Ohio leads USA in presidents, cruel abortion laws

 

     I swear, Ohio wasn’t broken when I left it. The Buckeye State was in fine shape in the late 1970s, a solid Midwestern place — high in the middle, round at both ends.
     Sure, people snickered at Cleveland. The Cuyahoga River really was so polluted it caught fire. Our mayor, Dennis Kucinich, really did resemble Howdy Doody. His predecessor, Ralph J. Perk, really did set his hair on fire, trying to cut a ribbon with an acetylene torch. An awkward, Nixonian man, Perk made Richard M. Daley seem graceful as Nijinsky.
     But we had industry: steel plants, car manufacturers. We had science. My father worked at the NASA Lewis, adjacent to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. I’d visit and wander the place, goggle-eyed. I remember those remote manipulators used to handle radioactive material — you put your fingers into tubes so you could operate large robotic arms, like on “The Simpsons.”
     We had culture. A world-class orchestra. An impressive art museum, particularly if you hadn’t yet been to The Art Institute. Even little Berea, my hometown, west of the city, had interesting stuff going on. The Berea Summer Theatre put on edgy productions like “R.U.R.,” the Karel Čapek play that introduced the word “robot” to the English language in 1921. Baldwin Wallace College brought in significant speakers, like Margaret Meade, the great anthropologist. I still have her autograph.
     Ohio people were salt-of-the earth types who drank Black Velvet whiskey neat and Genny Pounders — 16-ounce cans of Genesee Cream Ale, the local swill of preference. The state was home to eight presidents. True, those presidents were all guys like Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes and William Howard Taft — their brilliance not exactly shimmering off the pages of history — but that, too, seemed apt. We didn’t have to shine, we Ohioans. We were happy just to show up, punch the clock, survive another day.

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Breathless in the night: The struggle to treat sleep apnea

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     This is a melancholy day for me. Five and a half years ago, the Wellcome Trust, the largest medical charity in Great Britain, started Mosaic Science, a web site devoted to health and medical journalism. I heard about after one of their editors asked a pal at The Economist if she wanted to write about people with trouble swallowing. She didn't, but passed the assignment to me. I wasn't interested either, but had a story—Why are people so afraid of the disfigured?—that I had long wanted to write. Only nobody wanted to print it.  I passed the idea by Mosaic's editors, they embraced it, and Face Fear become the first of five articles I wrote for them.
     This is the last, my last article for Mosaic Science and the last they are ever publishing. Wellcome is shutting it down after today. If journalism is going to be saved by non-profits, then a $38 billion entity being unable to manage a blog posting two stories a month—kinda puts EGD into perspective, doesn't it?—has to be worrisome .
     If you're interested in Wellcome's explanation, you'll find it here. Boiled down, it's because a) Mosaic is expensive to run and b) commissioning stories produced messages that didn't perfectly mesh with their corporate goals. 

     I can't express how much I loved being associated with Mosaic. The articles were a ton of work—taking six to nine months, part-time—I've been beavering away on the one below since March.  A writer my age and position worries about phoning it in, or should, and nothing about these pieces was phoned in. They required me to talk to people who were terribly burned, to sit down with a Philadelphia plastic surgeon and go over the video of his repairing the muscles in a boy's face, to fly to Japan for the birthday party of a teddy bear.
     One of the wonders of Mosaic is that they publish under a Creative Commons license. Meaning that anybody is free to do anything with their stories. You could print them on a t-shirt and sell them. My pieces have appeared in publications from The Guardian to the Saturday Evening Post, featured on CNN, the BBC and one, on falling, was anthologized in a book.
     It also allows me to both link to the finished product—here—and post my own draft below, which is 30 percent longer (and not, I should add, copy edited by their fine editors). I'll leave it to you which you read, but will note that the vacuum cleaner's unexpected use in medical treatment, which I thought the crowning detail of the piece, got edited out —for completely valid reasons, because the thing is too long and the 1936 Lancet article I reference is certainly off point, albeit delightful. (If Mosaic were still around, I'd pitch to them a story on the role of household appliances in medicine. Alas, they are not).
     I do like a good honking long tale. And maybe you do too. So settle back and give yourself time to read this. You might as well savor it, because there won't be another. In parting, I want to thank my editors at Mosaic, Chrissie Giles and Rob Reddick, plus all the others, fact checkers and illustrators—they were a web site that used both. I don't expect to find their equal again.

Joyce Baronio Wearing Sleep Mask, by Walker Evans 
Metropolitan Museum of Art

     I thought I was dying.
     During the day, I was so tired my knees would buckle. Driving the car, my head would dip then I would catch myself. My face was lined with exhaustion. At night, I would sleep fitfully, legs churning, then snap awake with a start, gasping for breath, heart racing.
     My doctor was puzzled. He ordered blood tests, urine tests, an electrocardiogram—maybe, he thought, the trouble was heart disease; those nighttime palpitations....
     No, my heart was fine. My blood was fine.
     He ordered a colonoscopy—I was 47 years old, almost time for my first one anyway. So I forced down the four liters of Nulytely, to wash out my intestines so a gastroenterologist could take a good look inside.
     My colon was clean, the doctor administering the colonoscopy told me when I regained consciousness. No cancer. Not even any worrisome polyps.
     However. There was one thing.
     "While you under," he said, "you stopped breathing at one point. You might want to check that out. It could be sleep apnea."
     It was late 2008. I had never heard of obstructive sleep apnea. Many people hadn't. But we would.

                                                            *

     For most of human history, sleep was little considered by medicine. A realm of dreams, where the body repaired itself in some ineffable way. Since the middle of the 20th century, however, sleep has become increasingly studied, and we now understand it as a complicated physical condition, separate and very different from waking reality.
     Sleep is marked by dynamic changes throughout the body. Breathing regulates. Blood pressure and body temperature fall. Plus a "very significant loss of tone of most major muscle groups in the body," according to Wallace Mendelson, the former director of the University of Chicago's Sleep Research Laboratory. While nighttime slackening of muscles is not particularly significant when it comes to, say, the legs, when the muscles of the throat relax so much during sleep that the tongue lolls backward and the airway they support collapses, the result is obstructive sleep apnea—from the Greek apnoia, or "breathless."
      With OSA, the sleeper's supply of air is continually interrupted, causing oxygen levels in the blood to plummet, then the sleeper stirs, gasping, trying to breathe. This can happen hundreds of times a night, and the ill effects are many and severe.
     Thus apnea puts strain on the heart, racing to move the less effective de-oxygenated blood around the oxygen-starved tissues of the body, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke: studies suggest that 38,000 Americans die of heart disease worsened by sleep apnea.
     Apnea increases acid reflux, causing indigestion and increasing the risk of esophageal cancer. By affecting glucose metabolism, OSA promotes insulin resistance that leads to Type 2 diabetes and encourages obesity. Then there is the exhaustion of never having a full night's sleep, causing memory loss, anxiety, depression and inattention that contributes to traffic accidents—a 2015 study of Swedish drivers found that people with OSA are 2.5 times as likely to get in car accidents as those without—as well as absenteeism. People with sleep apnea are also fired from their jobs far more frequently than those without.
     All told, those with untreated sleep apnea, according to a study in the journal Sleep, are three times as likely to die during any given period as those without.
     As with smoking during the first decades after it was discovered to be lethal, there is a disconnect between the harms that OCS causes and public perception of it as a threat. Even sleep researchers were slow to acknowledge the problem. In 1972, when the Association for the Psychological Study of Sleep organized an international workshop on “nomenclature of the sleep disorders,” none of the diagnostic classification schemes submitted by participants even mentioned sleep apnea as an area of interest.

