alcohol. There would be times I would come home and I'd find her, it was like she had died or something, she couldn't move, or be awakened. It was really scary at times. Then she'd get into this routine where every day she would sleep until noon, then she would drink again and become really euphoric by late afternoon, and then a couple of hours later she'd become an angry tyrant, screaming and throwing things. That would persist well into the night, probably until 2 or 3 in the morning; I wouldn't be allowed to sleep. She would always be attacking me, throwing plates and knives, you name it, anything she could get her hands on. I'd finally give up and pack it in and go rent a motel room just so I could sleep.
"Eventually, it became clear something had to be done, and I wasn't sure what, but I got myself an apartment and moved out. I guess it was about that point she agreed to go into treatment. She spent a month in a hospital in Marina del Rey; they dried her out and counseled her and so forth. I saw her every day. But she began drinking as soon as she got out. She was hiding it. I'd come into the house and she'd have a tin of soup or something, and the bottom had been taken out, and underneath there was a glass of something. She'd be drinking all the time, but pretending she wasn't.
"After we finally split and divorced, she almost immediately remarried an old man who was living in Santa Monica. This old man, who was obviously very poor, managed to persuade her that he was actually very rich and he was going to buy her a Mercedes and take her all kinds of places, when the reality was he was some kind of retired bricklayer on welfare or something. But she married him, and they lived together for quite a long time, and then she drove him off, I guess with her alcoholism, until he left her with his welfare apartment right there in Santa Monica.
"She seemed to remain sober for some time after that. She got herself a job. She worked at a juice place in Santa Monica, where they served fresh-squeezed juices. I saw her there once. Her teeth were deteriorating -- they were really discolored, and she really should have done something about it. I tried to persuade her she should, but she wouldn't."
He pauses, visibly discomfited by the next memory.
"Anyway, I remember she lost her job -- maybe they thought she was pilfering money from the cash register, that's what she said -- but eventually she found another job, in a flower place. And then she fell off the wagon again."
Which was over seven years ago, during which time Michael did not see her.
"Somebody called me several years back and said that she'd been living on the beach, so I'd heard she'd fallen back into the worst state she'd been in some time. It didn't really surprise me that something awful would happen. I had this feeling that something like this would happen to her."
After receiving the phone call from her social worker, Michael visited Nancy at Harbor Convalescent.
"She was very proud of me when I went to visit her, you know, she obviously had been waiting for me, and our son, Alex. She immediately began introducing us to everybody in the hospital -- you know, she was just beaming with joy. 'See, I'm not really like this,' is what she was saying to all the people. 'See, here's my beautiful son and ex-husband who's successful.' I'm sure all the people in the hospital just thought she was telling them stories when she told them about us, so [us being there] was kind of a way of proving that what they saw wasn't all of her. I'm sure that's what she was saying to them, because I'm sure part of her wishes that she still was the person she was before. It's not just us, it's her whole past, her parents, her family upbringing. It's just . . . she's gone so far since then.
"You know, when she was a kid, her home sat on five acres, surrounded by woods, you couldn't see the next house, it was just . . . To me, I had no interest in that, I was just glad when she managed to run away. Her parents wanted to cut her off. But I thought, I can look after her, she's mine. I felt guilty taking her away from that, in a way, at first, and I wished I could have made up for it . . . [But] she's never been one to assume responsibility herself. When I first knew her, she had very high standards for everybody else. One of the things I found especially fascinating, why I thought she would be good for me, was because she seemed to have such high standards. I had this feeling that she was going to drive me to do great things, you know? But she wasn't doing anything herself. She never had self-discipline, she never did assume responsibility for her own actions, not ever. Strange, isn't it? As long as we were together, she knew how people ought to do things, and knew the right thing to do, but she couldn't manage anything herself.
"I would have done anything if I could have somehow made it possible to restore her in some way, that she would be possible to live with. We were together 13 years, though we only ever had two glorious ones. The rest were all downhill. I stuck with her for 10 years, trying to put it together some way, desperately hoping against all odds that somehow I could do something. In the end, I only left because I realized I was part of the problem, that by supporting her the way I was that she was getting worse.
