A tribute to the strongest man I know

A tribute to the strongest man I know

By: Jim Hamilton
Published:
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 4:32 AM CDT

The strongest man I know can’t run a four-minute mile. He can’t do 100 push-ups or bench press twice his own weight. He’ll never make an Olympic team or get his name in the body builder record books.

He’s my brother, Russell. You may know him, or someone much like him.

Russell is a quiet, intensely private survivor of kidney disease.

When, for no discernible reason, his kidneys failed him in the early 1980s, he opted to begin ambulatory dialysis, going through a peritoneal fluid exchange morning and evening.

It was a major inconvenience, but nothing he couldn’t work around. He still went fishing in the mountains and painted his sweeping Southwestern landscapes. When he came home from New Mexico to visit Missouri, he had a truckload of the life-saving cubes of dialysis fluid shipped ahead. That went on for several years, until his first kidney transplant. Afterwards, it was only the daily cocktail of anti-rejection drugs that slowed his step.

After about 15 years, the borrowed kidney failed and he went through months of serious illness, nearly dying before doctors determined that his failing health was due to the kidney.

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In time he was able to undergo another transplant, receiving a kidney donated by his wife, Sharon. Success was short-lived, though, as the result of a viral infection.

For another five years or so, he was again on home dialysis, all the while his body beginning to show the effects of prolonged treatment, medication and related maladies.

Nonetheless, just over a year ago he was able to put together an art show that ranked among the best of his more than 30 years in Albuquerque. His detailed mountain landscapes seemed to bring together all his years of artistic emotion and mastery into a single body of work.

More remarkable was what he was able (or driven) to do so in a weakened physical state. Only a few close friends understood the miracle of that show.

Over the next year, he continued to paint and maintain a gallery to showcase other artists in Albuquerque.

Then, a month ago, he got “the call,” and is today starting over again with another kidney transplant, though recovering more slowly from the surgery than he did while in his 30s.

That’s the short version, and about all he shares with most folks. In fact, it’s been a tough go for years and years. Weaker men would have given up. They would have resigned themselves to a life defined by their daily treatments, doctor visits and omnipresent ills.

Russell just kept working, forcing himself to get around every day to go to the studio or gallery and taking evening walks with Sharon. He continues to take the hands life deals him and never folds. He’s determined to stay in the game. He holds the cards close to his chest. He’s confident he’ll win.

And he has.

I was out to see my brother last week. The day I arrived he was just two days past follow-up surgery. He looked rough – gaunt and hollow as a Civil War prisoner of war.

He was better – much better – when I left a couple of days later. He’s looking forward to coming back home for a visit next summer. It will be much easier without the dialysis equipment to cart around. His overall health should be much better, too.

Many of us have experienced tragedies that have left our lives forever altered, by not necessarily encumbered.

We can’t really understand what it’s like to be confined by illness or disease when we remain free to move about as we please.

Most of us don’t live each day strengthened only by the hope and confidence that the next will be better.

Many of us don’t have the gumption to get up and do something when our every muscle and nerve say no. All that takes exceptional strength – the kind I’ve seen in my brother these many years and witnessed again last week.

Just getting up every day, putting on his shoes and hat and walking out the door – that’s the mark of the strongest man I know.

Jim Hamilton is a senior writer for Neighbor Newspapers. Contact him at jimh@cpimo.com.

http://www.southcountymail.com/articles/2008/10/22/opinion/doc48fe30dc7304b954994225.txt