| Why Marcus Limps
Why Marcus Limps
In December of 1999, miracle-working neuro-surgeons at University Hospital in San Antonio replaced my rotted and crumbling T4 and T5 vertebrae with a cage and the rods you see in the x-ray.
If you look carefully, you can see the cage behind the three center clamps.
The cage was filled with live bone chips from my ribs. New bone grew over the cage and bone chips. Where there were four vertebrae, there is now one long one.
Chips of rotted, crumbling bone scratched and damaged the spinal nerve. I was in stupefying pain, paralyzed from the waist down. The most powerful pain-killer drugs were only infrequently marginally effective.
I was admitted to University Hospital at eleven at night. At seven the next morning my nine-hour surgery began. My doctors told me later, I was only hours from paraplegia when I was admitted.
From the moment I woke in the recovery room, there has been no spinal pain.
After the miracle surgery, I was twenty-eight days in rehab, learning to walk again.
I have some residual nerve damage in my left leg but, in 2006, I walked six hundred miles on a pilgrimage from Seville to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. For stability I used Leki sticks.
I was 68 at the time.
After that rewarding experience, as soon as I raise some money, I will walk from Stockhom to Budapest. Ideas of other long-distance buzz around in my head.
With enough time, and enough money, I can walk a long way.
After what my doctors did for me, I do not understand why doctors do not do more for others with spinal problems.
If there is something you want to do, do it.
For years, I dreamed of riding a freight train from the Midwest through the Rockies to the West Coast and of playing polo at Gilget.
A rider gets on a freight train in the rail yard. He jumps off the train before it gets into the next rail yard. I can no longer jump off moving trains.
I practiced, too.
Gilgit is a village high in the remote Himalayas of Pakistan. The polo field is small, surrounded by a high stone walls. Players do not wear helmets. There are no rules. Deaths are rare, but always a possibility. Gilgit is the Holy Grail of polo.
There will be no polo at Gilgit for me.
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