"For years after, even after I remarried, I felt really bad that I couldn't do something. I felt guilty about the fact that she had become the way she was. She blamed me, too. She always insisted she was an alcoholic because I joined the Navy."
When Michael stops speaking, one gets the impression he has held this story in for 20 years, and now that it's been told, he will not speak of it again. When asked how Alex has dealt with Nancy all these years, his answer is economical:
"Our son has done so much to isolate himself against his mother, because she's caused him so much pain and angst."
P.O.V.: THE SON
"IT'S KIND OF INTERESTING THAT YOU SHOULD BE asking these questions, or someone is. No one really has," says Alex Safonov. "No one really knows how to deal with it."
Nancy's son, Alex, is 27 years old. Tall and painfully thin, he wears skate-rat/prep attire, a baggy plaid shirt and khakis. He left USC six units shy of getting his architectural degree, and works in commercial animation and experimental video. Drinking a beer in the bar beneath the mid-Wilshire hotel/apartment where he lives, he appears wary, leaning so far back in the dimly lit booth it's as though he's trying to disappear into it.
"So, what was it like growing up with her? I don't know, it was kind of a nightmare a lot of the time. It really gets me all wound up, actually, thinking about it. So, I don't know, whatever. I remember things like, I never really had the cool lunch at school like other kids, no Capri Sun and fruit roll-ups, just like an apple and a cheese sandwich. I remember some kid I used to play with, his mom asking me, 'So, when was the last time you had a bath?' At that time, I didn't care, I'd go, 'Uhm, I don't know, a week or something.' And I remember that the house was always kind of . . . not nice. It was not a nice house. My bedroom was like a mattress and some Legos over on the side."
Alex stares at his hands holding the bottle of beer. "I think the best memories I have of hanging out with my mom is, in the mornings, we'd go for walks on the beach, and that was nice. My dad would be out of town a lot, and he'd leave me alone with her. I was always so glad when he got back; it was always good to see him when he got back. So when they split up [and Alex lived with him], I was more or less happy about that. I remember I used to go hang out at her house on weekends, and that was kind of lame, because her shitty boyfriend would always be there. There was the old guy -- he was just an old fart, I wondered why my mom married him. He was pretty benign, but the others were really animals. I couldn't even believe where she found them, they were lousy motherfuckers, man. I think at some point, eighth or ninth grade, I just said to her, 'Fuck it, I'm not talking to you anymore.'
"Maybe it wasn't the nicest thing for me to do, whatever; kids don't always know how to be nice, but I saw the way she was living and I just got disgusted with her. I was like, 'How can you live like this?' Maybe she was working at Orange Julius and living in a halfway house or something, and her clothes were all secondhand. I wanted her to be kind of normal, and she wasn't; she was just like a total recovering fuckup, and I didn't really have any pity for it. It was embarrassing. I remember she wanted to take me to see movies on weekends, so we were in Westwood, and we saw a bunch of my friends from school, I mean, I just got so embarrassed, and I told her about it. I said, 'Aw, Mom, it's kind of embarrassing, the way you dress and stuff,' and she got really offended and she stomped off. And I was kind of relieved, almost. I felt a little bad, but then I was like, well, it's the truth; she's a weirdo and it's embarrassing. And she went one way and I went the other, and I was like, cool.
"I actually did live with her for a while when I was 17. I was fighting with my dad a lot, so I went and moved in with her. My mom was sober then; when she's sober, she's a real nice person. That was the summer before I went to school at USC. I stayed in touch with her pretty much all the way through school, until she fell off the wagon, which was about fall of '94.
"I was driving around with her when it happened. She had a job at the time, working at this flower shop, and we're driving in the flower truck, and she stopped at the liquor store, and I was like, what? And she went in and got some booze, and I just . . . I didn't know what to say. I was kind of winded . . . I remember being kind of sickened by it, but things hadn't really gotten that bad for her, at that point. She still had a job and residence and everything. The thing is, though, she'd inherited a lot of money, and that's basically what pushed her off the edge, because she didn't have to work. So, when she didn't have to work, I guess she just figured, fuck it.