                                                                  *

     Sleep apnea was first described in medical literature in 1965 by a pair of European teams working independently: a trio of French researchers led by neurologist Henri Gastaut, who specialized in studying epilepsy, and German researchers Richard Jung and Wolfgang Kuhlo, who published "Neurophysiological Studies of Abnormal Night Sleep and the Pickwickian Syndrome."
     "The Pickwickian Syndrome" is the literary name given in 1956 to breathing troubles of the severely obese, and the lack of oxygen in the blood caused by those difficulties. The name is a reference to the servant Joe in Charles Dickens' 1836 novel "The Pickwick Papers." Joe is a large, "dumpling-cheeked" boy who throughout the novel is either asleep and snoring or lethargically going about his duties in a narcoleptic shamble, which might find him sliding off the box of a carriage and to the ground.
     "The night sleep of Pickwickian patients is interrupted by long apneic periods of 20-40 seconds duration, terminated by 1-3 irregular snoring breaths" the authors wrote.
     Today, nearly a billion of the world's 9 billion people suffer from mild to severe sleep apnea, according to the first global study of the ailment, published in The Lancet in August, 2019. The article, decrying "the scarcity of published data on the global prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea," notes that the country with the most severe OSA is China. Researchers there cite Asian facial configuration as a contributing factor.
     "The Chinese community should have a higher incidence of OSA than Caucasians due to upper respiratory structure—narrow cranial base and flat mid-face," wrote Dr. Lai Chun-Ting, a researcher at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, where unpublished data suggests that more than 50 percent of Taiwanese men over the age of 60 display some degree of apnea.
     Sleep apnea was first diagnosed in mainland China in 1981 at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, and researchers there mark that moment as the beginning of recognition that sleep is a distinct medical realm requiring specialized study and expertise.
     "The practice of modern sleep medicine in China starts from the recognition of sleep apnea," wrote Dr. Han Fang, president of China's Sleep Research Society.

                                                              *

     There is no genetic marker for sleep apnea. No virus, no telltale bacterial infection. Like sleep itself, OSA is a condition. While there are risk factors—obesity, high blood pressure, a large neck or large tonsils, small jaw—apnea does not present itself until after an individual falls asleep and stops breathing. The only way to diagnose the ailment is to observe someone sleeping.
     This was a surprisingly significant impediment to research.
     "There was no tradition of staying up at night to carry out scientific research," wrote Dr. William C. Dement, who started the Stanford University's sleep center, the world's first. "Except, of course, for astronomy."
      Prodded by both exhaustion and the suggestion from the doctor overseeing my colonoscopy, with other possibilities ruled out, in early 2009 I made an appointment at something called North Shore Sleep Medicine.
     My doctor had suggested the place, but I was dubious. It didn't feel right. The facility was not in a hospital, or even a medical building, but a brick house that had been converted into a clinic on a suburban residential street in Skokie, a working class community north of Chicago.
     I suspected the whole thing was some kind of elaborate scam.
     But I was met by an actual doctor, Lisa Shives, a pulmonologist with a degree from the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. That was a good sign. She peered down my throat then suggested that I take a polysomnogram—a sleep study, where my breathing, blood oxygen levels, and brain activity would be monitored and recorded. The polysomnogram cost several thousand dollars, but my insurance would cover it. That helped. If this were some new form of midnight quackery, I doubted Blue Cross/Blue Shield would foot the bill.
     I returned a few weeks later, on a Thursday in February at 9 p.m., an odd time for a medical appointment. It was dark outside. I rang a doorbell. A technician showed me into a small bedroom containing a square double bed and an armoire. Behind the bed, a horizontal window looked into a lab-like room stuffed with equipment. I sat on the bed, took off my clothes, hung them in the armoire, put on some flannel sleep pants, and called in the technician. Gilia, a young Romanian woman in blue latex gloves, stuck electrodes all over my chest and head, then gave me a fishnet shirt to put on to hold the wires in place.
     I caught sight of myself in the armoire mirror. There usually isn't a one specific moment in a man's life where the last vestige of youth definitively falls away and he becomes irretrievably middle-aged. But seeing my haggard, round face; electrodes held on by squares of tape on my forehead, my cheek, my chin, the wires snaking behind my left ear, my chest also sprouting wires, all taking place in this odd, clinical parody of a bedroom, I felt the chill of senescence descend.
     "A bad look," I muttered to my reflection.
     Gilia vanished, taking up a position behind the glass. Gingerly trailing wires, like a tethered beast, I rolled into bed, between the crisp white sheets, read a magazine for a few minutes then, about 10 p.m. clicked off the light and, miraculously, soon fell asleep.
     At midnight, I woke up, confused, in a strange bedroom, a young woman hovering above me in the dark—a wire had pulled loose as I tossed. She reattached it, then was gone and I went back to sleep.
     I woke up again, fished my watch from an end table and held it to my face: 4:30 a.m. More conversation. I fuzzily volunteered to try to go back to sleep, but Gilia said they had their six hours of data and I was free to go. Freed from the wires, I took a shower, using baby oil to scrub off the adhesive from the electrodes. After I got dressed, Gilia told me that my apnea was "severe" and Dr. Shives would give me the details later. I had planned to take myself out to a celebratory breakfast after my sleep test, but instead I just went home. I wasn't hungry; I was scared.
                                                             *

     A few weeks after my sleep study, I was back the North Shore Sleep Center in the daytime. Shives sat me down in front of a screen full of multi-colored squiggles and numbers, with a small black and white video of myself sleeping in the corner. Few people get the chance to watch themselves sleep—there's something unsettling about it, particularly in grainy black and white. like seeing a crime scene image of yourself, dead.
     Speaking of death, I had stopped breathing, Shives told me, for as long as 112 seconds—almost two minutes. A normal reading on a pulse oximeter is between 95 and 100 percent blood oxygen saturation. Those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease might have a reading in the upper 80s. Mine at times dipped to 69 percent.
     How bad is that? The World Health Organization, in a guide to medical personnel, suggests they immediately check whether a patient's airway is blocked, a lung has collapsed or their heart has stopped beating, should oxygenation fall to 94 percent or below.
     My options were few. I could, she said, have a uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, a procedure as ghastly as its name: removing tissue from my soft palate and widening my airway at the back of my throat. But it was bloody and recovery could be long and troublesome. Shives raised the possibility only to immediately dismiss it as too hideous to consider and perhaps, I later suspected, take the sting off the second option: the mask.
     She ushered me into a small side room, where one wall was lined with shelves of Styrofoam heads, each wearing a clear, soft blue-tinted plastic mask, held on by a series of elastic straps, around the temples, some down the forehead and between the eyes. Some masks were large, covering the nose and mouth, some smaller, covering just the nose, the masked nose slightly comical, a high-tech clown nose. All somewhat tinctured with horror, like heads stuck on pikes. Screaming and fleeing the office didn't seem the path of the hero, however. I tried on a mask. It fit.

