4 letters

“When I got out of the Army, my net asset was a radio…and I had to hock it to get money for the bus to go to school”, my grandfather loved to tell me.  After the Army, he went to an agg college in Oklahoma and ended up teaching vocational agriculture in a small rural town in Oklahoma. He started building and buying cheap homes to turn into rentals. He acquired ranch land as he could afford, and raised horses, cattle and some crops. By the time I was born, my grandfather had 20 rental homes (most of which he built by hand), and a thousand acre ranch with hundreds of cattle and 30 horses. Almost every memory I have of my grandfather from the first 20 years of my life occurred outdoors on the ranch or fixing something in an old rental.

He slowed down as he aged. He still rode a horse, drove a tractor, and worked his ranch, but his herd got smaller and his work day got shorter. But then things changed. At first it was a loss of strength in his hands, in his legs…fatigue setting in earlier in the day than it ever had before. Most ranchers have some numbness or tingling from past injuries…but the numbness and tingling began to spread, and it was in parts of his body he couldn’t recall injuring. He started to lose his balance in odd situations. The strongest man I ever knew began to stumble, and then the stumbles turned into falls. This proud man began to suffer the public humiliation of incontinence. Through it all he never complained, and never wanted to go to the doctor…but finally the family made him. He had never heard of CIDP, and neither had the first small town doctor he visited. Eventually, he was diagnosed. The disease was rare, and the treatment options were slim. For years, he faithfully applied horse liniment to his joints every night and worked on his “exercises” for two hours a night, searching for the body he remembered. He had never encountered a challenge he couldn’t beat with hard work…but no matter how hard he worked, his muscles got weaker and the tingling and the numbness got worse. Adult diapers became a daily ritual, and he wouldn’t travel more than an hour from his home for fear of soiling the vehicle he was in. At first it was a cane, then a walker. Finally, it was a wheelchair. The man who worked 10 hours a day in the sun and the rain his entire life couldn’t leave his home without assistance. For a time he seemed ashamed, this proud man who never required help before. I recall him once looking longingly at the muscles in my legs, and saying he would give anything to have them. I cried that night. After a few years he accepted he would never leave the wheelchair, and the nightly exercises stopped. When I was young I remember thinking my grandfather looked like a King when he walked amongst his herd of animals on his land. He never looked the same after the wheelchair.

In 2010, I rented a large van with a bathroom and bed in the back and drove Grandpa from Oklahoma to Parker, Colorado. We went to a therapeutic riding center where we planned to get my grandfather on a horse. As we lifted him onto the animal, I was scared. Would he get hurt? What if he couldn’t even ride? As he took his seat, his core engaged and his back straightened. There was a glint in his eye and confidence I had not seen in years. He cued the horse forward, and I walked next to him holding his leg and a rein. My 83 year old grandfather sat up straight, smiled, looked down at me and said, “Evan, if you don’t let go of that rein these people are gonna think I’m a pussy”. I let go, and he rode off into the arena. The King was back.

*Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) is a chronic auto-immune disease that progressively affects the myelin sheaths of nerve. For more information regarding the disease, here is a good reference:

Dalakas, Marinos C. “Advances in the Diagnosis, Pathogenesis and Treatment of CIDP.” Nature Reviews. Neurology 7, no. 9 (September 2011): 507–517.