"When she inherited the money, she said to me, 'You know what? I want you to have it all, because I have a lot of creditors that would be after it.' I said, 'Well, okay.' My dad thought it was a bad idea, but he didn't really tell me exactly how bad an idea. So, I just gave [money] to her whenever she wanted some, but she just kept asking for more and more, and she was drunk all that time. I was on Venice Beach one time, and she came up and asked me for change. I was by myself, and I was like . . . I didn't know what to say to her, man. I said I couldn't really help her. She asked me what happened to all her money, and I told her I'd given it to her, that she'd had it, and it's gone. And she just ran away horrified, and I was horrified, and I ran away, too.
"For a while, I thought, maybe I can try to help her, you know. I'd help her get into a rehab thing, and she'd just check herself out, and I was like, this is making me sick, too. She hung out with such creeps, man, goddamn, fuck. They were mostly drinkers, I think, they just were such roustabout lousy motherfuckers. One night, when I was all jacked up on speed, me and my compadre, he was a much bigger guy than I was, called my mom's house while she was still in rehab, and I said to this guy that was staying there, 'Oh, hey, dude, why don't you be at my mom's apartment at such-and-such a time, because we're bringing her home and we want to make sure someone's there.' But we weren't bringing her home, we just wanted to go kick his ass. He was asleep. I just straight walked in, kicked him, and said, 'Get the fuck out. Give me your keys and get the fuck out,' you know? I'm sure it scared the crap out of him, and it was very satisfying to me; I was maybe 21. He split, but when she got out, she just let him back in anyway.
"Actually, during that whole time, I was really into amphetamines. I finally quit it around fall of '97. It was driving me crazy, the whole scene was driving me crazy. I said, fuck her, fuck speed, fuck everything, and I just started taking care of my life. We were kind of doing the exact same spiral. She went way further than I did, but it was very similar."
Alex orders another beer, and moves to a well-lit table, where his voice rises.
"The day I find out about her [accident], I hadn't spoken to her for a while. I was pissed off when I first heard about it. When my dad first called me, I was like, god damn her, what the fuck! Now this fucking fuckup has to go ahead and do this, has to get run over by a car? I got so pissed off, I almost said no, I'm not going, I'm not going to go see that fuckup. But I did. We went and visited her, which was . . . pretty horrible. I hadn't seen her for a while, and when I see her she's missing an eye and most of her teeth, and she has this bandage on her head. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ. It's like my dad said, she looked like she was 80 years old, and she's only 52.
"After my dad dropped me off [at home], I just had . . . I kind of had this panic attack, this whole thing threw me off, and it felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest, oh my god, what the fuck, the whole thing just horrified me. I don't see how she can go any lower than this. I'd like to think that at some point I'd be making enough money that I could at least give her some. I'd like to be able to help her, like a good son should. A lot of people have to take care of their parents. They may not when they're as young as she is, so maybe I just have to start a little earlier than some kids should. I mean, she's a fuckup, but at this point she's so old that she's just such a mess. Who else is going to help her but her family? I think that partly she got the way she was, maybe she didn't have enough family to help her, I don't know.
"I sort of know I come first. If she wants to die, fine -- I gotta live. That's why I said to hell with her before. Honestly, I hate to say this, this is a shitty thought, but I think she'd be better off dead. Honestly. I mean, I thought, why couldn't the accident have just killed her? Fuck, man. Why must she hang herself around my neck like this, like some kind of albatross? It's a drain. Parents shouldn't be there to drag you down, they should be taking care of themselves. You can fuck yourself up, but don't make other people take care of you.