                                                            *

     In the first few decade and a half after OSA was identified, there was only one treatment option. You could have a tracheotomy—a surgical procedure where a tracheostomy, or hole, is cut low in your throat, to allow air directly into the lungs, bypassing your collapsing upper airway. Jung and Kuhlo performed the first tracheotomy to treat OSA in 1969. It offered reliable relief, but had complications of its own, and doctors only considered it in the fact of patients in severe and immediate distress.
     "In the early days, doctors didn't know much," said Schwartz. "In the '80s, when I began, doctors were really not attuned to this problem. We were seeing the tip of the iceberg, the most severe apnea patients, who were gasping, snoring, choking during sleep, struggling to breathe. Tossing, turning, kicking, thrashing, jerking, tearing sheets up. They'd wake up with a headache, from their bodies' tissues not getting enough oxygen. Feeling very fatigued, as you might expect. They'd become depressed, there were mood changes, short-temper."
     Patients were understandably wary of the procedure, which today is "a surgical option of last resort" performed only in cases of extreme medical urgency.
     "I was always a very loud, aggressive snorer, waking up in the middle of the night, gasping," said Angela Cackler, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, who was diagnosed with sleep apnea in 2008, though she believes she had OSA since she "was tiny."
By 2012 her heart was failing.
     "I went into the emergency room because I was really tired, not feeling well," she said. "I found out it was heart failure. The next morning, they said, 'We are going to do a tracheotomy.'"
     And how has she adjusted to the tracheostomy after seven years?
     "Oh my gosh, I'm still trying to adjust to it," she said. "It's a battle to deal with. It is not fun. There is a lot of cleaning. It's nasty. It's work. You don't breathe normally. Your natural humidifier is completely gone. You have to supplement that. You're susceptible to infections."
     That said, the procedure did eliminate her OSA.
     "It's definitely a huge cure for it," she said, adding that the biggest drawback to a tracheostomy is it has kept her from swimming, a recreation she once enjoyed. "I don't snore and I can breathe and sleep better. I hate the care of it and the looks I get."
Would she have it done again?
     "If I had to do it again, yeah, absolutely," she said. "It has saved me."
Though they work in treating OSA, the life-altering drawbacks of tracheotomies inspired Colin Sullivan, a post-doctorate research fellow from Sydney University, to invent the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, or CPAP, that would become the ubiquitous first line treatment for apnea.
     He had gone to Toronto University to aid Dr. Eliot Phillipson in his research on respiratory control in dogs during sleep. Experimental gases were used, delivered to the dogs through a tracheostomy. Returning to Australia, Sullivan designed a mask that could fit around the snout of dogs to deliver gas.
     A human patient scheduled for a tracheotomy was "eager to know if there was anything else that might work," in Sullivan's words, inspired him to try to modify the dog mask for use by people.
     Sullivan did not invent the idea of blowing air into patients' lungs. That goes back at least to 1936, when London physician P.E. Poulton wrote a report in The Lancet about how he treated acute pulmonary edema with pressurized air. Poulton found "an Electrolux or Hoover vacuum cleaner answers the purpose," reversing it to blow through a regulator to maintain pressure and into a mask. (Perhaps a reflection of the Great Depression then in full cry, but Poulton, incredibly to today's sensibilities, does not mandate using a new vacuum cleaner to treat patients. Instead he suggests that, "when the household vacuum is employed the machine should be run for some minutes first of all to get rid of dust.")
     Sullivan took plaster casts of patients' faces, creating a Fiberglas mask attached to a hose. The blower—shades of P.E. Poulton—was salvaged from a vacuum cleaner, with a head harness crafted from the inside of a bicycle helmet. In a 1981 paper describing the process, Sullivan used the mask fitting over the nostrils of five patients and found, "continuous positive airway pressure completely prevented the upper airway occlusion in each of the five patients. The upper airway occlusion could be turned off and on simply by increasing or reducing the level of positive airway pressure."
     Sullivan patented his device, but it took almost a decade to bring CPAP to apnea patients outside a lab. First he partnered with Baxter Healthcare, which conducted trials for three years, then abandoned the effort. But one Baxter employee, Dr. Peter Farrell, quit his job and formed a new company, ResMed, to market the CPAP device. Revenues for its first fiscal year, 1990, were less than $1 million. In 2018, ResMed was an S&P 500 company with revenues of $2.3 billion and 6,000 employees operating in 100 countries.
     Now that they could offer a viable treatment, doctors began vigorously spreading the alarm about OSA. In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993, "Sleep Apnea—A Major Public Health Problem," Phillipson wrote it was "time for the nation to wake up to the staggering impact of sleep disturbances on the health and welfare of our society, an impact that rivals that of smoking," citing a University of Wisconsin study that found nearly a quarter of adult men have OSA, and that "undiagnosed sleep apnea in adults represents a major public health burden" with further research "urgently needed' to understand the role apnea plays in heart and vascular disease."
     Millions of patients find relief with the CPAP machines, though success often requires perseverance.
     "There was an adjustment period," said Dr. Steven Frisch, a Chicago-area psychologist who began using the mask in 2002. "The first two years, not every night but often, I would wake up and the mask wasn't on me. I don't have any memory of taking it off in the middle of the night."
     Once he became used to the mask, his condition improved dramatically.
     "The benefits of it are I get a more restful sleep," said Frisch. "I sleep for longer periods of time within the night. I don't wake up with a racing heart. I don't wake up gagging for air the way I do during the day when I nod off."
     But as more patients were treated and the CPAP machine's technology was refined—CPAP machines now can upload data automatically to the cloud where it can be analyzed—doctors made an unwelcome discovery: Their primary treatment often didn't work. Not much of the time, not in the real world.
     "In the late '80s, we'd sit down with a patient and ask, 'How's it going with the mask?''' And they'd say it was going wonderfully," recalls Schwartz. "Until we began to put electronic chips in the machines in the, late '90s, into the 2000s, we never appreciated how little they were using their machines."
     The chips tracked how long the machines were used and found out they frequently weren't being used at all. "The mask is like something from a bad science fiction movie: big, bulky and obtrusive," The New York Times wrote in 2012, citing studies suggesting that half of CPAP users completely abandon the machines within three weeks of receiving them.
Half the patients found the mask uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and that was only within the first month.
     I certainly did.
     Though not right away. I was assigned a Puritan Sandman, rented at $175 a month with an additional $40 fee for the humidifying add-on. The name was no doubt intended to evoke the bouncy 1940s hit, "Mr. Sandman," but for me it seemed a machine assembled by that weird late 1930s comic book hero, "The Sandman," in his business suit, fedora and gas mask. With a water tank at the back—to moisten the air—my new CPAP seemed like a device The Sandman would use to restore his crime-fighting powers at night through some magic serum.
     The CPAP did make me feel better the first night I wore it—again under observation at the Sleep Center. I woke refreshed, alert, feeling more energized than I had in years.
But the positive effect of the mask tapered off considerably after that first deliciously restorative night. Outside of the lab, I couldn't reproduce the benefits. That first "C" in CPAP is for continuous, meaning that it pushes air when you breathe in. But the CPAP also pushes air when you breathe out. You are fighting against it as you exhale, and I would wake up suffocating. There was the continual embrace of the mask, clamped to my face. Air would leak out around the edges and dry my eyes, even though they were closed.
     Then there was the unspoken shame of getting into bed next to my wife and tethering myself to this breathing machine with what looked like a ribbed hair dryer hose. She tried to put a bright spin on the situation.
     "You look like a fighter pilot!" she said, gamely. I didn't realize how lucky I was: spouses of other mask users ridicule them ("Elephant nose!" one Polish user recalled her husband calling her, "Alien!" before he went off to sleep in the guest room).
Despite their drawbacks, the masks have become commonplace.
     "A lot of people are familiar with CPAP, can use the word 'CPAP' and don't cringe," said Schwartz. "It's not some draconian mask. They know someone who has it. It's become much more commonly accepted that a lot of people are sleeping with these CPAP masks. To the point now that's it's become almost expected. Twenty years ago, following 9/11, you'd have to explain to TSA what CPAP is. Now CPAP is allowed; there's a placard."
For half the wearers. But I was part of the 50 percent who couldn't. Most nights at some point I would wake up and rip the mask off, casting it aside. In the morning, I would check the stats, which the machine dutifully recorded, and see how little it was working. I went back to North Shore Sleep, where Shives would fiddle with the pressure settings, or encourage me to try other masks. I went back several times, and began to feel like a regular. Nothing seemed to work.
Finally Shives, exasperated, said, "You know, if you lost 30 pounds, the problem might go away."
     That seemed like a plan. 
    I am not Asian, but I was heavy: while it is possible to be thin and have OSA, obesity multiplies the probability. I'm 5'9 and weighed 150 pounds when I graduated college. In 2009, I weighed 210. Some 40 percent of the world's population is overweight, the obesity rate tripling since the 1970s, as Western eating habits reach every corner of the globe. 
      This has spread apnea all over the planet, particularly in affluent countries. "In Saudi Arabia, three of ten Saudi middle-aged men and four of ten Saudi middle-aged women are at high risk for OSA," Ahmad Bahammam wrote in the Annals of Saudi Medicine in 2011, noting "the pandemic of obesity has increased the risk of OSA." More than half the patients admitted for coronary care have it. A 2016 study using self-administered tests in Argentina found 38 percent of men there suffered from mild to severe apnea.

