Mel determines to always stand on two feet

The doctor had an effective bed-side manner. He diagnosed my brother with border-line diabetes, looked him in the eye and said, “lose the weight or lose your legs.”
The doctor bluntly assured him, “You’ll be hungry for a long time. Live with it. And get some exercise. If you lose the weight, you probably won’t need insulin and you’ll keep your legs.”
The next five months, big brother walked 500 miles and lost 50 pounds. e does not need insulin. He wasn’t about to let a shake and a burger rob him of a pair of legs he twice fought to keep moving under him.
His first effort to save his legs came the first day of summer vacation after fourth grade. He fell out of a moving truck and landed with his left leg under the back wheels. His leg was so badly damaged that the doctors considered amputation. Damage done in seconds took hours of surgery and summer of hospitalization to repair.
I remember that summer of baby sitters, waving at my brother’s hospital window and sitting at grandma’s house listening to mom talk about his physical therapy.
My brother remembers the taste of grape jelly mixed with crushed pills and a physical therapist saying as bluntly in the 60s as his doctor in the 90s, “If you don’t stretch your leg and exercise it, you will be lame for the rest of your life.”
My mom said, “He would grit his teeth, stretch his leg and say, ‘I’m not going to be lame.’”
He hobbled home on crutches when the leaves were falling and continued healing. IN high school he played varsity basketball, wearing an extra long knee pad to protect the delicate tissue around his knee.
Years of working in an office as an electrical engineer have not slowed him down. A couple of summers ago, he was riding his motorbike around home. The bike skidded on a patch of gravel, slid out from under him and landed on his other leg, crushing the ankle and lower leg. X-rays showed a compound fracture in one bone and the lengthwise split of another. He lived on morphine and prayers for 10 days, waiting for the skin to heal enough for the surgeons to repair the bone damage and set a cast.
Again he had physical therapy, only in a hospital of the 90s with short hospital stays. This time he grit his teeth as he, cold turkey, fought his body’s addiction to pain killers and he learned to live with the daily pain of a severely injured leg.
Within weeks he was back at work, propping his swollen leg up when he could, walking with his foot jutting out at right angles, when he couldn’t. Through the winter the swelling went down and both feet pointed forward.
He looks like everyone else, but he isn’t. Hi ankle bones are sensitive to climatic changes. And, his mind is sensitive to anyone or anything threatening him from standing on his own two feet.
As a child he grit his teeth through the pain so he would not limp. This spring he closed his mouth and pushed away the table, warding off the threatened future loss of either leg.


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