"And my dad . . . he never really gave me any good advice about how to deal with her, either. He knew what she was like, that's the thing that kind of pisses me off sometimes. When she fell off the wagon the second time, around fall '94, he just didn't warn me, he didn't say, 'Look, it's not worth your time,' or 'You oughta step back, don't get involved with it.' He didn't say shit to me! He knew, though, because he had gone through the same thing, but he didn't tell me anything. That fucker. I'm pissed at both of them. I mean, he's such a cold fish; he's a fucking robot, that's how he can be so good at what he does. He only hears the voice of the equation, not a million voices like a lot of other people. Fine. He's very well-respected for what he does, like the Chinese have translated his texts so that they can study from them. He's damn good, yeah. But he didn't protect me. No, he didn't, he did not! He left me so open to that, this monster. He just, fuck, man, fuck . . . He wonders why I am the way I am, why I went fucking nuts when I was 17, like it's, 'Oh, it's a mystery.' He just doesn't, ahhh, whatever . . . if he doesn't see, he doesn't see. It's all water under the bridge.
"People ask about my mom sometimes. I say, 'She's nuts, I don't talk to her anymore.' I keep it brief, or else it invites a lot of questions I don't want to . . . I don't know. It's just not fun to talk about. You're the only person who really has even got this close to the situation, so maybe you can understand, but no one else does. No one in my family ever asked."
NANCY AND MACK
"THEY'RE FOR MACK," NANCY SAYS OF THE TWO HAM sandwiches and container of cottage cheese she holds in her lap during a drive in early July to Rancho Los Amigos, where her boyfriend has been receiving care for the past six months. Mack was sleeping next to her on the night of the accident, and was paralyzed from the chest down.
"I met him on Thanksgiving Day. There was a group of us gathered in what we call Cactus Park, near the pier. We were waiting for people to bring turkeys and things. He winked at me, is what happened, and that was that, I just forgot about everybody else. We were together one year, one month and a couple of days before it happened. Except when he was in jail. He likes crack cocaine, which will land him in jail occasionally.
"We were pretty much dedicated to each other. We kept, you know, a routine. Somebody would always watch the bedding and clothing, while the other one went out and did something or other to get money. I did most of the panhandling. He didn't like to do it; I put up with that. I averaged about $20 or $30. Sometimes I was in the mood, sometimes it was drudgery."
As for the smashup that separated them, Nancy is fatalistic.
"The accident was so freaky. It could have happened to anybody. More than Mack and I had used that slab to sleep. It's a concrete porch in front of a city-owned utility building that has to do with monitoring the chlorine that's sent into the sewage pipe that goes down to the Hyperion plant. There was a concrete porch about this high, and the car came from the north, I guess. She had to drive the car onto the concrete. It hit the wall of the building, and in the process of doing all that, she ran over my leg, which made my body go up, and my head connected with her bumper. I knew I went blind instantly, I knew it. I called out to Mack, I said, 'I'm blind!'"
Nancy wheels herself around the spinal-cord injury ward, looking for Mack. He's not in his room, nor in Occupational Therapy, where a young quadriplegic on a respirator is having his hand squeezed into a ball over and over by a nurse.
"My goal is to look for a place where Mack and I can live under the same roof. I'm not talking about the same convalescent home, but a place where we can make it possible for him. I mean, he's a quadriplegic, he needs incredible care. You have any idea what that entails? He can eat, but he has to have a suppository twice a day. He has to have what is called range of motion, he has to be exercised. He has to be turned. He has to have a Heparin shot, which is a blood thinner, to prevent blood clots. All kinds of different things. He's a diabetic, he has to keep checking his blood sugar. It's complicated. The state will help with a nurse up to a certain number of hours, and the rest will be up to me. Ideally, I'd like to be able to find somebody who has a guesthouse. An arrangement is what I'm looking for."
Nancy finally runs into Mack in the hallway.
"Hi, Mack," she says, coyly lifting her eye patch.
"Where you been?" asks Mack, a very handsome black man who, were he able to stand, looks to be a good deal over 6 feet. Their respective wheelchairs make an embrace impossible; Nancy reaches out her hand, but does not quite touch him.
They go to the cafeteria, where Mack asks a visitor to position an elastic band around his left hand, in which she's instructed to stick a plastic fork.
"This is how I eat," he says, as a visitor lifts the lid on his lunch tray; a steamy gravy aroma rises from the chicken leg and canned peas. He eats peas, bits of which stick to his cheeks, as he half-listens to the plans Nancy has.