                                                             *

      "In terms of therapeutics, CPAP really was such a huge success in the laboratory," said Schwartz. "When it was first rolled out in the mid 1980s ... its effects on apnea were so dramatic in the laboratory, and the patients were so sick everyone really wanted to believe that it would work. It took 10 or 15 years to realize, yeah, it would work in the laboratory. But at home, there were comfort issues, the cumbersome nature of sleeping with a mask under pressure. We'd try different pressure profiles. Maybe you need more humidification. Maybe this, maybe that. But the truth of the matter is, a large segment of the patients can't use it. Alternatives are needed, the so-called critical unmet need."
     A series of new treatments have been rolled out over the past two decades trying to meet that unmet need. Each offering its own particular benefits and drawbacks.
     In the mid-1990s, a dental appliance began to be used by those who couldn't tolerate the mask.
      "Obstructive sleep apnea happens in the back of your mouth," said Dr. David Turok, a general dentist with a practice concentrating on sleep apnea. "Basically your tongue doesn't have enough room in your mouth and pushes back into your airway. In my opinion, apnea is very much a dental problem. CPAP forces the tongue out of the way by forcing air down. An oral appliance brings the lower jaw forward, and the tongue comes with it."
     Think of it as a plastic brace, using upper teeth as an anchor to push the lower teeth, and with them the lower jaw, forward, creating an airway at the back of the throat.
     Like CPAP, the oral appliance is also an imperfect solution.
     "My three warnings to all my patients are this," said Turok. "One, because your jaw is held in a forward position, your muscles are being strained. That can be uncomfortable. Two, with this muscular distraction, your jaw might get used to that position as your anatomy adapts. You bite might change, and your jaw wants to stay in its forward, protruded position. And three, using the teeth as anchors, holding your jaw in a forward position, pressure on your teeth can move them a little."
     In his near-decade of creating OSA appliances, the majority of Turok's patients have success with an oral appliance.
     "Across the board it is very well tolerated and used," he said. "But these are mild-to-moderate cases. Someone with severe sleep apnea, CPAP is preferred. I never say you have a choice. You've got to try CPAP first."
     He said that the surest way to address apnea, for patients who can't adjust to either the CPAP or oral appliances, is orthognathic, or jaw advancement, surgery, a better procedure than widening the soft tissue of the throat.
     "Recovery is easier because it is bone healing instead of tissue healing," Turok said.
     Treatments are moot, however, if you don't know you have OSA. Turok observed that since apnea still goes undiagnosed in so many for so long, dentists have an important role to play in identifying the problem.
     "Sleep apnea is very much an oral condition," he said. "Not every dentist should be treating sleep apnea, but every dentist should be looking for it. We're looking down the back of people's throats much more than any physician. I think dentists should be a huge part of the screening process."
     Even with CPAP and oral appliances as treatments, doctors dragged their feet regarding diagnosis and treatment.
     "The diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders in primary care medicine today is essentially zero," Stanford's Dement said in a 1998 report to Congress from the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research. "The practice of medicine ends when the patient falls asleep."
     The latest strategy against OSA is, in essence, an electrical version of the oral appliance: hypoglossal nerve stimulation, where a small electrical charge is used to contract muscles and draw the tongue back during sleep.
     "We started the original work about 20 years ago," said Dr. Philip Smith, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School and an expert in pulmonary disease and sleep apnea. "A very small pacemaker—the same as a cardiac pacemaker, a wire loops up goes around nerve hypoglossal nerve, with a small cuff electrode."
     The hypoglossal, or 12th cranial, nerve controls the tongue. The pacemaker device is implanted in soft tissues just below the collarbone, the electrical lead is tunneled under the skin, and just below the jaw a cup is placed around the hypoglossal nerve. The patient using the device activates it before sleep by pressing a button on a remote control.
     "It's actually quite well tolerated," said Schwartz. "If you are awake you feel your tongue is stiffening up or moving a little bit forward. In general patients sleep through it really quite well."
     A 2014 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "upper-airway stimulation led to significant improvements in objective and subjective measurements of the severity of obstructive sleep apnea." That study was funded by Inspire, the only FDA-approved HNS device, available in the United States and certain European countries. The device was approved by the FDA in 2014, and makers of Inspire say that 6,000 people worldwide have the device implanted in their upper chests.

