Ode to senior athletes and former athletes now "Seniors"

On the weekend of Memorial day, I flew up to Rhode Island to participate in graduation events of my former High SchoolPortsmouth Abbey. I had been invited to address graduating senior athletes and next year's captains [including nephew Jimmy Buckley] at the Annual Portsmouth Abbey Varsity Sports Dinner. Thanks to classmate and teammate Ignatius MacClellan several of my Abbey and Harvard classmates also attended.

Headmaster Jim DeVecchi and Athletic Director Al Brown had suggested that my topic should touch on leadership. I was encouraged to talk about my journey of the last year and a half in Stroke rehabilitation. I chose to focus on the benefits I had gained as an Athlete how the experience of competitive athletics had taught me to leverage competition and adversity and the to focus on the "little victories" [progress] and planning the steps to achieve. My hope was to present these connections between my athletic career and remarkable recovery from the devistating stroke to inspire next year's Abbey captains in how to approach their roles for themselves, their teammates and their teams.

I began my talk with an "invocation" of Houseman's Ode to an Athlete Dying Young and ended with a ceremonial passing of a baton to each of next year's captains. I used this artificial ceremony to punctuate my rambling, and to end with a call to action for next year's captains: to adopt the theme "miracles don't just happen" in their new role as a team captain. My intention was to emphasize how significantly my experience in athletics had guided my recovery and to relate that insight as to why their leadership role could make the significant difference between a possibility for acquiring the life altering skills such as those that have supported my "miraculous recovery" and just running around the pastures of Portsmouth in their underwear.

[full text from my speaker's notes]

Time for passing the baton
"When Iggy first called me to propose that I fly up to speak at this dinner, I leaped at the chance – as public speaking was a part of what a did professionally and remains a big challenge both physically and cognitively.So this has been a great opportunity to “do some good- I’ll have to throw a heavy RhoDILAND accent in there – ironically, if I do too well tonight, I put my disability status at risk. So, it’s time for me to present you with a small gift – a special edition of my miracles don’t just happen poster delivered here tonight by my sister – not John Murphy’s sister – Jimmy Buckley’s mother!

As captain it is now your responsibility to work with your coach and your teammates so that you’re not just leading "catholic youth" around or through the cornfields of Portsmouth in your underwear.

Here are a few suggestions from "one made weak by time and fate but strong enough in will" to have seen the kiwi in the buckwheat. And so I have a gift I’d like to pass on to each captain – I've come as far as I can tonight and so I’ll symbolically pass this baton with a new edition of my miracles don’t just happen poster with these additional tips:

• Leverage what can be done to make progress towards those things you dream of doing.


• Develop a road map and know mileposts that will mark progress towards your goals.
• Ritualize the feeling or the image of reaching each “next step.”


• Don’t dwell on the entire distance you have ahead, focus on taking the next, right step.


• Miracles don’t always arrive by leaps and bounds, but by a sequence of small steps in the right direction.
• Cultivate respect and empathy for teammates and competitors.


• The relationships you cultivate with teammates and competitors are a far more powerful source of motivation than a nurturing of individual achievement

Parting thought from Tennyson’s Ulysses

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

"Thank you SO much for this therapeutic opportunity to acknowledge that although I am now "permanently disabled", some work of noble note might yet be done.Thank you for the inspiration to do some good as I continue to get well."

Stuck between Alzheimer's and Autism in Austin

Fear and Loathing of Red Flags or the scent of an old Red Herring?

My current cognitive dysfunction and agitated state has shifted from distress over Alzheimer-like short term memory deficit to one more commonly associated with Autism:

I’m hyper-sensitive to a point of distress and distraction by common background stimuli [sounds such as a refrigerator motor or ceiling fan in hallway are as disruptive and irrepressible as the pounding of a headache or ringing in one’s ears]
This hypersensitivity [from my dubious perspective] appears to contribute to or precipitate additional cerebral static. The cumulative effect of these sensations only inflames my anxiety over the genesis of the symptoms and prognosis for attaining and a more predictable set of expectations for any given day, the next week, or the rest of my life. I’m confused as how to interpret and if to share all this data with my medical team. Imagine how conflicted I feel about reporting to my neurologist that I’m having troubling walking and sleeping because of the inflamed big toe on my right (good) foot. My doctors carry a heavy case load of patients in what I assume are in a more acute phase of treatment for more life-threatening or debilitating disease. I’m guessing that the resurgence of the left leg spasticity has thrown a new gait dysfunction that is irritating toe on other foot Question: Will a neurologist see this as a red flag or a red herring? Does my asking beg the question? Or Is this all just fear and loathing?