"I'm hoping someone might have a guesthouse on their property that we could wheelchair-accommodate," Nancy says, "and we could live like that, without having any interference from the rules and regulations of HUD, ä which say you have to be married" -- she is misinformed on this -- "which even though, I mean, they'll come out and perform that, but . . ."
"I'm fixing out to a nursing home, trying to get closer to where my sisters at, that's Fontana," says Mack. "My social worker trying to get me as close as I can to them."
Hearing this, Nancy deflates. "I'm gonna go out and have a cigarette," she says, wheeling past the young man from O.T., who is being fed lemonade through a straw.
Mack's life story, which he tells in exhaustive detail, is laden with bad decisions: knocking out the windows of downtown L.A. department stores before the age of 10; burglary and car theft; two-thirds of his 55 years spent behind bars in juvenile halls, Soledad, Jamestown, Paso Robles, Folsom; and a 30-year relationship with crack cocaine, which he does not consider a factor in his misfortune.
"I was going to jail way before I knew about cocaine. It hadn't had nothing to do with me, 'cause see, I never have been busted for drugs in my life."
He asks a visitor to butter his bread, and then does not eat it.
Age 4, on the beach with her father
"They got me for running on parole, 'cause I would not come up there and [drug] test -- I stayed dirty a lot. Last time I got discharged, I caught the bus and went to Santa Monica. I met Nancy on the beach. She say I blinked at her," he says, watching Nancy wheel back in. "But I didn't like that beach. At first I used to say to Nancy, 'I don't know how you can do it, I got to get the hell away from here.' It was too cold, rain. But she tough, she's been out on the streets. She goes out and do her thing, getting the money every day. I mostly be sitting. That was basically it. She'd bring the food to me. Nancy's good at panhandling. She wasn't ashamed of what she was doing."
He looks at Nancy, looking at him. "She can get them people with that look, I guess they was feeling sorry for her."
Nancy exhales a mirthless "heh heh" and shrinks in her chair.
Nancy and Mack go back to his room, where the TV is already on. An occupational therapist comes in and applies a hot pack to Mack's shoulder.
"That feel good, this here," says Mack. "Since I been injured, I try to deal with it. I don't even really think about it. I try to take care of my needs." Mack closes his eyes as the O.T. manipulates his right arm across his chest. "Mmm, that's a good stretch when you come this way, all up in the socket. Feel them tingles. Oh, I passed some gas."
Nancy and Mack sit in silence for 10 minutes, watching TV until it's time for Mack to go lift weights. Nancy says goodbye to Mack; again, they do not touch.
Nancy is depressed during the drive back.
"He's never gonna walk. That would be a true miracle if he regained that ability, but I doubt it. And all this talk about his sisters, and wanting to be more where they live, which is more toward San Bernardino. I want to go back to Santa Monica."
She stares out the window.
"What I want to avoid is being stuck in a board-and-care where you have people who are in la-la land. You've seen people who just rock back and forth from the Thorazine and other medications, or they sit there and they kind of have a dead, glazed look? I don't want to be in that kind of situation, or where people are talking to themselves, or where they get violent and act out, things like that, uh-uh. That's one of my options, or maybe a sober-living situation, which would mean of course sobriety. It might mean not being able to go back to Santa Monica. I really just don't know. Ideally, I'd like to go back there, sure I would. And so does everybody else."
DUANE BARTSCH, A LAWYER, IS SUING the city of Santa Monica for $1 million on Nancy's behalf, claiming the parking lot should have been closed; the case has yet to be heard. Mack has been moved to a nursing facility in Claremont, where he recently underwent the amputation of his lower leg. Nancy is still a resident of Harbor Convalescent Hospital, and is trying to decide whether to be transferred to a board-and-care or wait for a Section 8 apartment or go back to the streets. She's been taking Access Paratransit once a week to Santa Monica, to panhandle.