                                                            *

     In 2010, I decided to lose the weight. I had a goal—the 30-pound figure Shives recommended. And I had a plan, what I called the "Alcoholism Diet." In 2006 I had stopped drinking, learning two vital things about shedding addictive substances like alcohol, or sugar.
     First, you need to cut them out, not a bit, not mostly, but entirely. You can't drink just a little; it doesn't work. You have to eliminate the danger completely. Ditto for high calorie foods. So no cookies, cake, candy, ice cream or donuts. Zero. To check myself, I counted calories, and vigorously exercised.
     The second important factor was time. Being in recovery for a month is meaningless. The weight took years to go on, I had to give it time to come off—a full calendar year to lose the 30 pounds. And I did it, going from 208 pounds on Jan. 1, 2010, to 178 pounds on Dec. 31. It helped that I had a sharp opener I planned to use in my newspaper column crowing about the triumph, but only should I succeed.
       "Unlike you, I kept my New Year's resolutions..." I wrote.
     The apnea, in a rare twist, was now a positive, an inspiration to dieting. And losing the weight did the trick. No more mask.
     “What else helped?” I wrote. “I had a debilitating condition – sleep apnea – and a doctor said, if I lost 30 pounds, it might go away.”
     I’m surprised I admitted in print that I had OSA. It was embarrassing. I’m not sure why. It isn’t as if apnea were an ailment classically suffused with shame. It wasn't like having gonorrhea. I suppose OSA just seemed a feeble aging fat man's complaint, echoes of The Pickwick Papers' Joe. I'd see the elastic marks on the red flabby faces of my fellow commuters at the train station in the morning, and I'd pity them for it, and hated the thought of casting myself among them.

                                                            *

   "Weight loss is curative," said Smith. "The problem is, they can't do it."
     Which underscores the enormous difficulty of dieting: even being unable to breath at night, even being confronted by the need to wear a suffocating mask or have an electric device implanted alongside your clavicle, or running the risk of developing cardio-vascular disease paired with exhaustion, most people still can't take weight off and keep it.
     I took the weight off, but the pounds I thought I had lost somehow found me, creeping slowly back on over the next decade: 20 of the 30 pounds I had shed. And with it, the apnea came back. Not that I realized it until the summer of 2019, when I underwent spine surgery: a C3-7 laminoplasty. The pre-surgery questionnaire at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago asked if I sometimes snored, if I was often tired, if I had ever been diagnosed with sleep apnea.
     Yes, yes and yes.
     "It's important to screen people for sleep apnea because it could be a risk when having surgery," said Dr. Phyllis Zee, director for the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, who said the hospital has been conducting pre-surgical screening for apnea for about 10 years. "It may be a risk factor for poor outcomes after surgery."
     The questions about snoring and exhaustion are important because, despite the efforts of medical science to spread the word, most people with apnea don't realize they have it.
     "Unfortunately, the majority of people who have sleep apnea are not diagnosed, so screening is very important," said Ravindra Alok Gupta, MD, anesthesiologist and medical director of the post-anesthesia care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
     A 2017 German study found that while OSA is present in as high as 40 percent of the general German population, that only 1.8 percent of hospital patients were identified as having it, which the authors cite as possibly due "unawareness" of the patients and "under-diagnosis" among hospital staff, whose consideration of the possibility of apnea the researchers found "low."
     Gupta pointed out that not only can the breathing stoppages and low blood oxygen levels associated with apnea have profound negative impact on surgery, but there are a variety of hazards that apnea is both a cause of and a marker for.
     "There are other conditions associated with sleep apnea: increased asthma, acid reflux, other lung problems," he said. "Often they have high blood pressure."
     An anesthesiologist needs to know this beforehand.
     "Our choice of anesthesia might change based on sleep apnea," said Gupta. They might choose a peripheral nerve block over general anesthesia, for instance. "We have to think about the medication being given them. Several medications can cause airways to collapse, or when you start adding multiple medications, those effects build up and layer one on another. "
     Afterward "we have to watch them very carefully, monitoring them for a longer period of time."
     A study in 2007 that found 8 percent of post-surgical patients who had complications severe enough to send them to the Intensive Care Unit could be directly attributed to apnea.
     A 2013 article in the New England Journal of Medicine called sleep apnea an "epidemic" among surgical patients and noted while one in four adult men in the United States have apnea, for those facing surgery the percentage is even greater—8 in 10 bariatric patients, for instance, have sleep apnea, resulting in a range of risks.
     "Patients with sleep apnea undergoing orthopedic or general surgery appeared to be at increased risk for pulmonary complications and need for intensive care services, which significantly increase health care costs," the authors noted.
     My revealing I had sleep apnea had immediate effects. My spine surgery was time-sensitive—taking place a week after I first went over my MRI with a surgeon—but in that brief period the hospital insisted I take a home sleep study to gauge the severity of the apnea. Instead of going to a sleep center, I brought home a kit that instructed me how to place sensor bands around my chest, a pulse oximeter on my finger, and a clip under my nose to monitor breathing. There was no EEG, and one drawback of these take-home tests is the units never know if you are actually asleep or not while the readings are being made.
     Still, the lowering threshhold of the cost and inconvenience of diagnosis offers hope that more people will discover they have apnea—the cost and time needed to have an in-lab polysomonogram is thought to be one reason up to 80 percent of men who have moderate-to-severe sleep apnea are never diagnosed.
     The test found I had moderate sleep apnea—perhaps a function of keeping that last 10 pounds off—information the anesthesiologist used when putting me under.

                                                             *

     Despite the possibly range of varying treatments, there is consensus in how to approach obstructive sleep apnea—start with the mask, try to do make it work, and if it doesn't, find something that does.
     Dr. Lawrence Epstein, program director at the Sleep Medicine Fellowship Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and past president of the American Association of Sleep Medicine, calls CPAP "the recommended first line therapy" but says treatment ultimately is "more about knowing all the options and trying to tailor the therapy both to what the patient has and what they would be willing to use."
     He pointed out that while OSA is one condition, it is prompted by a multitude of causes—facial and throat configuration, muscle tone, obesity—and so not every treatment works the same for every patient..
     "We have very effective treatments, but all have some downsides. You should try to match the person with the thing most likely to work. You need to match the patient correctly to the right therapy."
     There really is only one caveat:
     "Make sure it works." he said, noting that "we still have a ways to go" when it comes to perfecting OSA treatment.
     Much hope is centering on that treatment soon being a pill.
      "The future is neurochemical," said Dr. Philip L. Smith, of Johns Hopkins. "We have a mouse model; we can treat apnea in a mouse. Probably in the next 10 years, maybe five, you'll be able to take medication for sleep apnea, because it's a neural-chemical problem. It's not obesity itself, not fat pressing on the airway, but fat excreting certain hormones that makes the airway collapse. The chemicals that fat secrete are the culprit."
     There are also promising human trials. Dr. Phyllis Zee was co-lead author of a paper published two years ago in the journal SLEEP that found dronabinol, a synthetic version of a molecule found in cannabis, is "safe and effective" in treating sleep apnea.
     “The CPAP device targets the physical problem but not the cause,” said Zee, whose study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. “The drug targets the brain and nerves that regulate the upper airway muscles. It alters the neurotransmitters from the brain that communicate with the muscles. Better understanding of this will help us develop more effective and personalized treatments for sleep apnea.”
     There are other hopeful signs. A double-blind international study of atomoxetine and oxybutynin, used in combination, found the drugs "greatly reduced" apnea, cutting the apnea hypoxic index from a medium of 28 to 7.5.
     But for a person struggling with apnea now, the wait might be a long one.
     "They've been predicting in 20 years we're going to have some drug to deal with the problem," said Schwartz. "The only problem is, it's been a rolling 20 years. We'll get there, I have no doubt. There are a couple of promising pharmacological approaches that may be on the horizon."
     Waiting is a skill many seeking better health need to develop. For me, it was back to long-term dieting and an appointment at Northwestern Sleep's Center. But as a reminder of just how many people are dealing with this condition: I was put in touch with them in July, when I had my surgery and learned the apnea had returned. They said they would schedule me for the first available appointment: in late October.


