July 4, 2006

First some mail.

Thanks to Steve and Karen and Oren Watson for the nice card (boy, is Canadian mail slow! Oh, and by the way, Steve, I thought of you when someone mentioned that I was rather talkative in my blog; I recalled that you were the referee of my very first math paper submitted for publication; on your report, you wrote “Too verbose” :-)).

Also, thanks to the over sixty mathematicians at the Aegean Conference who sent Gary a group card!

On the 4th I uploaded the July 3rd journal entry a bit too quickly and it was fully of typos. I cleaned it up and reloaded it later in the day. So, if you read it before I had the chance to revise it, sorry about that! You can check out the corrected version below this one (the email that went out that night was the corrected version, in case you are getting that instead of going to the blog).

Today, July 4th, was the annual Peachtree Road Race, with contestants from all over the world. 80,000 runners, I heard. But before the running event came the Wheelchair Division – Shepherd is the official founding sponsor of that event. The Shepherd patients who wanted to witness the race were gotten up about 6 am, and were lining the street by about 7. I was told that if I wanted to attend this fun event I would have to be at Shepherd around 6, because the race goes right past Shepherd and so the road would be closed to traffic.

A fun event that would occur at 7 am and that I would have to be there by six for? Now there’s a contradiction in terms. I decided to skip it – under other circumstances I’m sure I would have found it very interesting, but I’ve been feeling more tired out than usual these past few days and wanted to take a little extra rest. I had hoped to sleep in late, in fact, but my hotel neighbors must have been planning a big day for the Fourth of July because they were up at six making a commotion. I have to say, though, that the hotel has been quite good noise-wise except for that first night with the dog fight – and now, with waking me up too early on the fourth!

Gary said the leading wheelchair racers were very impressive – especially the woman who raced using only one hand to wheel her chair – but that he was actually more interested in the stragglers. He said that they didn’t move any faster up Peachtree than he did, but that unlike him they didn’t have to rest every twenty seconds. He wished he could see these people go down one of Peachtree’s hills, to see how fast they went and how they handled it – he said that his personal experience in going downhill was that it was not the piece of cake he’d once thought it would be, because he had to constantly have the palm of his hands against the rim of his wheels to act as brakes.

Here is some info I found about the Wheelchair Division from the web:

General Course and Race Information
The Wheelchair Division starts at 6:55 a.m. and follows the same course set for the foot
racers: 6.2 miles down Peachtree Road, starting at Lenox Road and ending on 10th Street at
Piedmont Park. The course challenges racers with quick-turning curves, steep upgrades and
fast-paced downhills.
Athletes often find the most difficult part of the race to be “cardiac hill,” in front of Shepherd
Center at 2020 Peachtree Road, where patients and staff gather to cheer on the racers.
Wheelchair racers use specially-designed wheelchairs with a lower center of gravity and tires
similar to bicycle wheels with a steering handle in front. Lighter, high-tech racing chairs,
along with rigorous athlete training schedules have contributed to faster speeds and new
records over recent years.
Numerous Shepherd Center volunteers and staff members work before, during and after the
race to make the Wheelchair Division possible. Since 1981, as the official founding sponsor,
Shepherd Center’s Junior Committee has raised funds to provide pre-and post-race brunches,
defray travel and lodging expenses for racers and offer a purse of over $35,000 for winners.
Shepherd Center’s 20-member therapeutic recreation staff coordinates all race logistics,
including reviewing applications, orchestrating the start and finish, monitoring the times and
overseeing the needs of the athletes.
Providing opportunities for athletes with disabilities is not unusual for Shepherd Center. As
Founding Sponsor of the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games, Shepherd paved the way for more
than 3,000 athletes from 104 countries to participate in international competition. Shepherd
Center, which is home to 11 wheelchair sports teams, is proud to one again sponsor the
Wheelchair Division of the Peachtree Road Race.

You can find more info at http://www.atlantatrackclub.org/prr-wheelchair.pdf

After the race, there was an awards ceremony and brunch in the auditorium at Shepherd. Gary went to it, but the road was still closed to traffic, so I didn’t make it. Gary said one reason that gathering was interesting was because the room was full of people very experienced in handling their chairs, unlike the newly-disabled patients of Shepherd (after the race, the entrants transferred to their regular wheelchairs rather than stay in their racing chairs). Gary said he sat next to a man who was not disabled but had entered the Wheelchair Division. Evidently he likes working out in a wheelchair because of the exercise it gives to his upper body. But, he said, he can’t keep up with his wife, who has an SCI.

Strachimir Popvassilev (“Mirko”), a former student of Gary’s who teaches at Southwest Louisiana University, had arrived in Atlanta by bus in the very early morning and had walked his way (about 2 miles) to Shepherd and found Gary sitting watching the race (Later, I heard Gary describe their meeting as follows: he said he was watching the race and all of a sudden amongst the runners he saw a guy in long pants, walking along, wearing a backpack; he looked closer and saw that it was his former student). Gary’s team nurse took a picture of Gary and Mirko (she was taking pictures of all the patients), and I am trying to get her to send me it by email so I can upload it to the blog.