"It's good, though not nearly as good as when I was in the brace and wheelchair," she says, the fixator having been removed several months ago. "I used to force myself to stay out and make $20 a day. Now, I'm getting about $10. It just depends on Lady Luck."
Has she been drinking?
"Noooooo."
Does she want to?
"Now and then, I want to."
Does she think it will be hard to keep from drinking, should she wind up back on the streets?
"It'll probably be harder not to, yeah," she says. "But I could live there, if I have to. I'd have to go to Sears and get a sleeping bag and everything. All I know is, I could live there. I know how to stay out of trouble." She laughs the scorched laugh. "And I also know how to get into it."
Monday October 29 11:07 AM ET
Supreme Court Won't Review Violent Video Game Law
By James Vicini
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) on Monday let stand a ruling that blocked enforcement of a law that required a parent's consent for a child to play violent video games in arcades or other commercial locations.
The high court rejected an appeal by Indianapolis defending its law, adopted on July 10, 2000 and aimed at video games that depict ``graphic violence'' or ``strong sexual content'' and that are deemed ``harmful to minors.''
The case confronted the justices with the issue of whether free-speech protections under the First Amendment extended to violent video games and children. The free-speech challenge only covered violent video games, not sexually explicit ones.
The Supreme Court, without any comment or dissent, denied the city's appeal seeking to reinstate the law designed to shield minors from inappropriate, offensive influences and to reduce juvenile crime.
Indianapolis said the city had been influenced by scientific evidence showing a link between children's violent behavior and their exposure to violent video games.
Under the law, when a child wanted to play regulated video games in coin-operated amusement machines, a parent may either grant a blanket consent for the day or remain nearby as the child plays the games.
The law required regulated video games be separated from other games, and that signs be displayed stating a parent's consent must be obtained to play. The law only applied to video games that a commercial business offered to those under 18.
LAW COVERS AMPUTATION, BLOODSHED, MAIMING
Graphic violence was defined as depicting ``realistic serious injury to a human or human-like being,'' including ''amputation, decapitation, dismemberment, bloodshed, mutilation, maiming'' or disfigurement.
The law provided for monetary penalties and the suspension and revocation of the right to operate the machines as punishments for violators.
Various trade organizations and individual companies in the video-game industry sued, claiming children have a First Amendment right to play the games and that the law violated the right to freedom of expression.
A federal judge ruled the law had been carefully tailored to address the potential harm to children without infringing upon First Amendment rights. But a U.S. appeals court in Chicago disagreed and ordered that a preliminary injunction be granted blocking the law's enforcement.
The appeals court concluded the existing scientific evidence that violent video games pose a risk of harm to minors was insufficient to provide a compelling government interest.
In going to the Supreme Court, Indianapolis argued the appeals court decision ``held that a seven-year-old boy has a constitutional right to play hard-core, graphically violent, video games in an arcade without his parents' consent.''
In its appeal, the city said the Supreme Court should resolve the confusion over the government's power to limit children's access to the video games.
Indianapolis said the case raised issues of ``recurring and of considerable public importance.'' It cited dozens of similar laws under consideration across the country.
The video-game industry replied that the appeal should be rejected. Their lawyers said video-game content, like that of books and movies, deserved First Amendment protection. They called the law ``content-based censorship.''
Tuesday October 16 3:51 AM ET
Snow Forces Disabled U.S. Climber From Everest
KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A U.S. mountaineer who lost his lower legs in a flying accident was forced to turn back just short ofthe summit of the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest (news - web sites), because of bad weather.
Ed Hommer, a 45-year-old pilot from Minnesota who returned to Kathmandu on Monday, told Reuters he and his six-member team were defeated by heavy snow and fiercely strong winds on the north side of the 29,035 foot mountain.
Hommer, the first double amputee to try to scale Everest from the Tibetan side, said he was ``pretty disappointed'' at not getting to the top of the mountain.
``It was disappointing and frustrating to get so close and not get all the way up because of bad weather,'' Hommer said.
Hommer, who lost his lower legs in 1981, said he had a problem with one of his legs during the climb. Scar tissue at the residual end of his left leg split in the extremely dry air on the mountain and it bled and hurt slightly.