                                                          # # #

As their rights vanish, women lash out at exercise bike maker

     Extensive planning, hard work and big money go into making commercials. Though it can be hard to tell, based on how frequently these endeavors go spectacularly wrong, despite all the effort that went into them.
     The typical arc of a bad ad — like Pepsi’s 2017 misfire staring Kendall Jenner, suggesting street protests will dissolve into happiness if only we toss back enough Pepsi — ends with the company pulling the commercial and apologizing. Which Pepsi did. But its stock didn’t tank.
     The same can’t be said for Peloton, the exercise equipment company whose “The Gift That Gives Back” commercial not only drew waves of ridicule but is blamed for Peloton stock dropping 15 percent, losing $1.5 billion in market value over three days.
     The offense isn’t glaring. It’s subtle. At first glance, the 30-second spot seems no different than any other commercial where gorgeous hubby gives gorgeous wife a gorgeous something for Christmas.
     A guy gives his wife an exercise bike, she’s happy. What’s the problem?
     The devil is in the details. Two stand out: First, the rail thin arm the wife extends as she takes a selfie, announcing, “First ride.”
     Second, her fear. In a saucer-eyed close-up she confides, “a little nervous but ... excited.” Viewers compared it to a horror movie.
     Peloton forgot the sop. You know the sop, like in that GMC truck commercial, “One for You, One for Me.” Here, too, a guy gives his wife a gift: a red SUV, half of a pair of trucks. Only she rushes to his blue pickup. “I love it!” she cries, draping her body defensively over the vehicle. When he tries to explain, she insists “I love it!”

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Semi Solid

     "How beautiful is candor!" Walt Whitman once said.
     Ain't it the truth? In this era where falsity has been elevated—to the presidency, to an entire political/philosophical system—we in the fact-based world have to temper our disgust with an acknowledgement of just how bad the alternative looks on display. No wonder they can't or won't perceive it.
     Because lying is a symptom of cowardice: you are afraid of the truths you are denying. Which is such a loss, to the liar, because it is better to confront a thousand unpleasant, unflattering truths than to dwell in the sump of mendacity that these people do.
    I smiled, looking at this display of hollow turkeys at Sunset Foods. "Semi Solid." Another word for "Hollow," obviously, and the bright spin must not have worked, because they were piled around the store the week after Thanksgiving.
     Other candy makers seem to get by calling their products "hollow"—both Lindt and Russell Stover boldly advertise hollow chocolate Santas and bunnies on Amazon.  Hollow bunnies have their own cultural niche. T-shirts show a bunny and confess, semi-ironically, "I feel hollow inside." Then there is British author Robert Rankin's most popular novel, "The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse" (a loose-jointed murder mystery).

Boldly hollow

     Smithsonian.com looked into why chocolate Easter bunnies are hollow. (Easier to eat, supposedly). 
     Candy is not the only place this dodge is used. There are semi-solid doors, semi-solid gold chains. It isn't exactly calling it a "We think you're stupid gold chain." But close.
     Not that "Hollow Milk Chocolate" sounds better, at least I don't think it does. But then again, my take on milk chocolate is so marginal that it's practically in the realm of stuff that isn't worth the calories to eat. 
     We each have our own personal list. For me it's milk chocolate—with the exception of the rare Chunky, redeemed by raisins—plus Dunkin' Donuts... I was in a Dunkin' Donuts last week, where I had pulled a column subject so we could talk out of the cold, and contemplated their "Old-fashioned donut" at 280 calories. I like plain donuts, and might have done it, but then reminded myself it was a Dunkin' Donuts old-fashioned donut, a spongy, bland, bleh circle of nothing at, the little sign revealed, 280 calories. It would be a betrayal of Huck Finn donuts and all Huck Finn represents. I went for a black coffee and nothing else.
     Hershey bars, Dunkin' Donuts. What else? Peanuts aren't worth eating, unless they're honey glazed. Fruit punch. I'd say anything between a bun at McDonald's, but about every three years I have a taste for a McDonald's cheeseburger, though if I give into the inclination I'm immediately sorry I did. Otherwise, if I even walk into a Metra car where somebody is eating McDonald's, I move to another car. It's disgusting. 
     
     
     
     

Flashback 2010: Today's outcast is tomorrow's icon

     Some delinquent scrawled graffiti on the bottom of the Northbrook water tower last week. Maybe they'd have thought twice before doing that if they knew the edifice's place in architectural history. There's much more to it than "SAVE FERRIS," as I discovered in this 2010 column.
     

OPENING SHOT . . .

     When we bought our home in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook—can it be?—10 years ago this June, third on my list of gut-twisting worries, right after all the urgent repairs needed and the busy train tracks right across the street, was the enormous water tower practically in the backyard.
     The thing is huge, and while not quite as menacing as, say, an atomic power plant cooling tower, it isn't something that might appeal to future buyers either. "Oh honey, look, it has that lovely humongous water tower in the backyard. Let's get it!"
     The 135-foot tall tower is, by my count, 150 paces from my yard. But the house is a block from the elementary school and a block from the train station. So I deemed the tower an acceptable eyesore.
     Cut to last month, when the village announced it will be building a new water tower, twice as capacious, over by the expressway.
     Tearing down the old tower will improve whatever property values remain after the Great Housing Bubble popped. But did I rejoice?
     Of course not.
     Human nature being what it is, I felt a surprising flutter of propriety concern—what would become of our water tower? A neighbor I quizzed, amazingly, feels the same. As do my boys.
     Not that we're trying to save it. Who would try to save an old water tower? Of course, this is no ordinary water tower—this one has a cameo in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," with "SAVE FERRIS" painted on the side. 