Gary called me when Peachtree was again open to traffic, and I got over to Shepherd around 11:30. I confess that instead of joining in on Gary and Mirko's conversation, I stood by them in Gary’s room and worked on blog entries covering the events of July 2 and 3. I keep little notes to help me compose my entries, but I need to transform the notes into entries fairly quickly, because with my memory they soon become incomprehensible, and I had gotten way behind in the blog.

I did go out to the garden with them (we noted my little sign was still on the sculpture). Gary had to do a weight shift while we were there, and Mirko joked that he should make all his students do one with him when he taught class (since he has to do one every half hour, he will have to do one during class; by the time he is actually teaching a class of undergrads he might be able to do the depression weight shift while lecturing, but he is thinking it might be better to let them know what he was doing rather than suddenly press up from his wheelchair and stay in that position for a minute. He told Mirko that he’s been wondering what he would tell his first such class about his disability, as teaching with it will be new to him. He thought he might say something along the lines of, “You’ve probably never been taught by a paraplegic. Well, I’ve never taught as one.” He then commented to Mirko that when you have a spinal cord injury, you learn a lot about your body. Mirko said that that must be where the term “blissfully unaware” comes from, meaning that that is the state of the rest of us. Gary said you simply couldn’t afford to be unaware if you had an SCI, not if you wanted to stay healthy).

Gary had to go back to bed at 2, because he had already been sitting in his chair for 8 hours, and at this time, 8 hours is all he is allowed of consecutive sitting. However, he is now allowed to get in the chair again, if he wants, after going back to bed for three and a half hours in between the sitting sessions. And today he was definitely ready to get back to bed – time for a nap! The morning events had worn him out, since the nurses had come earlier than usual for the already early morning routine of doing his bowel program, giving him a bath, and so forth, as well as to get in the regularly scheduled 6am IC.

Actually, everyone in the shared room conked out. As I stood next to Gary’s bed and typed the blog, I noted that the room had never been so quiet while I’ve been it it.

Mirko had left after Gary was gotten back in bed. Mirko had said he would show people at the Summer Topology Conference the picture that had been taken of him and Gary (the nurse had given him a copy). Gary told him to tell those at the conference he would see them at a future one, though he doesn’t know at this point when he’ll be ready to take on the challenge of travel.

I left much earlier in the afternoon than usual to make my dinner and so forth, because Gary was going to get up to go to the ice cream social at 8 and the fireworks display at about 9, which meant we had to go through the stretching routine and his wound care starting at about 6:30, after his IC. The ice cream social was down in the garden, and we noted that our graffiti was still up. We saw someone pass it, read it, and move on. It then occurred to me that maybe they really thought that was the title of the piece, and Gary agreed that might be the case – to us that title seems so appropriate.

At the social, the father of a young man with a T6 injury, fairly equivalent to Gary’s, came over to talk to Gary. His son, who has a job accreditating business colleges, had told his father Gary was a professor and was going to teach in the fall, and the man wanted to know how it was possible that Gary would be returning to work so soon, when that seemed so far out of reach for his son. Gary explained that the math department was being very accommodating and what his teaching would involve, etc. The man said there would be no way his son could return to work at this point, and that they had no idea when he would be ready to do so. The man remarked that people just didn’t understand what it is like to have a spinal cord injury, that it’s not simply matter of things being the way they had always been only now the person is in a wheelchair – so much more is involved. He told us that friends and relatives kept asking when his son would go back to living on his own and/or going back to work, and couldn’t comprehend why the answer was, “We just don’t know, probably no sooner than a year from now.” Not that the man was blaming these other people for their lack of comprehension – as he said, no one really knows what it’s like to live with an SCI until it happens to them or to someone whose care they are responsible for. (Of course, you guys now have a better idea than most of what it is like ;-))

We headed for the parking deck about nine, about the same time Mother Nature let loose with fireworks of her own. Her lightning display was much more impressive than the Atlanta fireworks we could see from the protected second level of the garage, so we didn’t stay there all that long. Which was good, because I still had to get Gary hoyered back into bed, undress him, get him positioned properly, and attach the ankle pillows (we did have some comic relief during that routine. I pressed the button that would make his bed rise. “I feel like I’m in “The Exorcist,” Gary said, then continued, “Hopefully I won’t spit out green soup and my head won’t spin around.” “Well, if it does,” I replied, “we can show the therapists how well those neck flexibility exercises have worked”). I didn’t get out of his room until about ten-thirty, a little later than I’ve been getting out of there ever since I’ve been doing his wound care. I’ll be glad when his flap is healed sufficiently that all these extra medications on it are no longer necessary so I can go home closer to nine, as I used to do.

By the way, the ankle pillows seemed to have worked fine for those two hours last night (hah! Peg came up with another helpful idea!), so tonight he will keep them on the entire time.

I didn’t yet get the pictures from the nurse, but Jack Brown scanned the one Mirko had, so on the blog it will appear below this. From email, go to http://drpeg2003.blogspot.com/ and scroll down.