I though I was past this stage already

In a posting quite some time ago (August of 2006) I referenced a comedy routine by Stephen Wright to describe my then state of mind: a persistent sensation of just catching oneself from falling while leaning back on two legs of a chair. His surreal, delusional monologue described[comically] "feeling like that all the time." Four months later, (December of 2006) I was celebrating “my enigmatic lucidity” acquired after relief from the cognitive impairments inflicted by medication of my spasticity with a drug called Baclofen. Soon thereafter, I reported the significant improvement I attributed to the resumption of the rigors of cognitive therapy – with an escalation to the equivalent of “doctoral- level” cognitive therapy [February of 2007 - April 2007]

These most recent hour-long therapy sessions involved annoyingly complex and repetitive arithmetic tabulations in highly distracting settings. My performance in each session was carefully monitored, analyzed and re-calibrated by my ever-vigilant and [if not for her passion for her patients and craft] the frighteningly-skilled Speech Therapist a.k.a Brain-Repair-engineer Shilpa . For example, setting of one session was conducted in the same room in which a brain education session for a group of other rehab patients was being held. Try self-monitoring your own brain function while a lecture of how the brain works is running in the background – while performing sequential, cumulative calculations in which functions are encoded symbols[e.g # represents “subtract 4” from running total]

As if on cue, (perhaps the body rebelled from all the attention that damn brain was getting?) the symptoms of my personal case of spasticity: persistent contraction of left leg - followed by sciatic nerve inflammation escalated and drove me to a level of distraction and discomfort to pursue treatment via Botox injection referred to as chemo-denervation in the rehabilitation journals [not as bad as it sounds] but the procedure does involve the introduction of a neuro-toxin by a needle large enough to penetrate the belly of my offending hamstring. The hope and desired affect is temporary “paralysis” of the injected muscle [the presence of the toxin inhibits the muscle’s reception of and transmission of the signal initiated in the brain.

So, any potential for relief from pain is gained through temporary reduction of the muscle tension that precipitates secondary effects of cramping and sciatic involvement. In my case, a relatively low –level dose was injected to the outer side of my left thigh. This represented a conservative approach - a modest initial dose to assess my body’s tolerance for this mode of treatment and a location least likely to destabilize normal daily activities. Within 10 days I was able to detect a few modest signs that toxin was actively reducing reception of signal: my outer left hamstring was "softer to the touch" [i.e. not fully flexed] and noticeably non-responsive in a few of the exercises prescribed in physical therapy[sessions were scheduled for two-three per week. Unfortunately, the persistence and intensity of the sciatic pain resurfaced the ambiguity of possible disc involvement as a contributing factor – so sessions with physical therapy involved significantly more time on diagnostics than the aggressive stretching and neuro-motor retraining I had hoped to pursue.

After 3 weeks, the assessment was that disc involvement was highly unlikely and that adhesion somewhere along the sciatic nerve had developed. The recommended treatment would require an invasive [20 minutes of stretching every 2-3 hours ] and painful set of stretches to elongate the nerve itself and to relieve adhesions along the nerve the runs from lower back to foot]

Recall that the theoretical source of my case of spasticity is that a lesion detected in area of brain called basil ganglia – the command and control center for outbound motor signal as well moderation of outbound signal based on interpretation of inbound sensory input from extremities. This complex interplay between inbound and outbound messages is how and why you can manage to grab a Styrofoam cup of coffee without puncturing the cup by squeezing too hard. With that background, imagine possible reactions of a dysfunctional basil ganglia to stimulus of pain generated by stretching an inflamed and irritated sciatic nerve.

Now ask yourself, could the simultaneous increase in spasticity in the left leg with significant decline in cognitive function be a red flag or a red herring? I both fear the answer and am loath to ask the question.