As 2020 vote looms, a steel spine will come in handy

     This is the last of three columns about surgery for stenosis, a condition where narrowing vertebrae compress the spinal cord. The first two parts ran Monday and Wednesday.

Before

     The doctor wasn’t sure what he’d find.
     If my bones were pliant, he’d cut little “doors” in three vertebrae, propping each open with a tiny titanium doorstop, so there would be room for the compressed spinal cord to shy away from that bone spur spearing it from the front.
      But, if the bones broke, he’d have to fuse the whole thing with a titanium plate and rods. That second possibility made me worried I’d end up as limber as the tin-man.
     So when I came to, after three hours, and learned that Plan A worked, and nothing had to be fused, I was ecstatic. Doctors would ask me how I was — doped up, bandaged over, with stents in each arm and a drain and a catheter — and I’d mumble, “ecstatic.”
      Strange. Newspapers review every new burger joint and off-Loop musical, yet never rate hospitals. Let’s fix that. I spent three full days and nights at Northwestern. The surgical care was excellent. The post-surgical care was ... quite good, with exceptions.
  

After

   Amazing how the reputation of a vast, $11 billion medical enterprise teeters on the back of whoever answers your call button. Most nurses were great; a few, not so much.
      The dividing line seemed to be what each thought his or her job was. Those who saw themselves as tending to the person in room 1009 — aka, me — were sympathetic and attentive. When they went off shift it was like saying goodbye to an old friend. Some, however, seemed to be merely ticking off boxes — go into Room 1009, collect a blood sample, then get out.
      A couple close-but-no-cigar moments, like the aide who brought the water I requested but then placed the cup just out of my reach and fled. I thought of that skeleton sprawled before a pitcher in “Snow White” as my fingers quivered toward the cup and I wondered whether pushing the extra few inches would roll me onto the floor. 

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A few "close-but-no-cigar" moments. 

Dems manage to slip message past CNN hoopla

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, by Nam June Park (Smithsonian Museum of American Art)

     Getting your news from television is like trying to breathe through a straw.
     It can be done. But takes effort and you risk suffocation. 
     At least I assume that would be the case. To be honest, I've never tried breathing through a straw. Just as I've never settled for getting my news from television. 
     Though occasionally I watch, typically after some big story—the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris—or during some special news event, such as the Democratic Presidential Debates in Detroit Tuesday and Wednesday night. Invariably I'm let down, seeing endless iterations of something I learned on Twitter five hours earlier.    

     I suppose there is comfort that the disappointment was more from the CNN hoopla than any Democratic misstep, which is refreshing. Fox News is unwatchable propaganda that must require a lobotomy to endure, but that doesn't make me a fan of CNN either. Five years ago I pointed out how they had abandoned journalism and lurched into performance art after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and every time I give it another try, I'm reminded of how what they do is not news but entertainment. Nearly a quarter hour passed at the start of each night, while CNN hyped the show you were already tuned into and waiting to watch, playing a sizzle reel of the various candidates that was half American Idol set-up, half WWE fight hype. Did they have to make it a cage match between Godzilla and Rodan to keep viewers from flipping over to re-runs of "The Big Bang Theory?" Maybe. 

     Then there was the presentation of colors. Now I love the flag, fly the flag, have no trouble seeing it honored, nor singing the National Anthem. Why CNN had to do so before a debate of our nation's most pressing problems is a mystery—I've poked around, trying to find an answer; maybe readers can help. I assume the Democrats insisted, to dramatize they're not the traitors the Republicans insist they are. If so it was an odd and time-wasting bit of reactive pageantry. Aren't the flag pins enough? 

      The CNN moderators—Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Don Lemon—seemed intent on creating drama, on getting the various candidates to clash with each other, or force them to admit they'll do something unpopular, like raise taxes, rather than explore the policies they were promoting.  Maybe CNN thinks that makes good television; then again, so would having Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arm wrestle. 