     Does that matter? Does it matter that the thing has a name? A Horton Waterspheroid, constructed in 1954, the first of 2,400 built nationwide by the Chicago Bridge & Iron Co?
     If I'm going to make a case for saving it—and I'm not; this is purely an intellectual exercise—I would frame my argument, not in historic, but aesthetic terms. Anyone familiar with the loss of architectural treasures knows that every single one was torn down because people—not everybody, but enough—failed to recognize them as lovely or important.
     Tastes shift—during the modernist mania after World War II, when we fell in love with sleek, unadorned expanses of glass and steel, it was easy to view the ornate Victorian buildings that we all appreciate so much now as over-ornamented monstrosities. So down went the Stock Exchange Building and the Garrick Theatre and such.
     Sometimes those in charge were merely philistines. We should always remember that the boors running the Chicago Theological Seminary in the 1950s were about to tear down Frank Lloyd Wright's sublime Robie House to make way for a dorm when saner heads rushed in.
     I can imagine a day in our sleek, iPod and electric car future when a waterspheroid suddenly seems prescient and monumental and beautiful.

'DESIGNED FOR BEAUTY'

     That's certainly how it was presented at the time.
     "The pleasing symmetry of a Horton Watersphere is fast becoming a symbol of progress, utility and good water service," touted an ad in the April 1955 issue of American City magazine. Other ads called it "striking" and "attractive."
     Someday, when Google starts buying up old water towers and jamming them with massive zettaflop memory banks and servers and routing switches, we might feel smart having kept it. Or we could mirror the tower and pay Anish Kapoor to sign the bottom—it would outshine the Bean in Millennium Park.
     I sat down with village officials in charge of public works, who are approaching this as a purely practical matter: What does it cost to keep and what does it cost to tear down?
     And rightly so. The math is surprising. I would have guessed that the tower would be far cheaper to paint every decade than to demolish, but it's the reverse; far more expensive to paint, by a factor of ten—$240,000 when it was last painted, in 2000, and probably $300,000 by now, compared with an estimated $25,000 to demolish (a cost lessened by selling scrap steel from the tower, which weighs about a quarter of a million pounds).
     And yes, they sometimes demolish a water tower by felling it like a tree, or blowing it up, or cutting it apart with hydraulic shears.
     The village hasn't made a decision yet.
     "We're still not to that point," said Kelly Hamill, assistant director of public works in Northbrook. "We've got a contract with the consultant."
     In the meantime, I've learned two things: first, to cast a newly appreciative eye on Horton, as I call him, glowing golden in the evening sun, filling my kitchen window.
     And second—and this really was a surprise—Northbrook, alone among the interior Chicago suburbs, draws its own water from Lake Michigan and treats it, independently. (Adding a bit more chlorine than the city. "We err on the cautious side," said Ken Gardner, the water utilities superintendent, a sentiment that could be our village motto.)
     My bet is that the old tower goes. And while it'll be missed, for a while, the truth is that life goes on. The Chicago Bridge & Iron Company is still in existence, for example, but now headquartered near Houston, Texas. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis -- the times change, and we change with them.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     When I was winding up my conversation with Ken Gardner, he asked if I wanted to know about the strangest call he's gotten in his 36 years with the village. I did.
     "Somebody once phoned us and asked if we could adjust the water temperature. Because they were having trouble getting hot water."
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 13, 2010

New book tells of city’s Poles including — łał! —Jews

     I believe I owe an apology to Dominic Pacyga, whose book, “American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago” was recently published.
     Before I even cracked the book open, I asked a question that was also a judgment:
     What if he ignores the Jews?
     Because if I have learned one thing from reading my mail, it is that being Polish and being Jewish are often viewed as mutually exclusive, at least by the former. Having a grandfather born in Bialystok — definitely in Poland — and other grandparents from Galicia and Belarus, which are sometimes Polish, sometimes not, means nothing. 
     If Pacyga overlooked Jews entirely, what would I do? Confront the distinguished history professor? I had so enjoyed his “Chicago: A Biography.”   

     Should I even venture into this realm? Polish Chicagoans can have a ... choosing my words carefully ... finely calibrated sense of outrage. I’ll never forget their indignation when I came back from Vilnius after interviewing the Lithuanian president. Vilnius being the nation’s capital led me to the ignorant blunder of assuming it is therefore Lithuanian, and not, as I was informed with various degrees of asperity, a Polish city under occupation.
     Still, I plunged in.
     I’m glad I did. Pacyga starts debunking untruths about Chicago on page one: “The city often proclaims itself as Poland’s second city, with only Warsaw containing a larger Polish population ... it is a myth...”
     Turns out my question echoes the book’s central premise.
     “Just who is a Pole,” Pacyga asks. “Could a Pole be an Orthodox Christian, a Protestant, a Jew, or an atheist? Was a Pole anyone who believe in a free and independent Poland, even if their first language was Yiddish?”

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Flashback 1991: Black Jews assert claim to faith

Rabbi Capers Funnye preaching in 1991 (Photo for the Sun-Times by Al Podgorski).

     Facebook dangles potential friends, and most I don't know so let drift on by. 
     But I could not pass up Rabbi Capers Funnye, because in the early 1990s I visited his synagogue and wrote about him.  I really liked going to his synagogue, and meeting people who follow my faith, not because of the accident of their birth, but because they found it themselves and embraced it. Judaism meant something to them. 
    I had just seen his tallis, a few years back, in the Smithsonian's collection of African-American artifacts, along with Dizzy Gillespie's angled trumpet and Oprah Winfrey's microphone (reflecting, somewhat smugly, that I had met all three: how often does THAT happen at a museum?)
     The story stands out for several reasons. First, an editor, Larry Green, did not want to put it in the paper. What, he wondered, was "the hook?" What made it news? It was news, I said, measuredly, trying to contain myself, because people didn't know about it. Then he wanted me to somehow include Sammy Davis Junior, as a topical peg. Cause he's JEWISH. That I would not do.
     And just to show that no good work goes unpunished, it ran, and the complaints rolled in. I had written a sidebar on the Falashas, Ethiopian Jews, and they were aghast that I treated their origins as subject to speculation, and not descendants of the Queen of Sheba, or whatever myth they choose to embrace. I think I heard from every Ethiopian Jew in Chicago. 
     Then, to top it off, Rabbi Funnye complained, quite vehemently if I recall. The photo, which I remember running on the front page. It showed him with his mouth open. He didn't like that, thought it was bad, and I couldn't convince him otherwise.
     Plus there was my own disappointment at how warily mainstream white Judaism treated people who voluntarily took up their heritage. It struck me as mere bigotry, and made me embarrassed, not for the first or last time, that organized Judaism can be as myopic, unwelcoming and mistaken as organized anything else.