The leg problem, he said, was ``aggravating but not debilitating.''
When asked whether he wanted to go back and try again, he answered with an emphatic ``Yes!.''
A disabled American climber, Tom Whittaker, who has an artificial leg, climbed Everest in May 1998 but a Korean, Kim Hong-Bin, whose hands had been amputated, failed after reaching a height of 24,000 feet last October.
A total of 984 people have climbed the Everest summit so far.
The north face of the mountain is in China while the south face is in Nepal.
Sharing An Inspired Life
By CRYSTAL LaFLASH
Special to the Star-Telegram
ARLINGTON - Carl Brashear stood proudly in front of hundreds to tell a tale of honor, glory and true American spirit - the story of his life.
"Don't let anybody steal your dream," he said.
Brashear, the first black man and amputee to achieve the rank of Navy master chief petty officer, spoke in front of about 500 students, employees and visitors Wednesday evening at the University of Texas at Arlington. The hourlong speech was followed by a brief question-and-answer session and a reception.
Before the event, which was sponsored by EX.C.E.L. Campus Activities, the audience viewed Men of Honor, which is the movie inspired by Brashear's life. Some cheered when Brashear described the events of his life and some laughed at his jokes. Most listened intently to Brashear's speech in the E.H. Hereford University Center's Rosebud Theatre.
UT-Arlington Fire Marshal Chuck Kist served in the Navy for 27 years. Kist said he remembers hearing stories about Brashear.
"It is so inspiring, how can it not be?" the retired chief petty officer said. "It would be great just to shake his hand."
UT-Arlington student Jenifer Beck, a junior, said students need this type of inspiration so they don't ever give up.
"He has overcome so much in his life and went so far," said Beck, who helped organize the event. "Just like he said, if he can do it, anyone can."
After his childhood in rural Kentucky, Brashear joined the Navy in 1948. On the day he left home, Brashear received words of inspiration from his father.
"My father said 'You get in there and you fight, Carl. Don't you quit on me,' " Brashear said.
For nearly a year, Brashear served as a steward, where he prepared and delivered food. After proving his ability to swim, he was quickly redesignated to the rank of seaman.
Brashear was admitted to the Navy Dive School in Bayonne, N.J., where he had to overcome racism and the limitations of a seventh-grade education.
Brashear was injured during a 1966 salvage trip in the Mediterranean. He was faced with the choice to keep his leg with a brace, which would end his diving career, or amputation, which might allow him to keep diving. Brashear chose to have his leg amputated.
After strenuous rehabilitation, Brashear recovered and went on to pursue his dream. Brashear eventually became the first black amputee to achieve the rank of master diver and master chief petty officer.
Brashear said his greatest accomplishment was proving to the Navy that he could continue his career by taking 12 steps while wearing a 190-pound diving suit.
Brashear told the audience to never give up on a dream.
"If a farm boy with one leg from Kentucky can do it, then so can you," he said.
Monday October 29, 2:32 am Eastern Time
Synthes-Stratec sells European prosthetics business
ZURICH, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Swiss Synthes-Stratec said on Monday it was selling its European prosthetics business to Biomet Merck for an undisclosed sum to concentrate on its core activity of osteosynthesis.
Biomet Merck is a joint-venture of Biomet Inc (NasdaqNM:BMET - news) and Merck KgaA of Germany.
Monday October 15, 1:17 pm Eastern Time
Hanger Orthopedic names McHenry CFO
BETHESDA, Md., Oct 15 (Reuters) - Hanger Orthopedic Group Inc. (NYSE:HGR - news), which specializes in orthotics and prosthetics services, said Monday it named George McHenry as its chief financial officer.
Hanger in January said its previous CFO, Richard Stein, left the company to pursue other opportunities.
McHenry previously held the post of chief financial officer for U.S. Vision Inc. (NasdaqNM:USVI - news), a retailer of optical products and services, for 14 years, Hanger said.
Hanger on Monday also named Glenn Lohrmann to the position of secretary and controller and promoted Jason Owen to treasurer.
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