     Maybe that's next. Or maybe it's aimed at people who aren't me. I'm not really the target audience. The only way I made it through both debates was that I had my wife and younger son to provide running commentary and discussion, not to mention Facebook Scrabble on my iPhone to help pass the time—I didn't bother tweeting, as I did in years past, as Twitter is so clotted by ads and big footed by social media stars there hardly seemed any point in doing so.

      That's the bad news. The good news is that the Democratic candidates, all 20 of them, put on performances that ranged from credible to excellent in this second set of debates. There was much sensible emphasis on health care, one of the great social issues of our time. Even self-help guru Marianne Williamson, who delivered oblique calls to govern with love the first time around, scored points and even—dare I say it?—made sense at times.  Joe Biden, the front runner, got beat up on, though not as much this time, and had a tendency to clam up too quickly when the moderators tried to cut him off, a bad sign for succeeding in any coming mudpit wrestle with Donald Trump. Kamala Harris, the California senator and former attorney general, did well again, though not quite as well as before, while tech maven Andrew Yang did better. He kept to his one trick pony plan of paying every American a grand a month, and the concept—why should only farmers and Amazon get big government breaks?—started to make some sense. Corey Booker pushed for unity,  The first night Elizabeth Warren, whom I initially wrote off as a crank, appeared grounded, and even Bernie Sanders seemed less crazed, though he would do better not to yell everything he says.  He's on television, not standing on a stump in Vermont in 1850, trying to project to the top hatted listeners in the back of the crowd.

      Any one of them would be a far better president than Donald Trump—that goes without saying. As to whether they can win, given the natural advantage enjoyed by a sitting president, the fervor of his supporters, who back him in the face of a constant barrage of ethical lapses, racist statements and acts, and groveling before dictators, is another matter. But there is cause for hope—the seeds are in the ground, the sprouts are rising toward the sun, and at least the cloud of dooming locusts hasn't presented itself early in the season. They'll be plenty of time for desperation later, but I'm content to begin the first day of August with a ray of hope.

Surgical notes: If I’m talking, I’m still alive

     This is Part 2 of my Spine Surgery Summer Series. If you missed Monday’s column, you should start there.

     The nurse’s urgency over the telephone startled me.
     “Do you think it’s OK to wait until Tuesday?” I said.
    “If your condition deteriorates before then, call me,” she said. That was not the answer I expected.
     My hands had been numb for months, so my doctor ordered up an MRI. It showed severe stenosis: narrowing of the spinal vertebrae, compressing the spinal cord, damaging it. The first surgeon I saw suggested operating right away. Now, I was seeking the famed second opinion.
     My wife insisted on going with me. She wanted another adult in the room besides the doctor.
     Dr. Alpesh Patel was a revelation. I assumed he’d merely endorse the first doc’s suggestion. He didn’t. Instead, Dr. Patel gazed at the MRI and called the go-in-the-front-and-pluck-out-the-bone-spur strategy “dangerous.” Doing that, he explained, also might yank out a chunk of spinal cord. The hole would then leak spinal fluid and couldn’t be repaired, leading to meningitis and — I’m not sure if he said this or I just added it, mentally — death.
     Dr. Patel took a long time explaining what was going on — if Dr. Bone Joint took 10 minutes, he took 40. As if I were an actual human suddenly facing a complicated and terrifying situation, and not just the latest sack of defective meat delivered to his doorstep by the health care conveyor belt. He contemplated the MRI, musing, “Hmm, I’m not sure WHAT is the best thing to do here.” He ordered a CT scan to get a better look.
     Doctors love to radiate certainty. But suddenly the first diagnosis felt like a clerk at Macy’s giving me the once-over and announcing that I’m a 38 Regular. Being initially uncertain — Go through the back? The front? Both? — struck me as a sign that Dr. Patel was actually evaluating the situation instead of just pulling a procedure off the rack and hoping it fit me. My wife watched saucer-eyed — she later insisted it was worth my having surgery just to see Dr. Patel in action.

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"Now Neil, no more than TWO columns about this."

Not to mention a view, too. 