     Exodus 25 is not the most exciting chapter in the Bible. It contains complex instructions on how to build the Holy Ark. It includes lists: "violet and purple, and scarlet, twice dyed, and fine linen, and goats' hair. . . ."
     Seven men in succession rise and read the ancient Hebrew words. Some read fluidly, almost singing. Others hesitate and struggle.
     When they have finished, Rabbi Capers Funnye Jr. stands before his congregation and explains how the 5,000-year-old Scriptures apply to the average black Jew living on the South Side of Chicago today.
     "Why are (the passages) so detailed in saying precisely these measurements of the sanctuary?" Funnye asks, marking off the air with his hands. "Why these measurements? They could have just said, `They built the temple.' "
     The two dozen people at Beth Shalom Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, 5304 S. Winchester, listen carefully. Occasionally, someone cries out, "Teach on, Rabbi!" or, "Cane, cane," Hebrew for "Yes, yes."
     "It is to teach us to have perfection in our lives, that's why," Funnye continues. "It is so detailed because we're supposed to pay attention to the little things. To learn to take life a step at a time, day by day, mitzvah by mitzvah."
     The congregants of Beth Shalom, and those of at least eight other black synagogues across Chicago, practice forms of Judaism.
     But are they Jews?
     Mainstream Judaism for the most part says no.
     "You can't stand on the corner and say, `I'm Jewish,' and be Jewish," said Rabbi Mordecai Simon, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. "You can study Judaism, you can practice Judaism. But being Jewish is based on being legally a Jew. In Israel, 80 percent of the Jews do not practice Judaism, but they're still Jews because law says if you are born of a Jewish mother, or converted in accordance to Jewish legal proceeding, you're Jewish."
     Funnye said he was "rankled" by the idea that a person without knowledge of Judaism, whose mother is Jewish, is automatically a Jew.
     "He can walk into a Jewish community, and he would be accepted wholeheartedly, and I would have a problem," said Funnye, whose credentials as a rabbi are questioned because he received them from an unrecognized black school in New York. "They would have to quiz me to see what I knew."
     Chicago has as few as several hundred or as many as 8,000 black Jews, depending on your source and your definition of a Jew. Beth Shalom is without question the most traditional by mainstream Jewish standards. Funnye and his family have undergone ritual conversion to the faith. He works for the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and his children attend Akiba Schechter Jewish Day School in Hyde Park, along with other children from his congregation.
     "He's very sincere, very committed," said Miriam Schiller, principal of Akiba Schechter, where seven of 44 children in elementary school are black. "He wants his children definitely to be Jewish and be educated Jewishly."
     Most black Jews were not born Jewish. Nor are they Ethiopian Jews, whose roots go back millennia (see story, next page). Rather, they were attracted to the idea of Judaism's sense of victory over slavery, an aspect felt particularly strongly at this time of year, with the Passover seder celebrating the Exodus from Egypt.
     "I could take you to the Torah and show you any number of places that apply to a people who had lost their identity, who came by ships," said Tyrone Handy, a member of Beth Shalom.
     Michael Bridge, born and raised a Baptist in Chicago, voiced the common black Jewish belief that it is the white Jews who are newcomers, historically, keeping the nest warm until blacks could return to the faith.
     "The converts came into it when the real people went to sleep," he said.
     "In the majority of blacks who identify themselves as Jews, there is a quest and a thirst that Islam does not satisfy," said Funnye, "that no form or facet of Christianity satisfies."
     Observant Jews would recognize most parts of Beth Shalom's service, which takes almost three hours. There is the reading of the Torah scroll, with the traditional blessings before and after each reader, and the reciting of the shma, the key prayer in Judaism. The men and boys sit on one side of the aisle, the women and girls on the other, as demanded by Orthodox Jewish law.
     The sanctuary—once a living room, with the blond wood paneling still in place - would be recognized also as a Jewish synagogue, albeit a modest one. The Ark is plywood, covered by a threadbare ceremonial curtain salvaged from a wealthier, white synagogue. Overhead is a simple eternal light. To the left, a menorah. To the right, a shofar (ram's horn) on a stand.
     But a few aspects would be unfamiliar. In this house of worship, God is called "Yah," from the original Hebrew name for God, unpronounced in white synagogues. There is a testimony, where members of the congregation stand, as the spirit moves them, and talk about their week. On this day one speaks of the death of his grandmother ("She is out of her pain"), another of the impact of Paul Robeson, and a third on the joy of faith ("It's a blessing to be in this life and have an idea what you are"). And Funnye and his congregation sometimes inflect their Hebrew with a hearty gospel growl.
     Other black Chicago Jewish congregations have looser definitions of themselves.
     "We're a different branch," said Rabbi James Hodges of the House of Israel Temple of Faith, 7130 S. Chicago, where congregants wear skullcaps and prayer shawls and observe Jewish dietary laws. "We don't profess Judaism in its religious sense; we profess Judaism in its national sense. We are Hebrew Israelites; the original Jews descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We have constructed our own service form."
     Despite the publicity of tense black-Jewish relations, black Jews say they rarely experience anti-Semitism.
     "In our community, it's more a lack of understanding," said Charles Hickman, who also uses the Hebrew name Ben Cayil. "When they visualize `Jewish' they think of white guys with long beards. They don't understand how an African can be a Jew."
     He said that within the black Jewish community, there are differences in perspectives toward the religion.
     "The last time I went to Rabbi Hodges' synagogue, they weren't doing the week's Torah portion," said Hickman. "That is an integral part to me."
     Others include Jesus in their service, which baffles Hickman. "They've got off the path in some way," he said. "Ain't no God but God."
     "I think Judaism appeals to us because it is deeply rooted in the African heritage," said Rabbi Robert Nolan, who heads a congregation in Harvey. "I recall as a child growing up in the Southern part of the United States. There was this sense of Jewishness in the black community."
     "There are a wide variety of different kinds of black Jews," said James Landing, an associate professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has been studying black Jews for years. "There are those who refer to themselves as Orthodox Jews, incorporating a lot of Judaistic trappings; symbols, skullcaps. They may speak Hebrew."
     He said others were Old Testament Christians or Baptists "under a veneer of Judaism."
     Landing said black Jews in Chicago did not display "a legitimate interest" in Jewish teachings in their contact with the mainstream Jewish establishment.
     "They wanted financial help," he said. "They wanted buildings. They wanted to be donated old synagogues. But they were not interested in participating in white Jewish life."
     Simon, who has been in contact with the black Jewish community for 20 years, disagrees: "It's not a scam. The black Jews I know are very serious and very concerned with their religious faith, which they describe as Judaism. The organized Jewish community has tried to offer assistance in religious education - supplies, books, texts - which have been received lukewarmishly. They don't want the incursion of the white establishment. They don't want to be patronized; they're proud of what the y're doing."
     Funnye finds it ironic that mainstream white Judaism, which itself is divided into four distinct varieties—reform, conservative, Orthodox and Hasidic—should deny black attempts to form their own interpretations.
     "There are four strands in the white Jewish community; each one of those had a right to define Judaism as they understand it," he said. "Yet, it seems they want to deny our right to define an understanding of Judaism. We have people who are learned, yet black Jews tend to be more an object of curiosity than accepted as sincere."
     Nolan said: "We feel that there is enough historical basis that we have a right to exist as Jews. We don't have to have the approval of someone else.
     "We want to develop and maintain close ties with all Judaism. Jews are the color of the rainbow. It's not a black-and-white issue.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 31, 1991