     The Sun-Times used to have a library—a large one—and librarians, who acquired books and wrangled microfilm, filled clip files and aided reporters searching for information.
      Over the years, as the paper condensed and economized, the library shrank, the librarians were dismissed or died. One awful day the whole thing was eliminated, root and branch, and, as the rare person who actually used the resources there, as opposed to merely dipping my fingers into the internet to flick out a few drops of fact, I took it upon myself to load up rolling cart after rolling cart of books and convey them to my office, along with as many bookshelves as would fit, including a pair of tall, heavy, library-quality wooden shelves. They were seven feet tall. 
     The building maintenance man—who also seems to be gone, now that I think of it—must have helped me, and the shelves must have been unsteady, because under one he tucked a  shim—a thin, splintery slice of wood—to keep it stable. The shim projected an inch from the bottom of the shelf.
      I don't know why this bothered me. Maybe I was upset about the library. Maybe I'm just anal-retentive and annoyed by small things. But I figured I would push the shim forward, so it would be out of sight under the shelf. A simple process. Just gently rock the shelf back, and push the shim in. But I wasn't quick enough to nudge the shelf back then dip down to jam in the shim before the shelf forward again. So I tried again. Rock the shelf back, dip, push the shim.The second time it went in, but only a little, and was still jutting out. So I pushed the shelf back, a bit harder, dipped down to push the shim, tried again, pushed the shelf backward, harder, but this time whole shelf rocked forward and kept going.
     I had time to think, "Oh shit" as the big wooden library shelf pitched atop of me, raining books as it went. A crash was involved, or boom, or noise loud enough to send half the newsroom running to see. 
     So here's the scene. My small office. One fallen bookshelf lying atop dozens of jumbled books and someone beneath it all, a man whose command of the physical world has never been what it ought to be. The assembled crowd took it in in what must have been silent awe, a silence broken by a colleague saying, "Now Neil, no more than TWO columns about this."  General laughter, at least in my recollection. Then hands lifting the shelf off and I crawled out, amazingly unhurt.
     We got the bookshelf back upright. I made sure the shim was tucked out of sight, and began to slowly return the books to their places, chewing on that comment. "Now Neil, no more than TWO columns about this."
     Yes, I have a tendency to write about personal matters. A process that both elevates me, in my own estimation, and ostracizes me, in the views of other reporters. A real journalist, in the eyes of many, goes to meetings. He paws through piles of official documents, discovering financial improprieties that result in actual news, stories of wrong-doing or corruption. The public, the theory goes, has an endless appetite for this. I'm not so sure. I certainly don't.  That has never interested me, not in the way the small occurrences of people's lives, including my own, do. I'd rather write about manhole covers than bring down an alderman.
      But I do think about what he said, at times like this week, when I embarked on writing about my spine surgery. I hadn't planned on it. I had planned on being off work until the end of August. But lying around the house got dull. I was plugging away at the blog, so obviously could write stuff. I wanted to jump back in, early, and needed a topic. I thought about weighing in on the mayor's crack about a Fraternal Order of Police official, pointing out that the FOP are, if not actual clowns—they aren't funny, at least not in the ha-ha funny way that actual circus clowns are— then certainly an organization which couldn't do more to undermine the public image of the Chicago Police Department if that were their intended purpose. I could collect a Greatest Hits of tone-deaf, counterproductive FOP pronouncements on the frequent jaw-dropping misdeeds of police officers, while mentioning that I had only admiration for Lori Lightfoot's sneering non-apology, her crack that she was sorry she had said it aloud. I'm not. I'm glad. I wish she put it on a billboard.  
     But that seemed a small observation to build an entire column around and carried the risk of being dated—the kerfuffle had been going on for a few days already. Besides, I had already had my neck cut open. Did I want to return by immediately shoving my arm into the CPD's cage and letting them chew on that too? 
     So I wrote what I thought was something interesting on the surgery, a piece which turned out to be 2,500 words long. That would be a massive article in the paper, so I decided to whittle 400 words away and run it over three days, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That way, I wouldn't have to talk to my bosses or ask anybody for extra space. 
    But jeez, it was also THREE columns. I used to say that if I came upon Jesus Christ preaching the Sermon on the Mount in Grant Park, I would only write two columns. Because people get bored. Nothing is worth three columns. And here I went and did it.
    Why? I found the topic interesting. I wanted to convey the tale. But then I'm biased. I like medical stories. And it's about me, and something I just went through. The first installment ran Monday, and the public seemed to like it. I got dozens of replies--50, easily—which is a decent number. Turns out, lots of people have had that surgery, or were contemplating it, and one role of a newspaper is to reflect readers' experience back at them. 
     So why tell the bookshelf story? Well, first, it's Tuesday, 5 a.m., and I realized I had better get something up here—I spent yesterday finishing the second and third installments of the surgery series, and went downtown to research a column I'm running next week. I didn't bother to write anything for here. The personal nature of the surgery story made me think of that colleague's quip. As did, I suppose, returning to the office for the first time in a few weeks. 
     There is a coda to the bookshelf story, one that I'm not entirely proud of, but that I'll share anything because, heck, I guess  I just can't help myself. A friend who works at a big publishing house in New York called me. The guy who had needled me while I was still under the toppled shelf had sent her a book proposal of his own. Did I, she wondered, know him? 
    "Yeah," I said. "A little. He's a jerk." 
    She asked what he did at the paper.
    "I have no idea," I said. "Some kind of consultant I guess." 
    Oh, she said. From his letter, I got the impression that he was somebody important, a key editor, the axis on which the entire operation revolves.
    "No," I said. "Not as far as I can tell."
     I urged her to avoid him, and she rejected his proposal. Which felt good, at the moment. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Though now it just seems petty. Which is okay too. What's the Nicholas Cage line from "Moonstruck"?— "I ain't no freakin' monument to justice."  My office at the new place is so small there's no room for tall bookshelves, so I'm safe. 

Summer! Time for baseball, beaches, and complicated spinal surgery

     How’s your summer going? Pretty good? Glad to hear it. Mine has been ... interesting: the past six weeks or so have been spent getting ready for, enduring, then recovering from spinal surgery. Not something that typically goes into the newspaper. But I found the process ....interesting, to say the least, and hope you do, too. I’ll relate the story this week in three parts. If I’m wrong, well, there’s always next week.
     

      It couldn’t be a normal ailment — no cancer, no heart disease, no failing kidneys. Oh no, no, not for me. Odd duck that I am, it had to have something obscure: stenosis, which sounds like zeneosis, the imaginary disease I cooked up to entertain my boys when they were small and we’d visit their zayde at Skokie Valley Hospital. I had fun imagining ever-more terrifying Hot Zone symptoms, and threatened to to march them up to the Zeneotic Ward to see for themselves if they didn’t behave.
      Stenosis is real, however, a narrowing of the spinal vertebra. I learned I had it in 2015, getting a CT scan after I slipped on ice while walking the dog. The doc suggested I “keep an eye on it,” and, like any sane man, that meant I ignored it completely.
     But six months ago my hands started to go numb. Not that numb; I still could type. So no big whoop, we’re all numb nowadays, more or less. I employed the same ignore-it-and-hope-it-goes-away strategy that worked so well when the interior light on the Honda Odyssey started flashing during hard right turns. Eventually, the problem fixed itself. Truly, a miracle.   

You can't really see it on this screen grab of the MRI
but it shows the collapsing discs pushing against
the spinal cord, and that pesky bone spur, spearing
itself where it doesn't belong.

     
     But this didn’t go away. It got worse. My feet started getting numb too, then my calves. Unlike Republicans with climate change, I connected the dots and saw where this was heading. Plus my wife told me to go to the doctor, and I’ve learned to listen to her.
     My physician ordered an MRI. (Practical tip: Pay an extra $10 and they’ll give you a DVD of the image you can tote to future consultations.) Later, his office called to say the stenosis was severe and compounded by a bone spur. He suggested I see a surgeon at Illinois Bone and Joint Institute.

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Old Books from my Library #7: The Natural History of Nonsense

     Stupidity wasn't born into the world on June 16, 2015, you know, heralded by Donald Trump's descent on that escalator at his garish Fifth Avenue high rise. 
     It has a long, deep, rich history and, as someone who interacts constantly with the often credulous and boggled public, my job has, by necessity, acquainted me thoroughly with the deep roots and widely spreading branches of the Tree of Idiocy. The choice being to continually bemoan the fact or instead study it, appreciate it, almost savor it. I choose the second route.
     About 20 years ago, I wrote a book on the subject, "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances." Needless to say, I was not the first person to do this, and in conducting my research I assembled a small library of books on human misapprehension of reality.   
     I first thought, for today's final installment on old books, to discuss Paul Tabori's The Natural Science of Stupidity, published in 1959, and The Art of Folly, following in 1961. Tabori was a scholar who spoke several languages, and the books are rich exploration of the idiocies of ages past. It was through The Natural Science of Stupidity's chapter on the law that I discovered one of my favorite books, E.P. Evans' 1906 The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. 
      But something about Tabori, a certain denseness combined with his scholarship, struck me as a wrong note to end this week's series. Then I noticed a book with a lighter touch,  shelved right next to Tabori (I try to shelve my books thematically, to aid in retrieval). That is the last and most recently-published old book I'll address this week, Bergen Evans' 1946 The Natural History of Nonsense.
      Evans, a fellow Ohioan, was no slouch either: he attended Harvard and went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. A professor of English, he explains the origins of the book this way. In 1934, he picked up a hitchhiker. "He was friendly and above all talkative, and I was at first amused then awestruck at the immensity of his ignorance. It was not that he was wrong about so much as that he was so colorfully wrong, so militantly wrong!"
      That rings a bell, huh? Perhaps he had encountered some time traveller from our present era, when aggressive stupidity, united by the internet, has taken on a power and authority of its own and, needless to say, elected our first ignoramus president. 
     Evans is a sharp writer—he taught English at Northwestern for 40 years—and the problem with addressing his book is the temptation to just quote the whole thing. It begins with the good news, acknowledging our culture's slow crawl toward sense:

    Until about a hundred years ago rational men live like spies in an enemy country. They never walked abroad unless disguised in irony or allegory. To have revealed their true selves would have been fatal. Today this status is more that of guerillas. They snipe from cover, ambush stragglers, harass retreating rear guards, cut communications and now and then execute swift forays against detached units of the enemy. But they dare not yet risk an open engagement with the main force; they would be massacred.

     In that sense,  we live in a better time. It is at least a struggle, sometimes an evenly-matched one, the forces of reason and the forces of delusion occasionally meeting on equal ground, Godzilla and Rodan, grappling for control of our culture. 
      For being 73 years old, the book is astoundingly current, particularly when it comes to the resilience of folly.
     "The sudden emergency of presumably extinct ideas reminds us, in a similar manner, how near to darkness we really are," Evans writes.
      Or, to put the above into current vernacular: Look, Nazis are back.
      Evans marches through myths about animals, the tendency to anthropomorphize them and project all sorts of human qualities, like "chivalry," upon them. For instance, the once-popular idea that oysters take cues from a dynamic leader.
     Moving on to human follies, we encounter some current in the immediate post-World War II era, now entirely forgotten: women war workers worrying that welding would make them sterile, or they might become pregnant by handling the material that went into fire extinguishers. Earlier, women were told they could conceive after bathing in a tub that a man had used. We also explore the long history of women claiming to give birth to animals; litters of rabbits, for instance.
     The book builds toward that most pernicious form of ignorance, then and now: bigotry, demolishing untruths about black people (Evans shocked his contemporaries by taking Ralph Bunche to lunch at the Northwestern Club). It makes for squeamish reading, as Evans outlines beliefs so vile we can hardly bear to articulate them nowadays. Then it's on to Jews, and the general tendency to embrace what flatters your biases and reject what doesn't. Turns out this did not begin with Trump either.
     "Many tests have been devised to determine whether race and intelligence can be correlated," Evans writes. "And those who believe that they can and that the  white race is intellectually superior to all other races have seized with triumph upon those results that support heir belief, while rejecting with indignation those that do not." 
     Evans shares a quote from John Stuart Mill the particularly resonates: "Of all the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences."
     Good thing we've put that nonsense behind us.
     He concludes by pointing out that while a minor error can be amusing, "no error is harmless," particularly when related to groups of people and affairs of state.
     "Obscurantism and tyranny go together as naturally as skepticism and democracy," he writes. "Belief is the antithesis to thinking. A refusal to come to an unjustified conclusion is an element of an honest man's religion."
    Evans died in Highland Park in 1978. You can read his very interesting New York Times obituary here. He was once a presence on television as well.
      Since I began with the opening lines of the book, let me conclude with its final sentiments. There is no need for me to underscore their current aptness. Take the average person:

      In being asked to believe without evidence, he is being asked to abdicate his integrity. Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

    Sorry, I have to highlight that one line: "All tyranny rests on fraud." Ain't that the truth?

Old Books from my Library #6: The Secrets of the Great City

    Is this book thing getting old? Maybe.  Then again, today is Day Six, and were this "Kama Sutra  Week," I suspect that by Day Six reader interest in unusual sex positions might be flagging. So what hope can old books have?
      But it's Saturday, so I'll leave you with the title page of what is the oldest book in my library, Edward Winslow Martin's* 1868 The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, The Mysteries, Miseries and Crime of New York City.
     It is a textbook example of 19th century lasciviousness disguised as virtue (a dynamic, now that I think of it, that has continued with ease into the 21st century). Few self-respecting Victorians would sit down to savor the goings-on within brothels and clip-joints without first sprinkling a few shakes of moral censure over their repast. We aren't ogling "the darker sides of city life," oh no no no, we are investigating them and learning what to avoid. Reading what Martin dubs "a simple narration of actual facts ... designed to warn the thousands who visit the city against the dangers and pitfalls into which their curiosity or vice may lead them." These are the places you shouldn't go, the stuff you shouldn't do. 
     "It hoped that those who read the book will heed its warnings."
     So yes, we get public parks and schools, the newspapers and investment houses of this teeming city of over one million souls. But that's mere smokescreen; then we're off to the business at hand, in chapters with titles such as "Poor Girls" and "The Street Boys" (not sure why males get the definite article that females are denied. More important perhaps). "The Social Evil" "Assignation Houses" "Street Walkers" "Dance Houses" "Thieves" "Divorce Lawyers" "Swindlers in General"—you get the idea. 
     I should probably give a sense of the writing style. A typical foray into Gotham by "a beautiful maiden, born in a village on the Sound," pure as the driven snow, "reared in innocence and virtue until she reaches her seventeenth year" and makes the fatal mistake of visiting New York City for the first time:

      She is dazzled with its theatres, its balls, its Central Park, the Broadway confuses and intoxicates her, but opera has divine charms for her musical ear and she is escorted night after night by a man with a pleasing face and a ready tongue. .. She is persuaded to take a glass of champagne. She is finally persuaded to drink an entire bottle of champagne. That night the world is torn from under her feet. She has tasted the apple of death.

     Pregnancy and ruin quickly follow. She struggles as a seamstress or a dry-goods clerk, but is only postponing her inevitable plunge into the river (almost needless to say, with a cry of "Mother") from whence she will be dragged out, days later, "a mere greenish mass of festering corruption."
     The male version of this transit, which I will spare you, is amply illustrated on the title page, above, which was the real reason I bought the book—I think I paid $1 for it in a threadbare shop. I gave a framed color photocopy as a parting gift to a friend who was heading to New York to work for a newspaper, and posted it on my older son's Facebook page when he headed off to NYU. So far he seems to be heeding its warning and avoiding the company of The Fancy. 

   
* The author of such lurid fare—this book was "not for sale in the book store" and could only be purchased by subscription—would not use his actual name. Edward Winslow Martin was a pseudonym for James D. McCabe, a Virginian, born in 1842 and educated at the Virginia Military Institute. He served the Confederacy during the Civil War, and wrote some 30 books, including guidebooks, plays, a collection of religious martyrs, plus biographies, including one of Robert E. Lee, whom he corresponded with.